Mirror Technology

The Mirror engine, sometimes referred to as an onion engine or a Conpolposer (an abbreviation of Convex Polarised Superposer) is a machine comprising multiple separate parts designed to operate simultaneously over great distance. The largest machine is often referred to as the master engine or main engine and each smaller co-operational machine is referred to as a slave or beacon.

Each beacon contains a finite stock of particles that were generated at the same time as the engine was first created. These particles are entangled with their counterparts contained within the main engine.

When triggered, a collapse of entanglement between the beacon and the master engine is used to synchronise the Nowak-Lieu process which folds two separate identical volumes of three-dimensional space to form a superposition. This generates an expanding sphere of superimposed space containing both the main engine (also referred to as the "origin") and the beacon (or "destination"). The epicentre of the origin is generated within an empty sphere in the centre of the master engine and grows to encompass a space much larger than the master engine. During operation, as the outer edge of the superposition expands to encompass the target beacon, the beacon occupies the space in the hollow core of the master engine. When mass crosses the superposition's boundary to enter the sphere it becomes polarised according to the direction of its entry into the shared space. When the superposition collapses all polarisations are reversed, and the location mass exits corresponds to the newly inverted polarisation. Thus mass that is encompassed by the sphere of superposition at the origin exists only at the destination after collapse. Because of this inversion, all transported mass reverses in chirality.

Travel by Mirror engine in this way is referred to as either "uphill" or "downhill" according to whether the final product of the inversion of positions produces a net gain or loss of potential energy. Moving mass out of a gravity well has a large energy cost whereas moving mass further into a gravity well results in a net gain of energy that is radiated from the surface of the sphere during collapse as gamma radiation in wavelengths described by the Frank–Tamm formula. Long distance travel "downhill" emits such destructive energy that reflections from nearby objects at the destination can cause significant damage to the master engine's vehicle. Modern vessels fire chaff omnidirectionally as part of Mirror engine operation to shield against such reflections. Regulations require beacons near very large objects must be orbiting on the far side of an asteroid or planetoid from any inhabited structures.

Superposition Mass Decompression Explosion, or SMDEx, refers to the event of a superposition in which multiple masses are encompassed to occupy the same physical space. These events emit extremely destructive radiation and debris in the resulting decompression, and were a cause of fatal accidents in the first Mirror engine prototypes. The design of a hollow core into later iterations of the engine allowed beacons to exist within the master engine temporarily until superposition collapse occurred.

"Coring" occurs when a sphere of superposition fails by collapsing too early, effectively transposing the inner machinery of the beacon into the master engine's core. This irreversibly renders the beacon inoperable. Early Mirror engines required complete disassembly following a coring to extract the debris which required months or years of specialist work and a huge waste of resources. Modern Mirror engines are designed to continue operation as normal after a coring due to their ability to withstand SMDEx in subsequent use.

A challenge in engineering a beacon is that its size is constrained by the energy requirements of the master engine: supplying the huge energy input needed poses difficult engineering challenges if it must accommodate a larger hollow core to prevent SMDEx.