Space Travel

FTL Travel

Wild-haired scientists from across the galaxy still haven't managed to make a living being travel faster than the speed of light as of the 25th century, and if you want to find one of them at your local spaceport bar, just loudly proclaim that underspace is faster-than-light travel. That misnomer is still in common use among the general public, and at this point, just as prevalent as the technology itself. In reality, although different species and empires have discovered different means to achieve it, the end result is still the same for everyone: a way to drop out of normal space and all of its relativistic headaches and travel great distances through its underlying fabric.

How Does It Work?

Entering a Jump

The first rule of FTL travel is astrogation. Space is vast, and over the great distances one can travel, a single degree of error can leave you tens of light years off course, maybe without enough reaction fuel to try again. Worse still, gravity wells will yank your ship back into normal space without warning. A ship preparing a precision transit will come to a stop while its navigation computer runs calculations, checking against itself to find the safest, fastest route between two points. Depending on the grade of navigation computer installed in a ship, this can take anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes. Shorter, less-precise panic leaps take less calculation, but at the expense of making you easier to follow and unable to safely keep the transit up for long without rapidly increasing risk of running into something. While the calculations are being done, you power up your drive system, hope that you're a real chomper, and push the button. And then it gets weird.

Everybody enters a little differently. The Alganna Eternity figured theirs out first, and [Fjan put stuff here pls]. The Directorate found out that if you line your ship's hull with cellenium and dump your drive capacitors into it, you can collapse reality in front of you and pull yourself in, assuming you have enough liquid hydrogen in reserve to keep a protective, albeit boiling hot bubble around your ship during transit. Some say the United Families are so in tune with underspace that they simply alter their ship's hull harmonics and effortlessly fall out of normal space. The common denominator is it takes a lot of power to enter and a lot of fuel to maintain, limiting the distance that smaller craft can travel.

Transiting through Underspace

Assuming you didn't blow up, congratulations. You're now in Underspace, or one of fifty other names for a strange swirling grey sea where the gravity wells of normal space bodies swell in like great icebergs and the shadows of stars cast rays of exotic particles. While here, nothing from normal space can interact with you, and you can't interact with it. Time still runs 1:1 with reality, and the amount time you spend here depends on how far you're going and the grade and condition of your drive. Larger vessels like warships and bulk freighters tend to have more efficient drives and greater fuel stores, allowing them to travel further or faster than most light freighters, and of the few fighter-class ships that are FTL capable at all, their range tends to be extremely limited. Fast couriers and specially modified ships such as smuggling freighters and blockade runners are often modified with FTL drives greater than what they'd normally equip. The presence of exotic particles and your own shielding interferes with sensors and targeting equipment, making it impossible to fight another ship while in a jump.

Space Madness

Historical reports from many species concur with the Directorate's early findings that prolonged unshielded exposure to underspace, as well as prolonged gazing into its swirling grey maelstrom will inflict negative psychological effects upon a ship's crew. Accordingly, it is standard practice to close all viewports during a transit. Symptoms vary from mild to severe depending on length of exposure, with severe cases entering a state of paranoid, hallucinatory psychosis that has been coined space madness. Due to the exotic nature of underspace and its effects on modern sensor equipment, scientists have been yet to determine why this takes place. A Directorate brochure about space madness warns to seek help if you have any of the following symptoms following FTL transit:

• Urge to exit the ship into underspace.

• Hear the Voice in the Engine.

• Nonspecific auditory or visual hallucinations.

• Belief that the real Captain of your ship is outside the hull.

• A sudden craving for bitter foods.

• Begin speaking to the Tall Men.

• Begin sleepwalking.

• Feeling that you should not have a tail.

• Taste citrus.

Exiting a Jump

A ship's astrogation computer will automatically collapse the field used to carry it through underspace upon reaching its destination, but a crewmember may manually pull the ship back into normal space at any time during the jump. As collapsing the field under normal conditions will always bring a ship back to normal space, it is thought that it is impossible to become stuck in underspace, and the ships that have not arrived at their destinations assumedly suffered from navigational errors and emerged somewhere unrecoverable.

Highways in Space

Fuel isn't free, chomper, and most pilots like you want to get from one point to another as quickly as possible. That's why most navigation computers are pre-loaded with the most efficient routes between major trade hubs and capital worlds. Most traffic through underspace is unsurprisingly organized along these routes, with jump calculations taking significantly less time to prepare due to the sheer amount of data available. Free-jumping from point to point is often the domain of warships and is much less common for the average spacer trying to make a living running cargo. For ships without FTL drives such as small fightercraft, and for small freighters trying to capitalize on the time savings of a larger ship's more efficient drive system, jumpship services are commonly offered between major ports, with smaller vessels able to fly in the bay of or dock against large ferries. That's not free either, and FTL trade requires a constant weighing of options.

Lighthuggers

From the Directorate settlement of Cellen to the human colonization of Proxima Centauri, the lighthugger has been an intermediary staple of many spacefaring civilizations in their early years. Simply put, a lighthugger is a slower-than-light ship designed to accelerate as close to light speed as its fuel and design will allow, often reaching speeds from 0.5c to 0.9c. Due to the effects of time dilation and the relative size of space, the lighthugger is limited in its usefulness as a regular transport, often used instead as a colony ship in the pre-FTL years of a species' development.

Sublight Travel

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