Faster-Than-Light Travel

## Overview

**Faster-Than-Light Travel**, in simplest terms, is the ability to travel faster than the speed of light. Our Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across. This means that if you were going 1.00 SoL (299,792,458 m/s), it would take you a hundred thousand years to get from one end of the galaxy to the other. Nobody has time for that, especially not in a galactic community environment.

The universe of Gauntlet incorporates FTL travel both as a necessity and as a means to add weight to your decisions. Since travel is *not* instantaneous and since communications can often be delayed for those less financially fortunate, the decisions you make can have severe consequences. What happens if you send your fleet through the trade lane just as raiders warp into your star system? You need to weigh the pros and cons of your decisions while interacting in Gauntlet's universe.

Furthermore, we also like to have our FTL "make sense", not in the "definitely plausible today" way but in the "some thought was put into this" way. The human-centric approach to this roleplay likely means that most of us will be using the Yutani Drive or an engine based on the same concept for FTL travel. Alien species or other industrious human civilizations, however, may develop their own forms of achieving FTL. This article will be updated as new methods are concocted, serving as quick overviews while linking to their main entry in our lore.

## Methods of FTL

### Dimensional Tearing

Humanity of ages past debated fervently on how best to conquer the oppression of physics. How could humanity pierce through the veil if they could not travel and communicate in a meaningfully quick way? The answer was stumbled upon by accident during a growing environmental crisis on Earth. With the planet becoming quickly uninhabitable to human life at its current population, alternative approaches were needed that didn't amount to en-masse execution or starvation.

A project tackled by NASA and several aerospace companies around the world, the concept of dimensional tearing was introduced and subsequently theorized over. It was said that there existed an identical dimension to ours, the same in every way and completely in sync, only dramatically reduced in size. Some philosophers claimed this was the true "fourth dimension", although scientists have been hesitant to throw their weight behind such a hypothesis. They have instead taken to calling it the **Demeter Expanse**, named after an ancient Greek Goddess that smiled upon the Earth's fertility. The science behind dimensional tearing is still a new one even after several hundred years of study and use. In ways, it is a technological plateau that mankind has been unable to overcome.

Once this dimension was observed, the question then became how to access it. Reaching FTL speeds would be irrelevant if the distance that needed to be traveled was reduced by a significant margin. Trips that would take thousands of years would instead take hours if the dimensional models were correct. The answer was found in a rare crystalline solid deep underneath the Earth's soil, known today as selerium. When bombarded by a slew of different lasers and an unstable fusion process, selerium produces an unfathomable amount of energy that, if expelled properly, tears a hole in our dimension and allows passage into the smaller dimension.

### Yutani Drive

The Yutani Drive is the currently used engine across the Human Sphere for achieving FTL. The engine itself does not speed the ship up to FTL speeds. Instead, it uses dimensional tearing. This drastically reduces the distance from one point to another but also comes with some risk. Obstacles in your path are riskier than ever, with navigational errors often resulting in debris fields of ships that were eviscerated over light years of space. As a ballpark measurement, use of the Yutani Drive with current (7175 HE) human engine technology lets a ship travel from one end of the galaxy to the other in three months assuming no stops.

## Common Use

Since FTL travel is a core component of the Gauntlet universe, its Common Use policy is set to **YES**. The types of travel listed on this article are free to be used for your content (within reason), and you're also welcome to incorporate new types of travel after admin approval.

## Credits

FTL artwork designer is unknown. However, the source was acquired from an article hosted on RealAliens (and various wallpaper directories). You can find the acquisition source here.