Dillingham Drive: Technology
"Why, Ghaldron was working to develop a spacewarp drive, to get us out to the stars, and Hesthor was working on the possibility of linear time-travel, to get back to the past, before his ancestors had worn the planet out. . . . And a couple of centuries before, Rhogom had worked up a theory of multidimensional time, to explain the phenomenon of precognition. . . . Well, science was pretty tightly compartmented, then, but somehow Hesthor read some of Rhogom's old papers, and he'd heard about what Ghaldron was working on and got in touch with him. Between them, they discovered paratemporal transposition."
— Tortha Karf, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
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Dillingham Hyperdrive | Ghaldron‑Hestor Field‑Generator | Abbot Lift‑and‑Drive
"Generally Margaret Hale stayed completely out of these bickers, unless they involved the Keene-Gonzales-Dillingham Theory of Non-Einsteinian Relativity and the Dillingham hyperdrive."
— H. Beam Piper, "When in the Course—"
Peenemünde coming down fast
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The first mention of a faster-than-light starship drive in Piper's fiction appears in the 1951 Paratime yarn "Temple Trouble," where a civilization on a Second Level timeline is mentioned as "approaching the discovery of an interstellar hyperspatial drive." By the time of Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, published posthumously in 1965, there "are Second Level civilizations, and one on Third, that have over-light-speed drives for interstellar ships." Nevertheless these hyperspatial or "over-light-speed" starship drives of Paratime exist in an different setting from the starships of Piper's Terro-human Future History.
Faster-than-light hyperspatial — or hyperspace or even just "hyperdrive" — propulsion for starships is ubiquitous throughout Piper's Terro-human Future History yarns and the "Keene-Gonzales-Dillingham Theory [of Non-Einsteinian Relativity]" (which supplants "the older Einstein Theory") is mentioned in 1952's Uller Uprising, the first Terro-human Future History yarn. Hyperspatial drives are first referred to as "Dillinghams" in Space Viking, first serialized in 1962 and 1962 — though they also appear in "When in the Course—" which wasn't published until 1961 but may have been written before Space Viking. There are also hyperdrive engines in 1958's "Graveyard of Dreams" but they aren't referred to as Dillingham hyperdrive engines until the expanded Junkyard Planet was published in 1963.
[something about relativistic time dilation effects and increase in hyperdrive speeds with time]
Ghaldron-Hestor Field-Generator
"The Ghaldron-Hesthor field-generator is like every other mechanism; it can operate only in the area of primary time in which it exists. It can transpose to any other time-line, and carry with it anything inside its field, but it can't go outside its own temporal area of existence. . . ."
— Verkan Vall, "Police Operation"
Paratime conveyor controls
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The first mention of the Ghaldron-Hestor field-generator in Piper's fiction appears in the 1948 Paratime yarn "Police Operation." It is used in "paratemporal transposition" to "build up a hypertemporal field to include the time-line [one wants] to reach, and then shift over to it." The paratemporal travellers arrive in the same "point in the plenum; same point in primary time — plus primary time elapsed during mechanical and electronic lag in the relays — but a different line of secondary time."
Invented by Ghaldron Karf and Hesthor Ghrom, the paratransposition field-generator is the means of access to Paratime. "There exist, within the range of the Ghaldron-Hesthor paratemporal-field generator, a number of [parallel] time-lines of the order of ten to the hundred-thousandth power. In effect, that many different worlds."
"In theory, the Ghaldron-Hesthor paratemporal transposition field was uninfluenced by material objects outside it . . [but] in practice, especially when two paratemporal vehicles going in opposite 'directions' interpenetrated, the field would weaken briefly, and external objects, sometimes alive and hostile, would intrude." Once such accidental intrusion, by Pennsylvania State Trooper Calvin Morrison, is the basis of the story told in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.
A Ghaldron-Hestor field-generator is typically located in a "paratemporal transposition conveyor," a spherical fixture which is the size of the generated field. Conveyors can vary in size from that sufficient to enclose a small autonomous sensing device to large enough to accommodate large vehicles or craft. A typical conveyor is the size of a small van or room.
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