Well, they knew how to build another, but decided that it was a very bad idea. By developing a new way to bend gravity based on Martian designs, they were also bending spacetime. The inadvertently built a sort of crude time machine that not only disappeared from this universe, but let something else into it as well.



The loss of the ship was a major political scandal, but also had even stranger implications. The use of technical language is intended as a sort of veil here, to partially obscure events and give some sensation of the uncertainty of the moment.



The sister ship that had already been laid down was completed with an older style engine setup, but the results were disappointing. The rest of the class was canceled.