Faster-Than-Light Travel

**Faster-Than-Light Travel**, commonly shortened as **FTL**, is a catch-all term for various technologies that allow a species to travel between distant stars within the span of a life time.

## Concepts

### Space-Time Debt

Most forms of faster than light travel are effectively time travel. The
object gets from Point A to Point B sooner than should be possible,
through some sort of workaround or ‘cheat’. Extensive FTL travel exerts
strain on space-time on a large scale as causal paradoxes accrue a
"debt". When these aftereffects build up, it can impede with, or in
extreme cases, entirely halt other superluminal traffic and
communication. The severity of this effect, which scales in a nonlinear
fashion, is determined by the amount of discrepancy in information
transfer between locations, as well as strain on the local space-time
brane, as opposed to the apparent length of the voyage alone. Mass, or
size, is also a contributing factor, at least in the transport of
abnormally large objects.

### Causal Reconciliation

Reconciliation is the method of limiting the impact of Space-Time Debt.
To a limited extent, the universe is able to mend these paradoxes and
make sense of things. However, outright time travel or excessive
paradoxal accumulation, results in a ‘Time Wound’ or ‘Dragon Break’ as
the Tamrielic species call it. The universe crudely tries to make sense
of things in a rushed and hasty manor, creating bizarre outcomes.

Most space fairing nations already utilize some form of manual
reconciliation. It is imperative to the movement of large objects or
fleets of ships. Without it, the travel time of individual vessels can
vary up to 10-20%, which given that the universe and everything in it is
 constantly moving, can make precise travel and organized fleet
movements difficult.

A crude form of reconciliation technology is the Time-Phased Mirror, a
costly device made in the event horizon of a blackhole.  They consist of
 perfectly reflective surfaces which reflect light along a short span of
 time as well as space. This reconciles space-time in the vicinity of
the structure, capturing and adjusting the immediate light of any nearby
 object and allowing the transit of large amounts of mass without
producing major causal damage.
The next step above the use of awkward to make, oddly scaling
Time-Phased Mirrors, is the ability lightly manipulate this debt. The
most common method of advanced civilizations, is to simply shunt the
anomalies into another realm, such as Oblivion. This is effectively like
 a factory dumping its waste somewhere it doesn’t care about.

The most advanced civilizations, such as the Dovah and Formians,
effectively manually go through causal reconciliation, or use methods
that get around the issue all together. Their mastery of reconciliation
technologies can also allow them to interfere with the transit of lesser
 species, while enjoying significantly less interference themselves.

## Planes

An object traveling faster than light typically makes use of one or more 'planes of existence', either abusing their alternative rules, or taking advantage of irregularities between various planes due to time dilation effects.

### Realspace

Otherwise known as ‘reality’, Realspace consists of the 3-dimensional space most entities live in. Few if any civilizations can achieve faster than light travel using only Realspace.

### Subspace

*See Subspace for more information.*

Otherwise known as ‘Warpspace’ or ‘Hyperspace”, is a layer of the
time-space brane that lies between Realspace and Slipspace. Sharing
traits of both realms, it is often considered easier to understand and
manipulate by species. Objects moving through subspace do still have to
worry about gravity wells and planets, leading to the mapping of ‘Hyper
Lanes’ or paths through the stars that are particularly free of
obstruction. While the risk of hitting a planet or star is small, the
gravity can still affect the craft, which at the speeds they are
traveling, can cause massive deviances in course. A smart navigator
though can use these gravity wells as slingshots in their own right.
Devices used to navigate Subspace are generally known as Warp Drives or
Hyper Drives and typically wrap fields around the vessel to abuse the
odd interaction of physics to accelerate to speeds not normally
possible.

Once can still view stars and planets from subspace, though they often show as white-streaked lines.

### Slipspace

*See Slipspace for more information.*

Slipstream space,  colloquially known as Slipspace, is a dimensional
subdomain of alternate spacetime consisting of eleven non-visible
infinitesimal dimensions used for faster-than-light travel. Making a
transition from one place to another via slipspace is known as a "slip",
 or "jump". A device which allows a spacecraft to perform slipspace
transitions is generally referred to as a Slipspace drive.

Unlike Subspace, Slipspace is almost entirely divorced from Realspace.
Vessels moving through it do not interact with anything in normal space,
 save for entry and exit through portal-like Slipspace ruptures.
Slipspace also has its own topography, either due to its alien nature,
or through the buildup of ancient time-space debt. As such, the relative
 distance between objects in Slipspace, is often different that of those
 in Realspace.

### I-Space

*See I-Space for more information.*

i is short for ‘imaginary’, but what *is* “imaginary”? Well I’ll say it’s an alternate dimension. The i dimension. In the i dimension, all of our ‘numbers’ are ‘imaginary’. We can’t use the square root of -1 and the i dimension can’t use the square of -1.
So, a drive *somehow* decelerates a ship to the speed of i in comparison to the center of our dimension (wherever that is) and it instantly flips you to the i dimension because going at that speed is only possible there.
Once in the i dimension, the speed you are going is squared since the i dimension is the square root of our own. So traveling at 3x10^8 m/s (c) in i dimension is like traveling at 9x10^16 m/s (3x10^8 c) in our dimension.
Once done traveling, accelerate to -1 squared and you will flip back to our dimension! Hope your calculations were correct...

### Shuntspace (Oblivion)

*See Shuntpace for more information.*

Shuntspace is the universe’s dumping ground for paradoxes, both
naturally, and those generated by the sapient species of the galaxy.
Outside time and beneath space, it is a jumbled realm of misplaced
consciousness and matter that has shaped itself into its own place over
the ages.

Shuntspace still has stars, nebula, gravity, light, and other such
typical concepts, but they are all warped and distorted by their
haphazard displacement into this realm. Particularly ancient and
powerful clumps of displaced information have come to view themselves as
 gods, living worlds lording over whatever lower forms of life have sprung up in this realm of broken mirrors.

## **Other Methods of FTL**

### Space Fold

Space Fold does allow for instantaneous FTL, but bending space like that
 is rather power consuming. Also, due to how fast it is, it generates
high amounts of Space-Time Debt, making numerous space folds difficult
to pull off in sort succession.

### Wormhole

While similar to folding space, Wormholes are actually a very safe
method of travel. As they simply form a bridge between sections of
space, they don’t accrue debt at all. While natural wormholes exist,
creating stable worm holes is much more difficult, and a mystery left to
 the ancient species.

## Effects (or the TLDR)

### In Summary

* Big stuff is hard to move around.
* Moving stuff really fast has drawbacks.
* We have some basic rules for narrative technobabble that don’t really get too specific and bog down in minutia.

### What This Means for Balance

* The Dovah can have giant fleets of giant ships as would make sense for them, however, moving said fleets around is difficult, even for them. As such, they don’t tend to deploy large forces, as not only would they be slowed down, but they’d slow down everyone else too. Wormhole tech might be better left to Formians.

* Likewise, this helps explain why the Titans aren’t more of a threat than they are, as their big ships have trouble getting around with their lower tech level compared to the Dovah.

* Time travel, while doable by the Dovah, also has drawbacks.
* Yamashiro can’t just pin-point spacefold bomb every enemy into oblivion.