It took nearly thirty years of concerted effort after the second successful warp flight in history to find the derelict of its predecessor.

The greatest challenge of faster-than-light travel, after all is the need to temporarily detach yourself from the fabric of spacetime and all its petty rules and regulations before hurling your vessel towards its ultimate destination, where you can - hopefully - reattach.

As a result, correctly estimating the offset of any given warp jump is critical to its success.

Planets orbit their stars, those stars orbit in galactic whorls and dense clusters, while even galaxies proceed at a leisurely pace across the fabric of space.

By the time you seek to re-enter corporeal existence, your destination may have already leapt thousands of light years from its original position.

Of course we searched the obvious locations for the prototype warp vessel.

We calculated where the turning of the universe would have dropped it without any consideration of offset, and attempted a rescue.

But by then the navigator - lost in the darkness of vacuum far between galaxies - had jumped a second time, and a third, and on and on ever deeper into the long night.

Decades later, all we could offer him was a memorial.