Alderson drive
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The Alderson drive is a fictional device featured in the CoDominium series of science-fiction novels.
The Alderson drive is not, strictly, a faster-than-light drive: it can more nearly be likened to a device able to use a form of wormhole, whose entry and exit 'Alderson points' are at the ends of an Alderson 'tramline'. Alderson points are difficult to find. Alderson tramlines form between points of equipotential thermonuclear flux located near stars. Not all star pairs form Alderson tramlines, and not all those tramlines which do form are large enough to take a spaceship. In order to travel between star systems, it is frequently necessary to carry out a series of Alderson jumps interspersed with periods of travel in normal space.
Travel between two Alderson points appears to take no elapsed time; similarly, when Alderson tramlines form, they appear to take no elapsed time to do so.
At the start of the events chronicled in The Mote in God's Eye only one tramline leads to Mote system. Its inner end is well above the plane of the local ecliptic, and its outer end appears inside the photosphere of a red giant star. The Mote civilisations had long been able to construct an Alderson-type drive, but as they had no Langston Field technology until the arrival in Mote system of the battlecruiser INSS MacArthur — which revealed to the Moties the possibility of such a device — their many attempts to use an Alderson drive always ended in failure. All ships which passed between the Alderson points simply vanished; they were destroyed by the red giant before they could return to report the problem.
Sentient beings who travel by Alderson drive experience jump shock, a temporary period of extreme disorientation immediately following a jump between Alderson points. Computers are affected for an even longer period of time, making it difficult to automate a spacecraft after a jump. Vessels are thus vulnerable to attack until their occupants recover from jump shock.
Pournelle named the drive after his friend, Dan Alderson, a JPL scientist who helped him work out the notional science behind the drive, and how it should work to be a useful plot device.