“...Facts are useful, but they’re lifeless. I mean, I can tell you that a Yeerk Pool is a vertical shaft at the top of a hydrothermal cave system in karst topography. I can tell you the average temperature of the water is 87 degrees Fahrenheit and that the suspended sediment load is so heavy that it turns the water into a grey sludge rich in nutrients. But none of that would tell you what a Yeerk Pool is really like.
A Yeerk Pool is bursting with life! From the moment you return to it, you’re surrounded by stories, poems, and songs! Imagine thousands of your siblings and cousins crowding around, welcoming you back, eager to hear whatever you have to say about the world above. They want nothing more than to hear what it’s like above the surface. All a Yeerk has is their mind, you see. Before the war, we told so many stories. We could see the stars through the dim eyes of the Gedd that carried us, and we wondered what they were. We told stories that they were stars like our own, surrounded by worlds with alien waters, and we told stories to each other about what they might be like.
And imagine all the things you can do there! Imagine finding an upwelling in the depths, a warm jet of water shooting out of the cracks in the rocks that carries you to the surface like a rocket! Imagine chasing the bubbles of gas that filter through the water with your friends, or riding a current and letting it carry you wherever it wants to go. Imagine finding a nook to call your own, safe from danger as you flatten out to squeeze into the tiniest crevice, knowing your friends are there by their touch. Just imagine that, will you?
You don’t work for food in a Yeerk Pool. Minerals come from the caves below you, vitamins from the microscopic creatures in the water around you, and Kandrona comes from the sun above. You’re warmed, inside and out, and you can feel yourself come back to life after spending time away. From the moment you slip back into the pool, your stresses melt away until you’re just swimming in stupid little circles and chasing bubbles in sheer giggling-madly-to-yourself happiness!
That’s what a Yeerk Pool is supposed to be. All that nonsense about conquest? No no no, that’s not what Yeerks are, that’s not what we’re meant for, and you only have to look at how we live to see why. Our pools are a place of joy and warmth and sharing. Why would we ever want to abandon that?” - Wilnit 3605 of the Sulp Niar Pool, 2038
I have this idea that once the fighting on Earth is over, once Alloran has returned home and brought a boot to the ass of every Yeerk on the Andalite homeworld, and once the conflict is genuinely over for him, he spends a decent amount of time watching movies. Lots. And lots. Of movies.
He later tells Cassie <They let me escape my own life for a few hours at a time. And, I am ashamed to admit, popcorn is satisfying underhoof.>
Between this and building his new ship, he has a few years that are almost happy.
After the Yeerk War, an unexpected game took the Andalites by storm. It was a Human game known as Jenga. The simple rules, plain wooden pieces, and refreshing lack of anthrocentrism in the game were appealing to Andalites of all ages. It soon became a staple in scoops across the Homeworld, and the sudden demand far outstripped supply, leading to Andalites mass producing versions out of the pale blue wood native to their planet.
Many Earth companies looking to replicate the success of Jenga tried to market their products as simple, wholesome, and rustic, but nothing ever came close, and the advertisement campaigns became the subject of some mockery on Earth.
Post-War. Sometime around 2015 or so, there was a Broadway musical called VISSER: The Musical, starring Hugh Jackman. The main character was Visser Three, who dealt with the woes of trying to run an empire while being accosted by a small band of Andalites. He was defeated when one of the Andalite bandits, the one that often arrives in hawk morph, dropped a towel over over his head and eyestalks, blinding him just long enough for the Andalite bandits to escape.
Two guards at the Fort Leavenworth Maximum Security Yeerk Containment Center were fired after they plugged a copy of the musical into Esplin 9466′s lavender-colored sensory box and disabled his voice modulator. Esplin 9466 was forced to suffer through repeats of the musical for almost a week without being able to call for help.
The two guards were publicly shamed, but many on Earth and elsewhere in the Milky Way revere them as heroes.
Spatial Distortion Drives are a relatively rare technology in the modern galaxy in 2020. An inefficient and relatively slow form of faster-than-light travel, they serve as an intermediate step between sublight engines and Z-Space propulsion for many civilizations.
Specifications
Design differences between the various civilizations can make a single specification hard to pin down, but the method of operation is the same across all instances. Spatial Distortion Drives work by creating a negative energy potential that pushes, or rather pulls, the ship through normal-space at great velocities without relying on kinetic energy. This inertia-less form of travel is therefore not subject to limitations on velocity that occur when using kinetic energy.
