Orpheus Incident

The greatest technological innovations have also brought with them the greatest dangers ever faced by mankind. Steam power fuelled the industrial revolution, catapulting human civilisation into the nineteenth century, but it also brought with it an arrogance that the Western World would take centuries to shake off. Mechanised wheeled transport allowed people to cross huge distances in short amounts of time, yet it also saw the creation of devastating engines of destruction. Nuclear power would be harnessed, fuelling vast superpowers, but would bring with it the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Human society is littered with so many innovations that have brought increased destruction that it is a small miracle that they survived into the 26th Century at all. In this regard, slipspace navigation has had its own share of catastrophes, some isolated and others widespread. Quantum fluctuations have sent ships off course, becoming lost in the interstellar void or forced to abandon their transits. Other ships have disappeared entirely, consumed or destroyed by the dimension. Enigmatic at best, even to the leading quantum physicists of humanity, slipspace is as chaotic and unpredictable as it is vital to human expansion.

Of all the incidents to occur in slipspace, none is more infamous than the case of the CMA Orpheus. The result of a combination of factors, ranging from catastrophic quantum fluctuations to human incompetence and error, the Orpheus has become a cautionary tale to interstellar starship captains in the modern age of the need for thorough maintenance of dangerous slipspace drives and up-to-date navigational coordinates uploaded from NAVCOM. The incident would another nail in the coffin for the ship's constructors, Sierra Space Systems, though it would be another eight years before the company was forced to admit complicity in "cost cutting" measures that contributed, by which time it was already heavily in debt from a variety of other poor business decisions, filing Chapter 11 status in 2548. As of 2553, the familes of the thirty two crewmen of the Orpheus have yet to recieve any form of compensation, despite public campaigns among the merchant marine and military communities.

Disaster
===Aftermath

Remarks

 * "Slipspace is an eleven-dimensional space-time that we can enter and exit, allowing faster jumps. It's bad enough that most of the public call it "FTL", but when companies start telling their investors that it is totally safe accidents are almost guaranteed."
 * "I was surprised that some prominent Navy families got behind the campaign, especially Mrs Cutter, but I guess the merchant marine crewmen are risking just as much out there as our servicemen are. Thirteen ships were taken by pirates last year, and it's only a miracle that the Cole Protocol hasn't been violated yet."
 * "A wrecked ship called the Orpheus? Did anyone tell the person who named it that the name had a history?"