Faster-than-light space travel is a cornerstone of life in space, linking the settlements dotted around charted space with a reliable, safe, and relatively well-understood method of transportation. There are two main types of FTL drive in use, the tachyon-flux engine (TFE) and bluespace tunnel drive (BSTD). The phenomena utilized by these drives is well-understood by human experts, but is fairly difficult to grasp without the requisite specialized knowledge.
TFEs
Operation
Tachyon-flux engines are almost always the safer, more reliable and efficient alternative to bluespace drives. The TFE operates by searching local tachyon flux for a suitable group of tachyons - that is, tachyons with the right vector and energy level that would get the drive to its location. After a suitable group is found, the drive encapsulates itself in a protective energy field in such a way that it "catches" the tachyons like a sail, propelling the drive to its destination. Travel progessively degrades the field until it disintegrates, and so the field is shaped in such a way that the field "catching" the tachyons disintegrates first - causing the ship to decelerate to subluminal speeds, hopefully at its destination.
Efficiency
Searching through tachyon flux is somewhat energy-intensive, but is often well within nominal load for a generator sized for the vessel the drive is mounted on. However, a large amount of energy needs to be delivered in a very short period of time to create the protective field - this is typically done by supercapacitors or transmission-optimized superconducting magnetic energy storages. Larger vessels require larger amounts of energy to create such a field, but are typically able to mount more power generation systems, and larger power storage banks, as well as redundant systems - making them more practical, safer and economical.
Tachyon drives take an exponentially larger amount of energy to create a field based on distance to be travelled, although much less so than bluespace drives. This means that they are best suited to medium-distance jumps, with frequent stopping points to maximize efficiency. This has lead a creation of a large amount of outposts dotting known space, allowing vessels to dock to take on provisions and transfer crew, cargo and passengers while maximizing drive efficiency. While a direct route from Sol to Hedran's Folly is faster than a route through Semiramis, the amount of energy required practically stops all but the smallest craft to travel in such a way. The Sol-Semiramis-Hedran's Folly route allows much larger ships to travel, increasing the amount of passengers and cargo carried per trip.
Dangers
TFEs are remarkably safe, with the only known incidents occurring due to malfunctions in capacitor systems, which sometimes causes the fields to not be properly initialized. Improper field configuration can lead to the craft stopping mid-travel, being vaporized, or not catching the tachyon cluster at all, with the latter being the most common outcome.
BSTD
Operation
Bluespace tunnel drives operate on a wholly different set of principles. "Blue-space" is a dimension that is much more "compressed" than ours - a small movement in blue-space causes a large movement in realspace, and vice versa. Utilizing this principle, and the fact subluminal engines work perfectly fine in blue-space, faster-than-light travel is possible without utilizing tachyons. The BSTD is much simpler than a TFE, and can be miniaturized fairly easily, allowing for marvels such as handheld personal teleporters.
The BSTD operates by shifting the craft into bluespace. The initial shift consumes a substantial amount of energy, but the smaller the vessel, the less energy the initial displacement takes. Keeping the craft in bluespace also requires a significant amount of energy, but is also dependent based on the size of the vessel - human-sized objects require mere hundreds of watts. Exiting bluespace is done by stopping the maintained power - causing the vessel to naturally be expelled from bluespace in its realspace-equivalent location. When a craft is expelled from bluespace and re-enters realspace, the objects will take up the same place. This is fine if one of the objects is a fluid, but if it is not then the objects will become "spliced" - often with catastrophic results. Navigation in bluespace is done by dead-reckoning, using maps of realspace, and caluculations that relate the movement in bluespace to movement in realspace. This allows for fairly accurate navigation even with a fairly small processor, and may even allow regular humans who are capable of doing the requisite bluespace-realspace distance normalizations to navigate vessels themselves - although, with a fairly large degree of error.
Dangers
Bluespace travel is quite dangerous - the vessel is still vulnerable in bluespace, and breaches in bluespace will often throw out inhabitants away from the vessel - leaving them drifting and bombarded by blinding light, often causing them to be stranded if the vessel does not stop and attempt to retrieve their crew. Even suited persons will have trouble navigating, as they would be unable to utilize traditional quadrangulating systems and require a shielded visor to actually see objects in the surrounding light. However, as navigation in bluespace is fallible, most vessels without advanced dead-reckoning systems will have to continue on their route or risk accidentally displacing into a large body on exit.
Lore
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| Corporations | NanoTrasen, Frontier Megacorporations, Minor Corporations, The Syndicate |
| NanoTrasen Specific | NDV Marksman, Paracausal Monitoring Division |
| Other Organizations | ITV Talon, System Defense Force, The Orion Confederation |
| Worldbuilding | Extradimensional Mechanics, FTL Travel, Galactic Landmarks, Legends, Mysteries, and Rumors, Metaphysics and Paracausality, Technology of the 2500's, The Timeline |
| Contribution Data | Lore Submission Templates, Roadmap for Lore Development |