The Agbufon
A starship cross section
Briefly mentioned in the Aegis Sierra epilogue, the first human ship with a hyperquantum drive was built in Lagos. Named the Àgbùfọn (Yoruba for the black crowned crane), it was cobbled together by a student of Dr. Aminat Wasiu named Táyé Agbájé as part of his thesis work. Prior to the crisis of the 90s, nearly all of the space programs had shut down due to Kessler syndrome and there was a lot of material in surplus. Táyé used material from Nigeria’s space program coupled with a 2050’s era pressurized drone taxi to construct the Earth’s first hyperquantum starship.
From the outside, the most prominent modifications were the cold gas thrusters (GN₂) and propellant tanks, the deployable emergency re-entry ballute, and the heat dissipation fins required for the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG). The original power source for the vehicle were rechargeable Li-ion batteries which also had heat to dissipate, but the system was insufficient on its own to handle the output of the RTG.
All of the passenger seats were removed and the luggage rack was modified to hold the cryo-cooled hyperquantum computer and the Gravitational Neutron Interferometer (GNI). Some additional modifications were made to make the taxi completely air-tight. A salvaged ESPA-class GNC/reaction wheel system was used for fine rotation control and guidance during the post-jump phase. Eighteen stacks of 1000 compact discs served as the entropy reservoir. These were commonly used in teleportation systems along the first Lagos-London route — aiding the mission of the landfill reclamation sites in the area by taking the piles of difficult to recycle CDs off their hands1.
The system had to fly high enough for the gravitational field to be uniform over the vehicle to a very high precision in order to jump tens of thousands of kilometers past geosynchronous orbit using a small enough (low qubit, less capable) hyperquantum computer to fit in the vehicle. The enormous power requirements alongside limited volume and mass allotments meant the RTG used2 Polonium-210.
Much like the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, the first flight of a conventional hyperquantum drive was basically just a proof of concept. Táyé took off from an airfield outside the Lagos Aegis Region just before midnight and was back by early afternoon. The first leg was simply getting the vehicle to a high enough altitude to be unaffected by the small fluctuations in the gravitational field near the surface. Once there, the vehicle would hover while the hyperquantum computer performed the calculations to teleport to a point well above GEO.
In the “default” state of the algorithm, an object being teleported materializes in the same inertial frame as it started. However, as boosts (changes in velocity) are a symmetry of our universe (special relativity), it is actually not computationally taxing (it’s non-zero, but typically a small impact) to add an arbitrary velocity to an object being teleported. This is in fact often required — otherwise teleporting a person from Lagos to London would result in the person travelling at a few hundred meters per second too fast to the east because of the differential speed of rotation of the Earth at the two different latitudes. Given the lack of a decent enough vacuum (and quantity of space debris) inside GEO orbit, Táyé would not be able to teleport back to the Earth3 or the space between. Therefore he used the fact that you materialize in your inertial frame (at Lagos near the equator travelling at about 500m/s to the east) to create an “effective Δv” relative to the circular orbit velocity past GEO (~ 2 km/s) that would immediately “de-orbit” him to GEO Transfer Orbit (GTO).
During that period, Táyé and the Àgbùfọn would effectively free fall towards the Earth, and he could deploy an Aegis field to protect the vehicle from space debris damage and radiation. Additional Δv would have to come from somewhere to return all the way to Earth. The Àgbùfọn was equipped with three GN₂ thruster packs that could provide up to about 50-70 m/s (i.e. 0.05-0.07 km/s, well short of the 10 km/s needed to go from LEO to Earth on their own) that if used carefully along with aerobraking using the ballute would allow the vehicle to return to Earth in a few days. This was the emergency plan. The primary plan was Aegis braking.
When a particle with energy above the set threshold strikes an Aegis field, the horizon state information it contains is usually re-mapped randomly to the boundary of the Aegis region (bubble). However, if that information is re-mapped with preferential bit changes that induce an entropy gradient across the Aegis bubble, which creates a gravitational field (entropic gravity) resulting in a net force on the vehicle4. The Àgbùfọn was set up to use the collisions with the space debris and eventually the atmosphere to effectively create powered flight all the way to the surface. Once Táyé reached an altitude where the Àgbùfọn's props could operate, the Aegis was deactivated and he could fly back to the landing site.
The entire mission went off without a hitch. A few days later, Táyé repeated it with his advisor operating the two-way radio signal that showed the Àgbùfọn had indeed traveled some 50,000 km away from the Earth in just the 11 microseconds it took the hyperquantum computer to apply the new position information to the horizon state — an effective speed of over 15,000 times the speed of light5. Just a couple weeks later (while there was still sufficient power from the RTG), a public demonstration was done with representatives of the Lagos Aegis Region government and widely distributed across the holonet — Táyé transmitted a short video of himself floating in the Àgbùfọn and showed a tiny Earth in a backdrop of stars outside the window.
The flights of the Àgbùfọn and the subsequent emulators triggered the first public visit of the Uutaruu a few months later — Dr. Táyé Agbájé, like Dr. Miranda Sierra, was one of the guests of honor at the inter-species conference in Seoul. Táyé arrived in the Àgbùfọn — taking roughly 8 hours for a trip that in the 2110s would have taken days of short hops due to the limited capacity for international travel after the crisis of the 90s.
As teleportation (and hyperquantum drives) became more common and the landfill CDs started to run out, other materials were used as entropy reservoirs — typically complex quasi-periodic crystals to minimize the volume they occupy on a starship. Note that huge numbers of CDs were produced as one of the few ways to transport data securely after the advent of hyperquantum computers and their ability to break any encryption. Their production faded (for the second time) with the invention of holonet and message crystals.
Polonium-210 puts out 140 Watts per gram, but only has a half-life of about 4 months. It can be produced from Bismuth using neutrons to make Bismuth-210 which has a half-life of about 5 days, which then decays into Polonium-210. When the mission was getting ready to fly, Wasiu and Agbájé used the CERD accelerator ion beam to produce neutrons in order to make several grams of Bi-210 for the mission. It wouldn’t be until a few decades later when compact fusion reactors became common enough that hyperquantum drives would be practical for regular interstellar travel.
This would have required setting up a container at some designated point for Táyé to teleport back to (either vacuum, or as with surface teleporters, air that is teleported back to the departure point).
The teleportation from different points on the Earth has a projection of effective velocity along the horizon that is still limited by the speed of light and therefore takes a minimum on the e.g. Lagos to London route of ~ 17 milliseconds to apply the new position information to your horizon state (the horizon quantum states physically cannot transition fast enough to their new state) during which your body is temporarily in a pure horizon state “existing” everywhere inside the causal region. Since this is simply a different representation of the same fundamental information, your biological (and chemical, etc) processes continue mostly as normal — except e.g. quantum tunneling processes which can yield non-exponential decay through the quantum Zeno effect. There will be detectable differences in levels of e.g. Carbon-14 in objects that have been teleported. Side note: 15000c is well above warp 9.99 in the “new scale” of The Next Generation Star Trek.