Urenbeck Catapult

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A Urenbeck Catapult is a means of rapid space travel in Konami's Zone of the Enders video game series and its animated spin-offs.

Urenbeck Catapults are devices that are capable of compressing space, then launching that distorted space across inter-planetary distances with a vessel or container of some kind riding inside the distortion. The effect of the space compression reduces the effective distance between the Urenbeck Catapult and the destination of the craft that it launches. This allows a trip between planets that would normally require several months using conventional drives to be reduced to a matter of weeks or even days, depending on the craft's speed.

A Urenbeck Catapult is able to achieve space compression using a rare ore called metatron found only on Jupiter's moon Callisto. The Urenbeck Catapult is arguably one of the first and most important devices to be created through metatron research. It is a wide-spread technology that allowed colonization of the solar system to be made practical. Some limitations on the deployment of Urenbeck Catapults are their size, substantial energy use, and the large amount of metatron required to build them. As a result, Urenbeck Catapults are only built and operated in high traffic areas that require rapid transit between them and other major travel hubs. A few examples of this are the Urenbeck Catapult on the Earth space elevator, one on Deimos Station on that Martian moon, one on Antillia Colony orbiting Jupiter, one in the asteroid belt dividing the Terrestrial planets from the Jovian ones, and a private one covertly constructed in an asteroid near Earth that is used for black-market smuggling. Other Urenbeck Catapults may exist.

The basic principles of a Urenbeck Catapult can also be incorporated in a Zero Shift manoeuvre. Zero Shift is a special manoeuvre, so far only achieved by a few orbital frames, that simulates near light speed movement or teleportation. By using multiple external vector traps, the distance between the origin and the destination is compressed to zero. The frame makes a slight movement and releases the compressed space, ending up at the destination position while hardly seeming to have moved at all. To the naked eye this seems like instant teleportation while it is really distance-distortion. While a zero shift manoeuvre can move an object faster than a Urenbeck Catapult can (from an objective point of reference,) it appears to only function over short distances. An object traveling via zero shift can still make rapid long distance travels, but must do so with a series of small zero shift manoeuvres. Due to the short time necessary to form and resolve a compressed space corridor between manoeuvres, across astronomical distances the Urenbeck Catapult still has the advantage of short travel time compared to a zero shift capable orbital frame.