Dr Forbidden, head of DDS ResearchI am so often asked "Whats happening with DDS worm drive production?" Its a question that crops up all the time, well we are getting there but it is taking time.
We currently have 5 ships in the fleet with worm drive*, all but one of these powered by worm drives bought or supplied from the Dinos. One ship has a DDS built pre-production drive, though this was virtually hand-built by my team. Our production line is now in place and there are 4 new drives in various stages of construction. Much of this first batch remains hand-built as we are still learning how to work with Dino technology which is often radically different to our own.
I am confident that all 4 drives plus at least 2 more will be completed and will be in service with DDS warships (or at least ready for fitting) by the end of the year. True serial production is expected early next year and we are geared up to build 8-10 worm drives a year.
At the moment the priority is to fit them to the new build Indy 35B ships though we are also aiming to equip as many Panther 35As as we can too. Work is currently on-going on drawing up the field geometry for the Quasar 15A and Type 37 (you can't just fit a worm drive to a ship, it has to have its field correctly set otherwise attempting a worm jump would be suicidal). Currently we have geometries set up for the Type 35, Isometric and Isometric Prototype.
Its going to be a long process, new ships like the Indy and the forthcoming Corkscrew and Carbon will have worm drives from new and we'll fit them to existing ships as they come up for major updates. By 2120 we will likely have a majority of the combat fleet equipped, thats our aim. By 2130 we want all ships in the fleet equipped including transports. Now that is a long time but there is a huge amount of work to do as well...
* The 6th D101 Panther is currently in testing and will rejoin the fleet in a few weeks.
