Faster-than-light Travel
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THIS ENTIRE PAGE IS INCREDIBLY WIP, IT'S MOSTLY RIPPED FROM VARIOUS DISCUSSIONS AND INTERNAL DOCS. NOTHING IS SACRED, TAKE THIS WITH A BOATLOAD OF SALT.
Methods of FTL travel:
Currently, most FTL travel is done using the following tech in order of prevalence:
Hyperlane:
most ships are now equipped with rudimentary drives that have weak ass quantum tunneling capibilities, so they need to go down pre-triangulated “sweet spots” areas in space known as hyperlanes that they can reliably punch quantums through. This is effectively the slowest form of travel, but it requires almost no permanent installations, save for the initial run of triangulation that survey ships and hypergate stations do on the regular.
The Syndicate drives have these capabilities as well, but also have the capability to slingshot off of natural wormholes. It’s like a more rudimentary bluespace drive, a step above a civilian drive.
Hypergate:
You now have a massive wormgate that’s really good at efficiently going pew pew to the fabric of space with quantum particles, multitudes better than the old ones. instead of holding the wormhole open, the hypergate applies bluespace destabilization to the synthetic wormhole, sends a ship through it, and then closes the wormhole behind them, effectively causing the ship to “Surf” the cascading waves of reality that propel them faster (allowing them to go further, faster) down the wormhole path. Expensive to build, cheaper to maintain.
Wormshot(syndicate ftl):
find le epic natural stable wormhole, temporarily destabilize the structure with bluespace particles, gravity assist off the unstable wormhole, you effectively “slingshot” waaay farther than the wormhole extends, on a one way trip through another dimension, until you pop out on the other side, essentially. Typhoon drives primarily utilize this.
Bluespace Based(Solgov only):
Bluespace FTL utilizes bluespace particles on wormholes to destabilize their structure, allowing them to, under the right configuration, be rapidly triangulated since the opening and closing cost at that point becomes almost nothing, allowing you to triangulate a hyperlane FAST. However, If you're not solgov, you have to rely on triangulation methods that are far less efficient, which is why most of the civilian drives only stick to a few pre-calculated hyper-lanes that have been traveled before to keep the triangulation times and power costs down.
Wormgate(antiquated):
you shoot quantum particle, quantum do a little tunneling, whabam, you have a expensive ass synthetic wormhole for back and forth travel and you don’t even really know where it goes since bluespace is multi-dimensional and confusing (at the time). Cheap as hell to build, expensive as all hell to maintain. The wormgates you see are almost always destroyed, save for a few that the lower tech factions still utilize. Aint nobody got dosh for that, especially when there's far cheaper options available
Historical use of various FTL tech:
(pulled entirely out of stephs ass, woe is me if anything here is wrong)
At first, there was nothing. And then god said: "Let there be wormgates!". And it was good.
Everything started with wormgates, basically earth used the moon as an energy provider to upkeep a HUGE amount of wormgates, since wormgates couldn't be pointed in a specific direction, they could lead anywhere within the galaxy(or further), and closing one means probably never being able to find that place again.
Hypergates get discovered, but are not used as much since their initial cost is so high
as a consequence, hyperlane drives are discovered shortly after, but again, not that prevalent.
Then Solgovs scientists discover bluespace ftl
basically opening a wormhole wherever you wanted, pointing it wherever you want, nearly at no cost at all(citation needed). You can probably understand why they guard this tech like rabid dogs.
Syndies get formed, blow up the moon, all wormgates lose power, oh fuck
Some random syndie found out the slingshot method and finds a way to travel to sol QUICK, they use that to fuck shit up.
Moonie is gone, wormgates shut down, like ~50% of all the human species is cut off from the rest, never to be seen again
Since the only thing that could be started back up with any reliability were the hypergates, they quickly became the new standard to prevent shit like that happening again, with hyperlane drives filling in the gaps.
