Ur-Quan Warp Pod

A basic piece of starship machinery, this is a device for generating a field of unconventional space-time conditions that allow starships to "push up" from TrueSpace into HyperSpace. Warp pods are a basic feature of starfaring technology, and the engineering principles involved in building them are almost identical from race to race. However, the larger the mass that must be transported, the more intense the field must be and the more powerful the warp pod must be. Therefore building a massive ship the size of an Ur-Quan Kzer-Za Dreadnought or Kohr-Ah Marauder requires a highly energy- and space-efficient warp pod technology, one reason that no local species other than the Ur-Quan and the Chmmr have built Dreadnought-sized vessels.

The only Ur-Quan warp pod ever recovered and studied by Alliance scientists was recovered by Captain Zelnick in the Second War; by some freak accident, a Kzer-Za Dreadnought had managed to make a soft landing on the surface of Alpha Pavonis VII, and failed to engage its automatic self-destruct mechanism on the death of its crew. The Arilou Lalee'lay may have somehow been involved in this incident; whatever is the case, they observed it and, after salvaging the wreck for what they could, informed Zelnick that he could obtain Ur-Quan technology from the wreck if he chose. This was especially necessary if he wished to use QuasiSpace travel; the same exotic energy field used to enter Hyperspace, carefully modified, can be used to generate an overlap (or "portal") from Hyperspace to QuasiSpace using the phenomenon known as Dimensional Fatigue, though this is much more difficult and requires specialized technology only, to our knowledge, possessed by the Arilou. Their own Portal Spawners are powered by comparatively weak warp pods; since their purposes involve reconaissance and subterfuge more than large-scale transport or combat, they prefer to build their Arilou Lalee'lay Skiffs as small, quick vessels. In order to fit such a device on the Vindicator, they required a much more powerful warp pod, and since it was impossible to reach or modify the Vindicator's own warp pod hidden inside its Precursor framework, they had to use the Dreadnought's surviving starboard warp pod.

Speculation continues as to whether the manipulative Arilou engineered the unusual wreck in order to allow the creation of the Vindicator's Portal Spawner and the neo-Dnyarri, as both proved invaluable to the Alliance's victory in the Second War.