With a whole day spent relaxing and playing video games, Max was able to call this a proper birthday for once. There was no work, no insane mother throwing Princess-themed parties for him, and nothing to distract from his day off.

They did run into a number of the Alliance dignitaries at the Arcade though. The games were becoming increasingly popular all through the Alliance, and they wanted to check them out from the source instead of relying on others to bring the games to them.

Many VR headsets had made their way through the Alliance, but they usually only had one or two game options, instead of the hundreds which were available here, and the full immersion pods were still incredibly rare outside of the Reavers' ships.

There just wasn't anywhere for most species to put them unless they started a dedicated arcade like the humans had, but that was a big business risk since most of the species didn't even know that such a thing existed, so they would have to not only market their business but try to push enough of a cultural change to bring in steady business.

Only a few species, namely the Valkia and the Innu had fully embraced the gaming culture of the human species. The Valkia treated it more like a form of training, while the Innu were simply enthralled by the game mechanics. So, the types of games that they liked varied, but the planets held by both species had already started to bring in large numbers of VR pods for public use.

While Max enjoyed the Arcade, Nico and the Research Teams had their hands full with the most recent breakthrough that they had made. The experiments to modulate energy fields to enter the secondary layer of space had led to a breakthrough in Warp Field modulation that allowed them to theoretically push the limits of their traveling speed well beyond what they currently were capable of, at a much lower energy cost.

For the Alliance vessels, this was incredibly important, with their limited power supplies, and it would lead to higher energy ration distributions on long trips and fewer slow-moving large vessels being built in the future.

For now, it was a practical matter, they needed more power than the Warp Drives of their design could produce, but the ship itself was a tested and approved design that would be recognized by repairmen all over the Alliance. Being able to hire technicians without needing to do a long training course for new equipment was a big deal for the average businessman.

New things were great, but if nobody knew how to fix them, you could only call the manufacturer, and that left you at the mercy of their pricing scheme and technician availability.

Building Warp Drives was a science, but keeping them running right was more of an art form.

"Lead Researcher. We have the simulation data ready to go. Should we start testing in virtual reality?" Nergal asked Nico with a smile that only barely hid her need to shake Nico and demand that they start testing now.

The energy level in the room was through the roof, and everyone was on edge waiting to see if the ship's computer would agree that their newest design was going to work as well as the theory suggested it would.historical

It was close enough to the existing data that it should be possible to replicate it without doing a series of physical tests first, but sometimes you would just get a data error as the computer ran into a situation that it couldn't calculate.I think you should take a look at

"Go ahead. Let's see what the simulation says, and then we will prepare a shuttle and take this prototype out to do some physical testing." Nico agreed.

The simulation ran well for the first few minutes, but the pulse modulation wasn't something that the computer could calculate. It understood fluctuations and warp field collapses, but the deliberate modulation seemed like a suicide mission to it, as an error could collapse the field, or crush the ship inside.

Nico knew that was going to delay the adoption of this design by any sane species, but she had high hopes that they could find a way around that and build in some safety measures so that Warp Travel at extreme speeds wouldn't be counted as an extreme sport.

Though, in the worse case, it could be called a successful failure, as almost all the failure models showed the Warp Drive going supercritical and exploding in a most impressive manner.

If you couldn't use the design, you could always weaponize it.

[Hey Max, the data on our warp experiment came in inconclusive. The computer doesn't have the data to process it. We're going to send out a shuttle with a prototype to do some testing by drone if you want to come to watch.] Nico suggested.

[I think I'm good. The Valkia are teaching us to play Rings in the VR simulator soon, and that looks like it is going to be a good time.] Max replied with a laugh.

Both he and the Illithid were doing their best to tune out the nearly hypersonic pitch of the mental excitement in the design bays right now, and he wasn't all that eager to subject himself to that level of hyper at close range.

So, Nico packed four of the researchers, two from the main team and two students who were working on Warp Theory, into the shuttle and they took off for an empty area of space between solar systems where they could safely do their testing.

The test vessel was an unarmed Warp Torpedo, with sensory equipment that would stream back the data of the test loop in real-time. That would give them a huge amount of data for the computer, assuming that this did work and didn't blow the prototype up the instant that it tried to do the modulation.

If that were the case, this would be very anticlimactic. The field would need to modulate over a hundred times a second in order to maintain the targeted Warp 20 with maximum efficiency, so the test would be over in under a second.