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He [Xesh] was taken to his masters' machines—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—this dark hatred—was the Force and the power that fed his masters' ships...
—Force Hound Xesh was discovered to be Force-sensitive 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 hyperdrive engineered and produced by the Rakata Infinite Empire. As its name suggested, the Forcedrive was powered by the Force energies of sentient species and was only capable of transit to worlds with high Force signatures.[1][2] It was widely reverse-engineered by many nascent galactic civilizations after the fall of the Empire in 25,200 BBY,[1] serving as the primary inspiration in the development of more advanced realspace hyperdrives.[2]
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...
—Dr. Insmot Bowen explains the Forcedrive to General Arhul Kurumenga, 1 BBY
The Forcedrive was developed in accordance with the Unifying Force philosophy. As the Rakata believed that the Force resided in all beings[3] (a belief later adopted by the Rakata-influenced Sorcerers of Tund[4]), they believed that their technology could be configured to tap into the wells of Force energy existing within their sentient slave races.[5] 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 realspace.[2] 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[6] and a trillion denizens at its height.[5]
Forcedrive engines were installed aboard the Rakatan ships 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," isolation pods wherein the slaves were restrained face-down and hooked to a set of electrodes.[7] Turned into living batteries, they were subjected to intense pain for extended periods of time, with the resultant dark side energy extracted and enhanced via focusing crystals before being channeled to the Forcedrive engines.[7] Due to the vast amount of energy required to instantaneously move a resting vessel to faster than light speeds, 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
Kurumenga: “You said we took their technology. But hyperdrives and blasters don’t require the Force.”
— Dr. Insmot Bowen and General Arhul Kurumenga discuss the legacy of the Forcedrive, 1 BBY[src]
Bowen: “Correct, General — in fact, the Rakata were careful to keep Force-sensitive slaves away from their machines. But that drove their slaves to take their technology and reverse-engineer it, eliminating the role of focusing crystals and anything else that required the Force. Duros, Herglics, Baragwin, Devaronians, Gossam and of course the Coruscanti all experimented with hyperspace cannons, tumbledrives, pulse cannons and other derivatives of Rakatan technologies.”
In many respects, the Forcedrive was the primary inspiration for the development of the modern hyperdrive.[2] 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 Ssi-ruuk of Lwhekk independently developed a technological paradigm similar in form and function to the Forcedrive called entechment.[8] 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.[9] 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.[8]
Behind the scenes
The Forcedrive was voted "Best Miscellaneous" in the Fourteenth Star Wars Fanon Wiki Awards.
Appearances and sources
- Dawn of the Jedi: The Prisoner of Bogan 1
- Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare Author's Cut—The Celestials
- The New Essential Chronology
- The Unknown Regions
Bibliography
Notes and references
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