Forcedrive

"He [ ] was taken to his masters' machines&mdash;encased in a tomblike shell where he screamed in fear. Around him, he sensed his brood mates, shrieking in the darkness. He learned anger and hate. Later, he understood that this bleak anger&mdash;this dark hatred&mdash;was the Force and the power that fed his masters' ships..."

- was discovered to be during his time as Forcedrive fuel

The Forcedrive, variously known as the Force-powered hyperdrive and the Rakatan hyperdrive, was an early incarnation of the engineered and produced by the. As its name suggested, the Forcedrive was powered by the of   and was only capable of transit to worlds with high. It was widely reverse-engineered by many nascent after the fall of the Empire in, serving as the primary inspiration in the development of more advanced.

Design
"The Rakatan hyperdrive was of no use for traveling between arbitrary points in realspace, General. It didn’t work that way. Rather, it honed in on the signature of worlds strong in the Force — ones brimming with life, in other words..."

- explains the Forcedrive to ,

The Forcedrive was developed in accordance with the philosophy. As the Rakata believed that the Force resided in all beings (a belief later adopted by the Rakata-influenced ), they believed that their technology could be configured to tap into the wells of Force energy existing within their sentient slave races. While this system did work, the Forcedrive's reliance on the Force as its primarily power source resulted in certain limitations, the most important of which was its inability to travel between any two arbitrary points in. The Forcedrive was only capable of targeting worlds with high Force signatures, a fact which resulted in an empire that spanned the breadth of the galaxy but which only incorporated some five hundred worlds and a trillion denizens at its height.

Forcedrive engines were installed aboard the s of the Imperial fleet, while entire rooms were dedicated to the storage of slave fuel in vast containment racks. Each rack contained a number of "tomblike shells," wherein the slaves were restrained face-down and hooked to a set of s. Turned into living, they were subjected to intense pain for extended periods of time, with the resultant  extracted and enhanced via focusing crystals before being channeled to the Forcedrive engines. Due to the vast amount of energy required to instantaneously move a resting vessel to, these devices were notoriously inefficient, burning through hundreds or even thousands of slaves in the span of a short intragalactic journey. Thus, Rakatan ships attempted to take as few long transgalactic journeys as possible, preferring instead to make short jumps to nearby occupied worlds to resupply and restock on slave fuel as needed.

Legacy
In many respects, the Forcedrive was the primary inspiration for the development of the modern hyperdrive. The sheer ubiquity of this device due to the Infinite Empire's vast holdings meant that many nascent galactic civilizations had independently reverse-engineered the Forcedrive in their attempts to build their own faster-than-light drives. Coincidentally, the of  independently developed a technological paradigm similar in form and function to the Forcedrive called. Like the Forcedrive, Ssi-ruuk entechment drives required the use of living fuel sources to function, drawing the life energies of sentient lifeforms out by turning the organism into a living battery. Unlike the Rakata technology, however, entechment made no use of the Force nor drew dark side power from the hate and suffering of its fuel sources.