In common Human parlance, such drives are referred to as “warp drives”.
Usage and Limitations
Due to their immense power draw and technological requirements, ships capable of faster-than-light travel will have either a Spatial Distortion Drive or a Z-Space Engine, but not both. Because of this, Spatial Distortion Drives are considered to be a tool of limited use by the Andalites and many other civilizations for a couple of key reasons:
Spatial Distortion Drives are significantly slower than Z-Space drives because the ship travels through normal-space, which is a much greater distance than entering Z-Space.
Spatial Distortion Drives often consume just as much power as a Z-Space Engine of similar size, if not more. Because larger Spatial Distortion Drives allow for a greater energy differential and thus higher velocity, the power requirements quickly become overwhelming even for advanced civilizations such as the Andalites. While a Dome Ship’s Z-Space engines require the energy of a small star to operate, a Spatial Distortion Drive of similar size and configuration may require the energy output of a globular cluster!
However, across short distances, Spatial Distortion Drives possess a number of key advantages:
Spatial Distortion Drives can cross distances such as the width of a solar system in reasonably quick times without ever needing to plot a course through the chaotic terrain of Z-Space.
Ships using a Spatial Distortion Drive do not experience temporal effects when approaching or surpassing light-speed.
Ships using a Spatial Distortion Drive are extremely hard to track by conventional electromagnetic sensors due to light-delay, which can make them virtually invisible from the front and very hard to hit in combat.
The extreme forces at the edge of the bubble can destroy incoming projectiles, protecting the ship from kinetic attack.
Due to these disadvantages and advantages, the role for this method of faster-than-light travel becomes clear. Civilizations with access to both technologies will use Spatial Distortion Drives for personal sporting craft, in-system mining vessels, and in-system patrol vessels. Anything meant to travel to other star systems will use a Z-Space Engine instead.
History
Andalite Spatial Distortion Drive technology dates back over 3,000 years and served as the first form of FTL travel enjoyed by the Andalites. Exploration vessels such as the legendary Khentaras were launched in every direction to boldly graze where no Andalite had grazed before. Andalite patrol vessels, especially those in the Andal homesystem, rely on this technology for ambushing invading fleets or assisting in the event of an emergency somewhere among the asteroid belts.
Yeerk Spatial Distortion Drive technology owes it’s existence to several civilizations, drawing on design features from the Andalites, Ongachic, Hawjabran, and Desbadeen. Notably the Nova-Class Empire Ships, some of the largest and most powerful ships in the Yeerk War, featured both a Spatial Distortion Drive and a Z-Space Engine, giving them unparalleled tactical and strategic mobility. However, the two engines could not be activated together, as the ship only produced enough power to run one at a time.
The Yeerk Directorate took the use of Spatial Distortion Drives a step further by outfitting their 32 “Beetle” Fighters with a miniaturized version of the technology, making them superb interceptors and attackers. As these were the only ships the Directorate was permitted to build, every resource was poured into these fighters to make them the best possible.
Human Spatial Distortion Drive technology, known to the general public as a Warp drive or Alcubierre drive, was first theorized in 1994 by the Human physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His work caught the attention of the Yeerk Empire due to a number of minor differences between his theorized drive and the ones used by the Yeerk Empire. They refined the design over several years, and at the end of the war the technology was turned over to the Humans as part of the peace agreement.
After the Yeerk War ended, Human researchers continued investigating the technology despite the promise of Andalite Z-Space technology, and in 2004 a collaborative effort between Boeing and Lockheed-Martin produced the first Human-built FTL vessel, the Wayfinder. The first Human-built Z-Space-capable ship, the OV-201 Berenson, followed two years later.
Future Developments
In 2020, a collaborative project between the Humans, Desbadeen, Andalites, and the Directorate is underway. The goal is to create a vessel equipped with a combined Z-Space/Warp Drive. The vessel in question would enter Z-Space and then activate it’s Spatial Distortion Drive while there, leading to even greater velocities than achievable by Z-Space alone.
However, due to the shifting and variable nature of Z-space, the ship’s various shields and structural integrity fields must make thousands of adjustments per second to prevent the ship from splattering against an especially dense pocket of nothingness. Thusfar, numerous remotely operated prototypes have been reduced to clouds of ions and debris, but researchers remain hopeful that the newest prototype, a small vessel known as the Grasshopper, may be able to achieve the impossible and travel between Earth and Andal within a single week.
