Professor Piss uses it (though we understand bought the technology off some aliens and doesn't have a clue how it works) and now the Dinos say they have cracked it. It being Wormhole Displacement Travel (WDT), basically this entails creating a wormhole between two locations in space-time and then travelling between them. Its not rocket science, its far beyond that.
The benefits of WDT are easily apparent, distances can be travelled in a very short time that take days or even weeks now. The problem is, its not very safe. The Dinos have had a working system for a couple of years now but the success rate has been so low (at times less than 5%) that only unmanned test probes were allowed to use it. WDT was also fitted to the flagship DM5 however and has been used in a time of dire emergency, luckily it worked on that occaision!
After years of work and development the success rate has risen to 12% but its still not enough to allow general everyday use, until now. Dino scientists have increased the success rate to an estimated 89% and hope to "dino-rate" it after an intensive test programme. The key to this breakthrough has been to not be quite as ambitious with the distance the wormhole crosses. The longer the tunnel in space-time the more chance of it collapsing when a ship is travelling through it. Previous tests used a Wormhole Separation Distance (WSD) of 5 lightyears but this has been reduced to 3 which a much higher safety. WSD means the distance between the starting and destination wormholes thus a WSD of 3 means you can travel 3 lightyears in just a few seconds.
By comparison a ship using conventional hyperspace travelling at 900c all day would travel 2.46 lightyears (and in practice it would be less as ships cannot maintain that kind of performance all the time). Using WDT and an average of one "tunnel" per 10 hours a ship could easily double that distance in 1 day. The DDS are also working on WDT but they are said to be years away from a working system. The Dinos hope to be able to roll out WDT to key ships in their fleet next year.
