The Temporal Lance mission causes the starship to transport itself, and all ships traveling with it (see Warp Chunnel for details), to a location that doesn't have a valid Chunnel Target. This consumes 50KT of fuel.
The starship initiating the Temporal Lance must meet the following conditions for the operation to be initiated:
In addition, the Chunnel Target being used to guide the Temporal Lance must meet the following requirements:
If the Chunnel Target starship is being towed by one of your starships, the mission of the towing starship will be reset to Explore . If the mission is later set to Try to tow , the Temporal Lance operation will fail.
To initiate a Temporal Lance, select the Temporal Lance button (where the Warp Chunnel button would normally be), select a target from the list and set the speed of the starship to at least Warp-1. The final destination will be approximately ten times the per-turn movement of the starship at the selected speed. The starships will appear at the destination at least 10 turns after they enter the Temporal Lance. It should be noted that travel in time and space, by the use of a Temporal Lance, is an inexact science.
As the overshoot (distance travelled beyond the Chunnel Target) increases (due to increased speed), the number of turns the starships spend in the Temporal Lance increases, and the less precise the destination. The details of this are in the following table.
Overshoot Precision Speed (light-years) Turns Required (light-years) Warp-1 10 10 2 Warp-2 40 12 4 Warp-3 90 14 6 Warp-4 160 16 8 Warp-5 250 18 10 Warp-6 360 20 12 Warp-7 490 22 14 Warp-8 640 24 16 Warp-9 810 26 18
While starships are in a Temporal Lance, they are temporarily suspended from the game (they're still counted in the scores). This could cause the number of starships in the game to be lower than the ship limit, possibly allowing new starships to be built without use of Priority Build Points or Priority Points.
As the starships travel towards their emergence location, the space-time continuum at the destination begins to warp. Shortly before the starships emerge, the warping is severe enough that the automatic scanners of all races can notice the event.
As with a chunnel, starships emerging from a Temporal Lance will have their shields down, and launching a Temporal Lance from or into a debris disk will destroy all the starships traversing the Temporal Lance.
See also: Out of Fuel.