>(Just out of curiosity, how did you get it to do the umlaut?)

There are quite a few special characters in the Latin-1 character set, all of which can be displayed in HTML markup with their numeric code delimited by an ampersand and a semicolon. A lot of the diacritical-marked vowels used in foreign languages have mnemonic shortcuts - an umlauted lowercased U is amperuumlsemi, for instance. (If I typed it correctly, it would be evaluated. I don't recall offhand how to mark up something like that so that it's not evaluated... )

>And, just to get this back on topic, how does the drive on the Sol
>Bianca fit into the picture, if at all?

That falls under the general heading of "weird-ass alien gear of unknown provenance". It appears to "submerge" the ship in the sub-ether, the sort of "sideband" to reality where FTL datacomm lives (making a galactic Internet possible), but matter isn't supposed to be able to exist there, as it's not a true parallel reality. The principles behind that drive are not understood, not least because only two examples have ever been seen (Sol Bianca and Unicron), and in neither case have scientists been able to examine them. We aren't even sure where that technology came from, although the most plausible theory to date has been that it's a relic from the lost galactic empire of Atlantis (ca. 5000 BC - AD 0).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/