FTL

Warp

by TheiaTheGondia

Warp travel is the most basic form of FTL and the one species usually comes up with first. It involves making a bubble of space around the ship and moving that bubble faster than light by manipulating mass, warp has an unusual effect when observing the universe outside the bubble as the universe you observe outside the bubble will move backwards in time until you reach your destination, however when the warp bubble is resynched with the rest of the universe time will quickly move forward to the present day. This happens due to relativity because time moves as fast as light does and the universe light years away is still in the past from your perspective so you are taking a pocket of the present day backwards in time as you move faster than light but when the bubble re-joins the rest of the universe it goes back to the present and takes the ship with it. All FTL travel is time travel and basic Warp prevents you from actually interacting with the past due to the fact that you are carrying a piece of the present with you but more advanced forms of FTL can be used to actually travel into the Past and require safety measures and alien species that move past warp have to deal with this.

The speed of warp travel is proportional to the amount of energy one can dedicate to it, most species can achieve a few light years per day but in theory with a large enough power supply and an efficiant enough warp drive any speed is achievable.

Transwarp

created by: TheiaTheGondia

(also known as hyperspace, subspace, etc)

During the reign of the ancient Vaalbarans a subspace tunnel network was created spanning all the Galaxies in the Local Group and M81 group. This system of tunnels through subspace are called the transwarp network and allow for fast travel to any point in the network, any location in all the galaxies the network spans, However it requires a transwarp drive to enter the network and to build a transwarp drive you have to know the network exists and how it works and not many species do. There are 2 kinds of transwarp drive:

1. the transwarp (ship based) drive that allows vessels to travel through the transwarp network, these can be found on ancient Vaalbaran ships and a few species have been able to reverse engineer their own. The speed in which a ship can travel through transwarp depends on how advanced the drive is; some species have transwarp drives that are only a bit faster than regular warp but the later Vaalbaran drives were almost instantaneous travel.

2. the handheld transwarp transporter device that can create a portal between 2 places within the network that an individual can walk through. note this device was invented by the Ancient Vaalbarans at the end of their civilization and these relics are extremely rare.

The transwarp network doesn't only exist in M81 but it exists everywhere in the universe, this is because the probes sent out to create the network travel backwards in time as they are FTL craft this means that the network has always existed even predating the Vaalbarans who created it, however the transwarp network itself cannot be used for time travel as the Vaalbarans put safeguards in it to prevent it from being used this way.

Sometimes wormholes through the network spontaneously appear connecting different areas within the network and these can be traversed by objects with no transwarp drive but these are presumably a glitch of the network rather than an intended feature.

Portals

created by: TheiaTheGondia

portals are ring shaped devices capable of transporting matter and energy through a wormhole to another connecting portal. First a coordinate calculation is used to connect one portal to another and if the coordinate points to a space which is within one light year of a portal it will connect to that portal like a lightning bolt finding the point of least resistance then the wormhole will open. The range of a possible connection depends on how much energy is available to create a wormhole and its exponential the further away it is that's why most species are only able to make a connection of about 60 light years, but it is possible to go portal hoping and create several wormhole connections between portals to get further instead of going in a single jump. However the theoretical limit is 12.8 billion light years because that's when the energy requirement would become infinite according to our current math.

portals can also be put in space to allow ships to travel through as FTL shortcuts.

portals on planets offer a good alternative to starship FTL travel and are often used by people who can't afford thier own ship

portal history

Portals were a technology originally created by the Vendalah as a means of transporting from their ships to nearby star-systems to collect their parahuman pray, but the technology has been appropriated by many other species and now the knowledge of how to create these devices is publicly available to most advanced species, and each species' version of the portal is cross compatible with each other so a portal created by the gondia is able to connect to one created by the Vendalah as long as its within range, the reason for this is because portals are essentially just conductors for wormholes and the real power is in the computer that does the space and distance calculation.

Nuna FTL

created by: TheiaTheGondia

unlike the FTL of other species the Nuna FTL systems involve creating a bubble of altered physics around a spacecraft in which light travels much faster, this increases the max speed of the universe inside and allows the Nuna ship to travel up to 10 light years per day (while other species have only gotten up to 3 light years per day through normal warp), when inside this bubble time also goes faster due to a reverse time dilation effect (created by increasing the speed of light) for this reason the nuna ship needs to accelerate to near the new the new speed of light to create a time dilation effect to counteract the reverse time dilation and bring the ships time back into sync with time outside of the bubble