FTL travel

Previously considered the threshold for declaring a species of life form to be legally sapient, FTL travel is a catch-all term describing any technology which permits matter to be relocated across the galaxy in less time than would be required for unhindered photons to make the same journey.

FTL Communications technology is its own separate category.

FTL Travel is accomplished by one of three means:

* Apparent Linear Velocity "Warp" Drive
* Corti "Black Box" Drive
* Wormhole Jump

FTL speeds are generally measured in "lights", or multiples of the speed of light. The most common unit is the "kilolight" with most civilian trade ships having an interstellar cruise speed of about fifty kilolights or fifty thousand times the speed of light. At such speeds, the 4.4 light year journey from Sol to Proxima Centauri would take about three quarters of an hour.

For safety reasons, ships making "intrastellar" journeys within the confines of a star system will travel much more slowly, usually at no more than a hundred lights. At such speeds, the trip from Earth to Neptune would take about 2 minutes.

Military vessels tend to be faster than civilian ones, but the fastest ship in known galactic history would be the private yacht *Sanctuary*, which had an estimated top speed in excess of 1 Megalight, or a million times lightspeed. At such speeds, *Sanctuary* was theoretically capable of travelling a third of the way around the galaxy in two weeks. In practice, running its engine that hard would have damaged the ship, and so its usual cruising speed was a mere 500 kilolights, still much faster than the average civilian ship.

## Apparent Linear Velocity "Warp" Drive

The ALV drive is so named because it creates a spacetime distortion with the effect that the distance the ship and its occupants experience travelling is significantly less than the distance they appear to travel from the perspective of an outside observer.

This "warping" of space is what gives the ALV drive its more popular name. It is the most basic form of FTL travel, and is usually the first such technology a species develops. In human terms the ALV drive is a kind of Alcubierre drive, though the highly constrained nature of the distorted spacetime field it creates mean that the ALV drive is both cheaper in terms of energy and less destructive than Alcubierre's model predicted.

Its simplicity means that the ALV drive is cheap and easy to mass-produce, and so this is the most common type of FTL engine installed on ships of all types. It comes with the additional bonus that the warp engine can create artificial gravity fields inside the ship and stabilize the ship's contents and crew against their own inertia. When working properly, the occupants of a ship will not notice that the ship is accelerating at all, nor its orientation relative to the local gravity well.

ALV drives can be disrupted by intense fluctuating distortions in local spacetime, as are generated by a so-called "Gravity Spike." In fact the feedback caused by a Gravity Spike can seriously damage the engine. Gravity Spikes are used by Hunters and pirates to trap civilian shippings, and play a vital role in ship-to-ship combat where they are used to control range and prevent the enemy from maneuvering.

## Corti "Black Box" Drive

Allegedly developed by the Corti Directorate, the Black Box Drive is only sold as a sealed unit which is designed to self-destruct when tampered with.

The Directorate is tight-lipped about how BBDs work and jealously guards its monopoly on their production and sale. So far, no other species has duplicated BBD functionality.

BBDs have two important advantages over ALV drives: They are more energy-efficient, meaning that ships fitted with a BBD are faster at FTL than ships fitted with an ALV, and they are immune to Gravity Spikes.

As discovered by Kirk in Chapter 21: "Dragon Dreams" the Black Box Drive is actually Hierarchy technology, and doubles as an important linchpin in their communications network.

## Wormhole Jump

Otherwise known to human science as an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, Wormholes are unstable physical anomalies wherein two separate volumes of three-dimensional spacetime temporarily have zero distance between them in higher dimensions. By controlling the way in which this anomaly collapses, the two end volumes of the wormhole can be caused to swap places, instantly transporting any matter or energy contained within those volumes to the other end of the wormhole.

This is by far the fastest way to travel, as there is no theoretical upper limit on how far apart the end points of a wormhole can be and the "snap" moment when the wormhole dissipates takes a tiny fraction of a second. Also, because the matter passing through a wormhole does not in fact travel the intervening distance, wormhole travel can circumnavigate any force field or physical barrier.

There are however some limitations, most important of which is that both ends require infrastructure to be used for travel: One end needs to have a generator, and the other a beacon. The beacon is necessary not only for collapsing the wormhole correctly but also for providing precise coordinates in space and time. Without the beacon, a wormhole will collapse almost instantly, and its unanchored end will appear at indeterminate and random coordinates in time and space, which become more and more random as the wormhole's radius grows larger. A single-end wormhole sufficiently large to carry a ship might appear anywhere in the universe at any time in the past or future.

The second limitation is that wormholes have a limited tolerance for how much matter can intersect their event horizon before they dissipate. For this reason it is difficult or impossible to use wormholes in pressurized environments.

For this reason, wormholes have seen only limited use by the Interspecies Dominion. Humans use them extensively however, having developed both "dragon's teeth" combat microsatellite beacons which are used by ships in combat to jump out of the way of incoming hostile fire, and also "Jump Arrays" which use forcefields to sweep the air out of a volume so that a wormhole can form.

The human colony of Folctha on the planet Cimbrean is connected to Earth by a sporadic jump array connection at first, but by 14y AV the planet has several large arrays to enable the bulk transfer of goods and materials between the two planets.