Time fault

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Time fault
General information
Type	Anti-gravity singularity Military factory
Location	Underneath the Earth Federation capital; Earth
Political information
Affiliation	Earth Federation Greater Garmillan Empire

The time fault, also called the Reverse Syndrome, was a phenomenon that occurred on Earth after the use of the Cosmo Reverse System. Described as "the darkness" behind the resurrection of Earth after its desolation during the Great Garmillas War, it nonetheless remained crucial to Earth's efforts to rebuild its military and provide a strong arm of defense.

Overview

The time fault was an anti-gravity singularity deep beneath an undisclosed and secret place on Earth. Appearing similar to a massive pocket of air deep underwater, the fault was surrounded by a blue shimmering field. The dockyard itself was a hulking, twisting mass of rusted and worn steel comprising of hangar bays, construction models, pipes, smokestacks, and landing platforms where ships were laid waiting to be completed and sent out.

A line of new Dreadnought-class ships waiting to be finished

The singularity slowed time inside of the area, stretching it tenfold. This means that in the three years between the end of the war and the year 2202, thirty had gone by inside. In those three decades, a series of drydocks and construction facilities were built inside with which warships were produced. Underneath the waterline that surrounded Layer 1, was a second layer of the time fault, which went undiscovered until late 2203, where time slowed to a near halt. A dimensional node, linking regular space to a higher dimension was present in this deeper fault.

Lieutenant Susumu Kodai's reaction to the time fault's slowed-down gravity

The Reverse Syndrome had dire effects on living organisms; even with a full protection suit, the human body could not stand more than an hour within the fault while without a suit a human would be dead within ten minutes. Thus the infrastructure within the time fault was almost solely automated and designed to function with minimal human input. Even metals within the fault would rust and decay at the same accelerated rate, and with the sheer functionality of the fault facilities little thought was put into aesthetics: the metal walkways and panels were all rusted and worn, gantries and structures sat at odd angles.

Approaching via the hallway

The time fault was first accessed via a deep elevator. One would then pass down a hallway leading past a series of rotating mechanisms which allowed passage into the fault: the clean and maintained metal surfaces gave way to rusted and decrepit looking sheet metal. An exit shaft, from which ships were launched, was located near the Earth Federation capital.

History

Garmillas ships in the time fault

The time fault was created by the activation of the Cosmo Reverse System in late 2199. The Earthlings discovered it in 2201, but it took them one year, meaning ten whole years inside of the fault, to fully understand its workings. On the same year, the Earth Federation announced the Wave-motion Gun fleet plan, a rearmament program which aimed at constructing a number of new classes of ships armed with Wave-motion Guns. To that end, construction immediately began on a vast shipbuilding factory inside of the fault, which took three decades, or three years in the outside world, to be completed. As part of their security treaty with Garmillas, the Earth sold areas of the time fault to the Greater Garmillan Empire, gaining in exchange various colony worlds that the empire had no use for.

Andromeda, namesake of the class, and four other Armed Vanguard Starships

By December 2202, the factory was completed and it began churning out masses of new and advanced warships to replenish Earth's near-nonexistent defenses. Such ships included the state-of-the-art Andromeda-class and Dreadnought-class Vanguard Starships which would prove essential in Earth's defense against the Gatlantis Empire. The resources needed to build these ships were redirected there in secret, and the existance of the time fault was kept secret and was only known to high-ranking officers of the Earth Federation Defense Force, members of the Science Bureau, as well as the E.F.G. President and the Garmillas Ambassador Loren Burrell and his staff. After he discovered that the goddess Teresa had called the crew of the space battleship Yamato to her world, Ambassador Burrell revealed the existance of the time fault to Yamato's tactics officer Susumu Kodai. When confronted by Kodai on the matter, U.N.F. General Commander-in-Chief Heikuro Todo proceeded to deny the existance of the fault.

In the following months multiple ship classes continued to be built inside of the factory and automized vessels fully under the control of commanding AIs began development. In May 2203, as part of Operation S in preparation of the coming Gatlantean invasion of the Solar system, the time fault factory was put at full capacity, constantly producing new ships for the growing Cosmo Navy fleet. To allow for an even greater warship production, UNF deputy commander General Serizawa pushed for the integration of the public and private sectors. This ultimately led to civilian contractors, such as Domon Hightech, working within the fault. When the Gatlantean Emperor Zworder was made aware of the time fault's existance, he sought to take control of it to further his human eradication campaigns.

Automized Andromeda Blacks in orbit of the Earth

The first vessel to be partly automized was the Yamato-class vessel Ginga. The ship was at the center of Project G and was first deployed on May 11. On top of its command AI, it only needed a skeleton crew of about a dozen members to be battle-ready and fully operational. The AI's mainframe was located inside of the time fault, and was constantly growing and self-replicating thanks in part to the combat data provided by Ginga. By May 14, it had aquired enough data for the first fully unmanned UNCN fleet to be sent into battle. On June 2, Gatlantis broke through the Mars Defense Front and arrived on Earth, declaring full control over the planet, citing the time fault as the reason the Earthlings would be enslaved and not wiped out.

Yamato resurfaces in the time fault

Six months after the conflict, on December 8, Yamato, which had disappeared into an higher dimension at the end of the last battle against Gatlantis, reappeared inside of the time fault. Upon investigating, Lt. Commander Shiro Sanada discovered a second layer to the time fault, where time slowed down to a near halt and a dimensional node linking regular space to the higher dimension was located. Sanada, with backing from Ginga's captain and the commander of the Earth Federation Cosmo Fleet, drafted a plan to send Yamato through the node to the higher dimension to rescue Commanders Yuki Mori and Susumu Kodai, who had remained stuck there after the battleship's descent. However, to do so the battleship would need to have nigh infinite energy, which could only be obtained by collapsing the time fault through the same Cosmo Reverser that had created it. Serizawa and the rest of the EF leadership opposed the proposition, but thanks to Ambassador Burrell's political pressure on the President, it was agreed to make the time fault public and allow the Earth's citizens to decide on whether or not the fault would be sacrificed. A referendum was held on December 30, seeing the "yes" win. The fault was collapsed on the same day and the two officers where saved.

Legacy

The disappearance of the time fault, which also caused the disappearance of the AI mainframe that was kept inside of it, forced the Earth Federation to change its military policy to an optimization of the armed forces to match the federation's current size. Almost all subframes outside of the fault were also rewritten and the production of Wave-motion Gun-equipped warship was stopped, with previously produced models being converted into new classes and unmanned vessels being refit into manned ones.

Notes

• The official subtitles for Star Blazers Chronicle 2202 call it the Temporal Fault.

Japanese language information

間断層 Jikan dansō