Force-drive

"[Xesh] was taken to his masters' machines—encased in a tomblike shell where he screamed in fear. Around him, he sensed his brood mates, shrieking in the darkness. He learned anger and hate. Later, he understood that this bleak anger—this dark hatred—was the Force and the power that fed his masters' ships."

―Force Hound Xesh was discovered to be Force-sensitive during his time as Force-drive fuel^[6]

The Force-drive,^[2] also known as Force-based hyperdrive^[5] or Rakatan hyperdrive,^[1] was a type of hyperspace drive used in the skipships of the Rakatan Infinite Empire.^[2] As its name suggested, the Force-drive was powered by the Force energies of sentient species and was only capable of transit to worlds with strong Force signatures.^[7]

Description

"The Rakatan hyperdrive was of no use for traveling between arbitrary points in realspace, General. It didn't work that way. Rather, it honed [sic] in on the signature of worlds strong in the Force — ones brimming with life, in other words."

―Dr. Insmot Bowen explains the Force-drive to General Arhul Kurumenga^[7]

Tasha Ryo's vision of Xesh in the Force-drive

The Force-drive was a type of hyperdrive that powered warships using the wells of Force energy existing within sentient slave species as fuel.^[8] Force-drives were installed aboard the Rakatan ships, where entire rooms were dedicated to the storage of slave fuel in vast containment racks. Each rack contained a number of "tomblike shells," cells wherein the slaves were restrained face-down and hooked to a set of electrodes.^[6] Turned into living batteries, they were subjected to intense pain for extended periods of time, with the resultant dark-side energy extracted and channeled to the Force-drive.^[6]

While this system did work, the Force-drive's reliance on the Force as its primarily power source gave it certain limitations, the most important of which was its inability to travel between any two arbitrary points in realspace.^[7] The Force-drive was only capable of targeting worlds with strong Force signatures, a fact which resulted in an empire that spanned the breadth of the galaxy but which only incorporated more than five hundred worlds.^[9] In addition, a powerful prisoner with a strong will could overcome the destructive effects of the mechanisms and break out of their cell.^[10]

History

Infinite Empire

"Long ago, we Rakata were a great space-faring people. Our ships combined technology and the power of the Force, and we were able to pilot them to the farthest reaches of the galaxy."

―Orsaa^[11]

Many years before 36,453 BBY, the Kwa uplifted the Rakata civilization of Lehon, who were taught the power of the Force and were given advanced technology. Following the devastating conflict with the Kwa, the Rakata promptly developed^[4] the first known hyperdrive,^[9] discovering that they could use the energy of Force-sensitive slaves among the populations they conquered to fuel their warships. Thus the Infinite Empire was born, which expanded with each new conquest and discovery of another planet rich in the Force.^[4]

When a plague stripped the Rakata of their Force-sensitivity, they lost their ability to wield their Force-based technology. The Infinite Empire collapsed and the remaining survivors fled to an isolated region in the Unknown Regions known as the Rakatan Archipelago. While most of tribes in the Archipelago reverted to primitivism, some tribes recovered the technology of their ancestors. Buried skipships exhumed on Makatak and Tulpaa turned the Rakata into spacefarers once more. The Rakata's Force-blindness meant they could only operate the ship's machinery at a fraction of its functionality. The ship's Force-drives zeroed in on life-rich planets across the Rakatan Archipelago, but the Rakata had no control over this process. The Makatak and Tulpaa Rakata's Force-drives brought them to the same unspoiled planets, leading to resource wars between them.^[2]

Legacy

"You said we took their technology. But hyperdrives and blasters don't require the Force."
"Correct, General — in fact, the Rakata were careful to keep Force-sensitive slaves away from their machines. But that drove their slaves to take their technology and reverse-engineer it, eliminating the role of focusing crystals and anything else that required the Force. Duros, Herglics, Baragwin, Devaronians, Gossam and of course the Coruscanti all experimented with hyperspace cannons, tumbledrives, pulse cannons and other derivatives of Rakatan technologies."

―General Arhul Kurumenga and Dr. Insmot Bowen discuss the legacy of the Force-drive^[7]

Although the Rakata did not reveal the secret of their technologies to the slaves, over time, they did discover the secret of the hyperdrive and many other technologies.^[7] The Gossams and Devaronians created a tumble hyperdrive even before the fall of the Infinite Empire, while Coruscanti traveled without a hyperdrive at all, sending colonial sleeper ships across the Core Worlds. In turn, Corellians and Duros independently reverse-engineered hyperspace cannons from the Rakatan hyperdrive, but it was the development of the modern hyperdrive by Corellian scientists around 25,000 BBY that opened up the galaxy to interstellar trade and led to the formation of the Galactic Republic. The latter, representing an amalgamation of various emerging civilizations, also combined developments based on Rakata technologies.^[5]