Travel and distance
Ships set three-dimensional courses freely. No mandatory gates, lanes or transit monopolies exist.
A typical sustained fleet planning speed is about 0.6 light-years per standard day; a lightly loaded courier can approach 1.1. Maintenance and reserves still constrain an expedition.
A drive needs a controlled field volume and tolerable local gravity gradients. Arrival usually occurs in relatively empty outer approach space, followed by conventional travel. There is no universal safe distance identical around every mass.
A ship with poor navigation data can make a cautious broad emergence and survey. Denying one observatory cannot make a star system geometrically inaccessible.
Warp is not accumulated conventional momentum. Ships emerge with controlled local motion; an apparent interstellar speed cannot be converted directly into impact energy.
A functioning drive needs ship-scale power and field equipment. Ordinary guided munitions cannot cheaply warp into a habitat. Expensive unmanned vessels may exist under the same constraints as ships.
There is no instantaneous interstellar radio. Couriers carry messages; local laser and radio signals obey light-time.
Concealment reduces signatures rather than eliminating heat or making every sensor irrelevant. Current faction-specific concealment capabilities remain intact.
RTS tactical time and map scale are compressed representations. The campaign can span months, and a mission timer is not a universal astrophysical measurement.
The Matter Garden
The Garden grows complex metal–ceramic structures in controlled mineral baths. It uses compatible feedstock, power, heat management and time. It does not create elements from nothing.
Continuous growth can produce structures difficult to assemble from separate pieces. Modern Nacre communities already use smaller forms of this technology. Aderra’s discovery is extraordinary in scale and history, not a monopoly on manufacture.
Homes, repair plants and warships can use some of the same industrial methods. What the Garden should produce is a question for people and institutions; a machine cannot settle it by recognizing good intentions.
Bodies, consent and recovery
Nacre are artificial persons with different bodies, histories and political commitments. Joining a shared process does not surrender the right to leave it. An individual does not speak for every Nacre.
Recovery requires a surviving viable state, suitable equipment and work. It cannot recreate someone whose identity has been irretrievably destroyed. A recovered person may choose a different body, a different name or a community beyond the Continuance.
Control Requisition describes capture of a vessel’s control systems. It never converts its organic occupants into machines. Those occupants remain people.