The Milk Run Preview: Starship OMCOM

One of the key tenets of the upcoming novel entitled The Milk Run was that I tied up any remaining loose ends from the previous novels in the Rome's Revolution series.

These include things like:
- Whatever happened to OMCOM aka Planet OMCOM?
- What, exactly, was the purpose of the mutations that OMCOM allowed to occur?
- Where did the Stareaters come from?
- Whatever happened to the Ark IV, destination Nu2 Lupi?
- How will man expand into the universe when the stars are so damned far away?

Well, all of these loose ends are tied together into a single concept whose working title is Starship OMCOM. The Null Fold X-drive is similar to the Null Fold star drive except it bends imaginary negative energy instead of the real part. There are many more dimensions to negative energy to be exploited so the upper velocity is limited only by the computing engine behind it. Imagine how fast a starship could go if it had a computer the size of a planet?

The only problem for launching it is that it needs a PPT tunnel larger than anything ever seen. This is where the Stareaters come in. Two of the smaller ones join Planet OMCOM, after he converts himself into a starship and they create the launch window. For reasons which will be made clear in the story, Junior has to be mounted on a stalk in the very front to lead the way. In the drawing below, his starcraft is visible but in real life it would be too small to see at the scale presented.

So here, for the first time, is a preliminary drawing of Starship OMCOM, the fastest starship that will ever be built. Don't laugh, it's the best I could do...