The Single Route into Deadwater Certified

~2803 UCSD

About 2803 UCSD the Survey Corps certifies a fold route from a Tier 1 staging site on the home side into a neighbouring primary universe, and places a platform at the far staging in the one system the route reaches. The crews name the membrane within days of arriving: Deadwater, the sailors' word for the stretch of sea where a sound hull under full power loses its way. Nothing more official has displaced it.

What the first crews find is the reason the name holds. A launched harmonic front attenuates to noise within light-minutes, with every instrument reporting that it has done its work; no corridor forms, and no relocation lock holds. The membrane's harmonic regime is overdamped, and the finding is a measurement, repeated by instruments that came home reporting no fault in themselves. Fold transit, which is adjacency and not propagation, is unaffected, and that is the only reason the membrane is surveyed at all.

The platform is kept from the year the route is certified and crewed from about 2805 UCSD; by the late winter of 2809 UCSD it has been crewed for four years and kept for six, taking its date from each relief hull's clock and logging the pedigree (Under Full Power (S01E00C09)). The route is re-certified on the ordinary schedule. No second route has been found.

Canon facts:

  • Deadwater's one fold route was certified no later than 2803 UCSD, the year its far-staging platform was placed; the platform was crewed from about 2805 UCSD. Both years are the record's arithmetic from the platform's age in the late winter of 2809 UCSD.
  • The overdamped harmonic regime was measured by the first crews and has been measured at every relief since; it is a finding about one membrane, filed at that width.
  • The name was chosen by the survey crews, not by any registry, and the registry kept it.
  • No second route into Deadwater has been found; the one route is staged and re-certified on the ordinary schedule.

See: Deadwater: The Silent Membrane, FTL Mechanics: Channels and Their Constraints, The Scope of Physical Law, Under Full Power (S01E00C09), Karla Wender.