Faster than Light (FTL) Technology

Throughout the outer rim of the Milky Way galaxy, there are inhabited planets called rim worlds. Some rim worlds have civilizations with advanced spacefaring capability and others do not. But because of the great difficulty of crossing these vast distances superluminally, in terms of resources and applied technology, these civilizations prefer to cooperate with one another. They speak of stories of hostile civilizations that would attempt interstellar war, but would quickly collapse under the extreme financial burden of militaristic upkeep. Other civilizations, having lost trust in that world’s leaders, would withdraw their cooperation. Given the extreme energy requirements of superluminal transportation, these hostile civilizations would turn upon themselves, often ending in bloodshed, high energy yield war or a planetary destruction event. But once trust is lost, it literally takes thousands of years and many civilization/dark age cycles before trust can be earned again.

The advanced spacefaring rim worlds send forth their starships for trade, exploration, and social interaction. Social interaction is a high priority and is part of their culture. As it turns out, immortality has been achieved by some. It is with pride that immortals say they have known somebody for an aeon or more. A few of these immortals become technical giants in the field of spacefaring technology. With help and cooperation from others, they will build huge space stations that are flying saucer factories (or whatever appearance pleases you). It is in these star or black hole orbiting places that the laws of hyper-dimensional physics are pushed to their limits. The motto of one facility is: All the power of the universe stuffed into a very small space that won’t eat you. In their language, it sounds more terse and poetic.

One of the challenges of building UFOs (starships/fly saucers/spaceship) is getting around the default laws of physics that restrict travel to subluminal (slower than light) speeds. To visit your friend on the other side of the galaxy, you don’t want to have to wait in a starship traveling at .9c to cross a hundred thousand light years. Even for immortals, that is impractical. But even if you could change the speed of light, you don’t want to mess around with the delicate balance of physics in your physical body. If you change the speed of light inside of your body, your particles will change and you will very likely disintegrate. Nobody has ever admitted to making that mistake. So the technical strategy is to extend a field safely around your ship, inside of which, the laws of physics are normal; outside of field, the laws of physics are normal, but at the boundary, lots of interesting stuff happens.

The aliens continue to stand over me while I study the physics of Superstrings and M-theory. I’ll explain in more detail later, but this is what I understand so far. Inside of the spacecraft is a superluminal space-time warp generator. It extends an elliptical field around and someone beyond the ship (about 30 meters beyond the ship). The field has two layers closely space to each other (about an inch separation from each other). On either side of this two layer superluminal field, the Laws of physics are normal. But between the two sheets that make up the field, E = mc2 is blocked. The speed of light as a restriction to FTL travel is no longer operational. This causes all energy entering the field to be converted into velocity, causing the two sheets to slide across each other, superluminally. So, the good news is that I can travel across the galaxy much faster than light. The bad news is that I don’t know how to get it to stop!