A rift turbine is an engine bearing some similarities to a classical warp drive, but designed solely for travel through the otherwise non-navigable Rifters' Realm. Every Realm-capable vehicle mounts a rift turbine, though they can be of varying sizes: tiny "pods" meant for quick jumps between universes have turbines no larger than a human arm, while the greatest of vessels mount turbines of inconceivable sizes well past the megaparsecs in length.
Functionality[]
A rift turbine is cylindrical in shape, mounting a spatial motor on each end - each one similar to a traditional jet turbine, though designed to remove a point in space from inside the cylinder. To operate, the cylinder creates a power imbalance by stretching the point into a line segment and thus forcing the spacial motors to attempt to collapse the segment from the forward end first.
As the point is "supposed" to be anchored to the interior of the cylinder but disconnected from the Realm outside, this effect causes the entire vehicle to shift forwards every time the line segment contracts, generating singularities in nearby points as the local space attempts to catch up.
In order to turn, Realm-capable vehicles mount smaller rotational turbines at angles along their sides, and then simply switch to them, as only one can run at a time.
SICO[]
As the speed of travel is dependent on both the line segment's maximum length and the speed of its oscillation - both of which are arbitrary given the constant correction factors involved - it is rarely useful to compare speed with either of these. Thus, speed is instead given by the strength of the singularities generated by the turbine as the vehicle moves: the singularity induction coefficient, or the SICO.
A SICO of 0 loosely corresponds to a forward speed of one parsec per second, and each integer above or below this equates to a difference of roughly one order of magnitude.