Why are there no historical records of the commissioning of the 160th Imperial Legion?
Because it hasn’t been commissioned yet.
There are records of it participating in several battles independently from any Theater Command, or even Core Command.
Yes.
Without being commissioned?
While cause mostly precedes effect, this is not necessarily the case.
While utterances mostly convey meaning, this is not necessarily the case either.
The “Causal Effectives” will be founded in 11346 as one of the Transcend’s special troubleshooting teams, Anything they do before then is all of important, classified, and unlikely to be understood in its full historical consequence before that date.
What else do we –
Further information is not available in this whenwhere.
Yes, they’re regularly sending messages etc back in time across some relatively short periods, one example was a writer getting a message from some 10-15 days in the future.
This is talking about sending a full military group back some 4000 years or so, and then taking them back to their starting spacetime.
It’s never been established that knights-move transits are only feasible across short periods of time, only that you have to be very careful how you program the star-gate’s exit parameters, and that the receiving stargate has to exist at your desired exit time/place. I wouldn’t consider that one author’s experience to be indicative of the limitations of time travel within the 'Verse.
Besides, you don’t actually have to send back an actual task force as a material object. Send the operators as encoded mind states to a past tangle channel, and they can probably interface with pre-existing Imperial assets and/or use assembly seeds to churn out the materiel they need for their mission, then mind-cast back via tangle-channel. And if you’re willing to put on your tin-foil hat a bit more, there may be proof that this sort of thing can work across millennia.
Just to clarify a misconception that’s crept in here, a “knight’s-move transit” isn’t a time-travel mechanism in itself, it’s a description of how you use it. Specifically, it’s one particular tactic that uses it, to wit:
There are three systems linked by stargates: A, B, and C. You are at A and want to be at C, but there is an enemy picket in system B waiting to ambush you. If you have a good astrogator and the devil’s own luck, you can pull off a knight’s-move transit by skew-framing your jump from A to B to take you back (or forward) in time, and likewise your jump from B to C to take you forward (or back) in time, thus letting you pass through B at a time before the picket force arrived, or after it had left, even though by empire time standards, it is there now.
It’s called a knight’s-move transit because it basically skips over the occupied system the way a chess knight does squares containing enemy pieces, y’see.
There are any number of varietals on this - involving refinements like picking up the tactical recordings of how you won the battle that you will leave there afterwards, or joining forces with yourself from a different point in your own timeline, and so forth - but the regular knight’s-move is the basic temporal tactical hack.
Now as for time travel itself, it’s easy. If you have FTL, you have time travel, says physics, and I’m happy to lean into that. You may recall that one of the things you have to do when making a stargate jump is “obtain an empire-time reference-frame trap”. That’s because the gate can move you between any two points within range of its entangled kernels, which have temporal length. Go in one side, you can come out the other at any point during the lifetime of that stargate pair.
This is problematic insofar as even when physics doesn’t, people care quite a lot about not coming unstuck in time and sequence. The frame trap lets you pick the right spot along t axis to emerge. There will be drift, caused by causal pressure and the inevitable imperfections and instabilities in the field, which it’s more or less impossible to fit to the universe in real time; if you’ve got a good pilot, you should drop in within a sphere a few light-seconds in diameter, with the gate at the far end at its center. But drift doesn’t happen in a sphere, it happens in a hypersphere; that same volume encompasses seconds forward and back as well as light-seconds in the other three dimensions. While usually this is trivial, it’s relatively commonplace for queued starships on busy routes to arrive in a different order than the one they departed in.
“Skew-framing”, manipulating the parameters of the trap, is what lets you manipulate the drift effect in various ways, including to pull off various bits of temporal hackery. In theory, there’s no limit to how far you can push this manipulation, except for increasing power requirements, your ability to manage field instability, and –
Well. You are still in a block universe, and the quantum probability of any event that causes a grandfather paradox is still zero. Push this too far, and you come out the other end as a light-year long smear of exotic particles.
(So if you’re going to try jumping into last millennium, check your history books to make sure that you were there before you hit the big red button.)
On a final note, it is both possible and fairly easy, too, to build a specialized time machine which is basically the same thing as a stargate, only focused on t axis rather than x, y, and z. This does let you pull off a neat trick by using a single kernel entangled with itself across time, which will let you commute back and forth along the worldline of that kernel, so long as it exists.
(Be careful if you’re going to the future, because without the rest of the machine and its exotic matter lenses, all the kernel is is a hungry nothing. Best send a drone first to check.)
Of course, you still can’t travel back beyond the start of the kernel’s worldline, so… tum-te-tum, tum-te-tum…
This does raise the question of how many of the starships you see gating through in a day are actually in sync with the empire-time reference frame. Sounds like it would be very easy to prove that the Empire gloriously continues for eons on end if you see traffic pouring in from year 1000000 or something.
To clarify, my question is basically what’s stopping random people from just gating throughout the entire hyperspace volume connected by Ring Dynamics as a form of temporal tourism / migration?
(and deliberately trying to bounce around t axis makes the causal pressure so much worse)
Much like attempting to skew-frame far enough to reach arbitrary star systems from a single gate pair, the problem with this cunning scheme is that it is a beautiful theory the attempted practice of which is essentially guaranteed to kill you in a variety of theoretically fascinating ways.