The FTL Railgun

Welcome Students to History of the Galaxy. Today we are going to be covering one of the most isolationist societies in the galaxy.

Homo Sapiens; Humans as they call themselves. Are bipedal and have 2 extremities on the top of their torsos for manipulating their environment. 

Now I know not many of you have heard of Humans apart from some small time chats on Galex, but they have been a member of our Galactic cluster for longer than most species. 

Humans are the apex predator of their home planet, evolving as what they claim to be persistence hunters. Though that part of their past has been long forgotten even by them. Now they live lives of leisure. Existing on their planet doing as most of our own planets would. Living as they would please. This hadn’t always been the case though.

Back I would say roughly 700 of their solar cycles or so the humans began to explore the Galaxy around them. Sending out satellites and manned missions to their moon and surrounding planets. Though do you all know what was happening to the galaxy during that time. It was roughly 547 Standard Cycles ago.

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C’mon people you know this.

The Fellidar Invasions! Correct. 

When the Fellidar Empire made its way across the great empty void to our Galaxy, the humans began exploring. It was horrible luck on their part. The Humans began to make a few colonies outside of their home system. That’s when at first they were elated they had found their first signs of life other than themselves. It came in the form of a crashed Fellidar Ship at this point the humans had been traveling via wormhole. 

Just outside of Sol, their home system was a rare wormhole. To our knowledge it connects to a system just outside of the Phalnag Union, all the way on the other side of the Galaxy. This ship had the remains of a Fellidar, who the Humans promptly took home for study along with their ship. That is where the humans began to get most of the more advanced space travel ideas from. Up till this point they were using rockets powered by crude rocket fuel. 

And yes I know what you’re going to say. “Doesn’t that blow up if it goes through a hyperlane when it isn’t sealed properly.” Yes it does, you’re all very clever. But the Humans did use hyperlanes. They used the wormhole for all their intersystem travel, and the fuel does not explode in a worm hole. It only begins to freeze as the molecules compress together from the. I’m getting off topic.

The Humans took the ship back for study. They already had better guns and armor than the Fellidar did. Humans are very good at making weapons, even if until this point they had no one to fight but themselves. The main parts of the ship that interested the Humans were the engine and the Power Systems.

The Power System was relatively easy for the Humans to reproduce. During that process they discover a new type of alloy, or at least new to them. That could withstand greater temperatures and transfer power more efficiently. That part of this study that would worry some militaries but never worried the nations that house them was how the Humans responded to the engines. As you all know the Fellidar had the most advanced FTL drives the Galactic Community had seen until a few Human Generations ago. It could gross a hyperlane in mere moments, It crossed the great Galactic Divide in a relatively short 100 Years. It may sound like a lot, Class. But trust me when you get into ship designs in your engineer classes you’ll truly see what a feat of distance travel that is.

The humans made a copy of the drive, or at least as close as they could make with their own production capabilities and sent a mission out. That first mission never returned, all the Humans had was a recording of what had happened from a camera that they had placed on board the vessel. 

The Humans who had taken the test flight, when subjected to FTL Speeds began to change shape. Their weak fingers broke from the speed, almost instantly. Their skin appeared like it was melting. Unlike us with our hardened carapaces, the Humans have very soft, fleshy skin. Almost like a newborn before its shell hardens. These bodies do not stand up to the speeds and dangers you get for going at FTL Speeds.

While certain types of shielding and LSS Systems can mitigate the effects on their bodies it will never fully get rid of it. No matter what they did or tried they would always start to melt, and their bones would begin to break from all the pressure that FTL put them under. So Humans put the drive away into storage.

Then as you smarted members here might have already realised, those satellites the Humans put out got noticed by other Sapient Species. Keyly the Fellidar. When the Fellidar pick up on something they will come for it. As they did with almost half of the Galaxy up to this point. The Humans should have been no different, in fact they should have fared worse than most other species due the lack of FTL to run away. 

When the colonies fell the Humans got to work, and they worked fast. They made weapons unlike anything the Galaxy had ever seen. Those FTL drives they set into storage, they had a team still studying them. But not for travel or expansion, as a weapon. They thought that if something could make these and travel that fast then they needed a better way to defend themselves. And oh boy were they right.

The Fellidar were not ready for what happened to their ships when they went through that wormhole. Moments after they went though a blast of light smashed through them. Obliterating all their ships and traveling down the wormhole. The Humans had developed a cannon, they dubbed the Fullser Theodor Lyon Railgun or FTL Railgun for short. Named after its creator Fullser Theodor Lyon.

The FTL-R not only destroyed the vessels that made it though but also all of the ones still in the wormhole. Along with destroying an entire invading fleet of Fellidar the Humans made a new discovery about wormholes. If you enter and exit a wormhole at FTL speeds it will cause a chain reaction that acts much like a sonic boom. Seconds after the object arrives in Real Space a shockwave is sent out of the wormhole that destroys almost everything in the system. Electrical systems get fried, asteroids crack and get sent out of their orbits, and planets all over the system experience Class 10 Weather Events.

The Fullidar never attempted to invade the Humans again after that devastating defeat. They wouldn’t even get close to the Human systems for fear of their fleets being blown up. And the Humans after their first Galactic Colonization attempt failed, and resulted in an invasion from a hostile species decided to stay home. They turned their civilization inward. Many of their number feared the outside Galaxy. It had killed a great number of their people and now they thought all others they meet might be hostile. Though now we are starting to get them to open back up. 

That’s all we have time for today. If you have any questions please ask them quickly, I have another class to teach soon.