The train of thought immediately espoused by the top-secret Commission on Lightspeed Circumvention, which first met in Círdas' Isladestel on the homeworld of Aláran in 8334, mainly supposed that could these WIMPs be temporarily altered to effectively invert the mass of an object, it could then be repulsed by gravitational fields and attain a velocity sufficient to pass the criteria. Many attempts were made to devise a system which could change the nature of the WIMPs latent in an object, but no significant advances were made in OCR a century and the project was roughly thrown to the back-burner. Around 8500, an event known as the Blackout was officially declared, where Aláranid colony ships had passed the 5ly mark and could no longer be effectively communicated with. The fact that several hundred of these ships now plied the abyss marked the beginning of a new era of Aláranid civilisation, where no single world could reasonably know of events occurring on any other outside a certain range. While most were resigned to this particular occurrence, several Escalan officers and scientists were more determined than ever to revive the Commission and continue its research.

The next half-century showed no marked progress, and all the while, any form of accurate centralised information dwindled in relevance. As the ninth millennium began, the Blackout continued, with an estimated four hundred colonised worlds and fully three trillion people now outside all knowledge of the old systems surrounding Aláran proper. By this point, attention from the members of the Commission was devoted mainly to the creation of a system for faster-than-light communication using particles which were entangled on a quantum level. After two hundred years of experiments, an incredibly expensive prototype was developed and tested with great success. Unfortunately, the vessel carrying one of the three operational machines was destroyed in a collision en route to a neighbouring system, plunging the Commission into debt. Another century later, with the now-defunct Commission doing no further work, Escalan Executive Command and the Patrol Branch of the Corread Armed Forces were prepared to release the data to the public. In a desperate bid to prevent this, a second-tier Patrol Commander, Hystran Amirlón Deskendaral, asked his younger brother Stratanil Myrít to return once more to the original research of the Commission, that regarding faster-than-light travel.

Stratanil Myrít Deskendaral quickly realised that with new postulates in physics taken into account, the original theories were invalidated. With this disappointment in mind, he attacked the issue from an entirely different angle. Instead of starting with WIMP manipulation, Stratanil began with attempting to understand the utility of gravitational fields themselves. After twenty years of field studies and mathematical calculation, he came to the conclusion that the most valuable asset of a gravitational field was the manner in which it reacted instantly to changes in any other gravitational field. Surprisingly, this provided an encouraging example of a phenomenon wherein faster-than-light action and reaction was existent. The next step became a question of how this principle of fields might consequently be used to propel a tangible object through space. In his quest to divine just such a method, Stratanil Myrít stumbled across another instrumental fact, this time that since any object's gravitational field could be mathematically simulated as emanating from a point mass, one could, if the natures of other surrounding masses were known at any given instant, predict their states simply by observing the state of a single point. This was born the prototype of the Disruptions Monitor (DisMon) system, though this would not become functional until sufficient data had been gathered in the mid-10th millennium.

The final theoretical component and undoubtedly the most essential fell into place in 9545 ACT, near the end of Stratanil's life. Again returning to the point-mass construct, he realised that shifting the location of this centre of mass with relation to the actual position of the object by manipulating its component WIMPs would successfully alter its perceived location as far as other gravitational fields were concerned. They would then compensate- instantaneously- to match the new position. As soon as the field altering the distribution of WIMPs was disengaged, the object would "jump" to the new location in accordance with its mass. Repeat this process an infinite number of times, each time moving the object but a few microns, and you could in theory dispense with the lightspeed barrier entirely. This the final elements of the technology coalesced, and with the creation of a machine that supplied the requisite field to alter the concentration of WIMPs, the rippledrive as we know it was born.