Untara Drive Control
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For centuries, scientists, engineers and madmen have tried to find some way around the use of hop computers and route computers. Almost every one of these experiments has lead any individual brave or foolish enough to actually use such devices to their doom. Finally such experiments were outlawed save by special permission of the Imperial Congress. However, there was one type of drive that did work, at least 60-70%25 of the time.
The Untara Drive Control was the invention of one Isaiah Untara, a brilliant Imudring physicist who found a way to work around hop pollution and dangerous routes by a rather simple graviton detector wired directly to the hop drive itself. The theory was fairly simple, that when graviton interactions became very high, it was likely there was either dangerous influence of some large gravitational body (black holes, neutron stars and the like), or dangerous hop pollution. In practice however, the Untara Drive Control proved sufficiently unreliable (and thus fatal) that it was discarded.
With the collapse of the Imperium and the degradation of the quality of hop maps, the Untara Drive Control made something of a comeback. However, even with a more advanced theoretical understanding of branespace, failure rates were still around 20%25. One out of every five Untara-based vessels would either disappear, end up exiting branespace smashed to pieces or otherwise severely damaged, or exit in a completely unintended location. It didn’t take government regulations to convince most star travellers that the Untara Drive Control was a rather dangerous piece of hardware.
Not everyone has abandoned the Untara Drive Control. The Retri Gahani, not the most sane group of people in explored space, use them as part of there colonization efforts. Some merchants, particularly those delivering to systems that have been cut off by hop pollution, have found that the money made from trading with such systems make the substantial risks worthwhile.