Procedures for temporal investigations in the event of a breech of continuity in history are laid out in more detail in General Orders 3, 6, 9, and 15. These orders define the Temporal Regulations which govern what can and cannot be done when attempting to repair damage to the timeline.
Causation
There are two primary causes for Solas Tempus to become alerted of a temporal incision having happened or being in progress.
- Inbound Temporal Wave
- A temporal wave being inbound can often be detected before it reaches the present day. In the event of a temporal wave being detected, all vessels are to immediately go to Condition 2 and Starbase Pandora should deploy assets to investigate further.
- When a temporal wave impacts the present day, all assets with temporal shields will cause a temporal storm that separates them from the timeline, temporarily. The length of time this separate lasts is proportional to the power and number of temporal waves.
- Alert from HAL that a violation in continuity has occurred.
- Some alterations in the timeline are too small to produce large temporal waves across space that can be detected. Nor do all temporal waves produce temporal storms over a wide enough area to be detected. In these events, HAL will alert to a change in continuity, labeled as a Continuity Violation.
Studying Temporal Waves
A temporal wave propagates unevenly through the timeline. Space-time fissures open up at focal points through which temporal entropy expands rapidly in the current time period. To trace back a temporal wave it is necessary to locate the focal point and scan the fissure allowing the temporal entropy to move through time. The fissure will link back to the original change in the timeline which created a particular wave.
Multiple Waves
Most fissures actually convey multiple waves. Or to be more accurate, most temporal fissures are actually clusters of smaller fissures that merge together and allow the propagation of multiple temporal waves through the same area.
To determine the origin the signatures from the fissures must be then sorted to determine the earliest wave produced by a particular set of fissures. This can be difficult as a single change causes ripples, and often the original change is not the strongest wave produced. The strongest wave will tend to make it difficult to determine the temporal origin of weaker waves.
Temporal Storms
Temporal storms are caused both naturally, in the event of a natural phenomena preventing the temporal entropy of a wave from rewriting reality as it passes and artificially, in the case of a temporal wave impacting temporal shields. Some areas of space are naturally protected, to some degree, from changes in the timeline. A case in point in Starbase Pandora which sits near the Pandoric Rift in the Modrag Nebula. The entire nebula and the anomalies within can be seen as a natural temporal shielding. The Schatten Star System is another example, the he concentration of anomalies and the regions barrier produce a natural shielding effect.
Studying Causality
When HAL alerts to a change in the timeline, usually it surrounds a singular event of some importance. However, it is uncommon for such an event to be the true locus for a change in the timeline. Such changes must be researched back along the historical records to locate the earliest deviation from what the protected records within HAL know to be true.
This is troublesome and often requires the dispatch of a team to do first hand research and look for signs of temporal anomalies within an area. Such anomalies often point to a time traveller manipulating time. These are fact-finding missions, for the most part, and since a team should not over-use time travel to hop from location to location, sometimes a team or single operative is sent back to a particular place and time and then implanted there to observe over long periods of time.
Correcting Continuity Violations
The end result of both is the same, where a team finds the actual change in the timeline and assets are deployed to correct the changes. In either case there is a certain amount of guesswork involved, as once a team has passed a critical point in time, setting an event right can cause more harm than it prevented in the mad struggle to correct an event that has already been altered. Most often a team or operative has the latitude to decide that something is going to be changed and then make sure it does not change.
At times there are no records to say how the details of an event should go down. Also records can be inaccurate, often historical records are some point of guesswork unless it comes down to a primary source (actual recordings of an event). Even a diary, which is among the best sources for information, can be flawed and an actual event may not be recorded accurately. In these cases it is important for operatives to make the best attempt they can to produce the required effects. This does not always go smoothly but soon after an alerted event, time is still somewhat elastic toward the original and operatives can use this to their advantage, aligning a sequence of events to the required events soon after a chance can result in the timeline snapping back into a reasonable sequence of events.