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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 2266394" data-attributes="member: 694">Here's what I use in my sci-fi games:The most primitive (and slowest) form of FTL travel is a warpdrive. Warpdrive is simply a specialized application of artificial gravity technology, because once you can create your own gravity fields, you can manipulate the curvature of spacetime enough to create a bubble of warped space (or "subspace") around a ship and move the bubble forward like a wave. This drags the ship along with it, but since the ship itself is all but stationary within its own reference frame (it's spacetime that's moving, not the ship), there is no inertia, no time-dilation, and no light-barrier. The only limit on how fast the ship can actually go relative to the rest of the universe is how powerful the engines are. Warp speed is measured in "warp factors" (W), which relate directly to the number of lightspeeds (X) by a factor of W^(10/3) = X. Warp 5, for example, is about 213 times the speed of light, or fast enough to reach Alpha Centauri in a couple of days. Ships with warpdrives in my campaign tend to be fairly advanced, with warp 9 being a slow cruise and warp 14 or 15 being the top speed of a high-end military cruiser (none of this Star Trek: Next Generation "warp 10 is infinite speed" crap).Less common than the warpdrive is the hyperdrive, which is only possessed by the very technologically advanced. A hyperdrive, rather than bending spacetime into a subspace bubble, uses quantum tunneling to essentially teleport all of the ship's particles forward along a tunnel of "hyper-warped subspace", or "hyperspace". A ship traveling at hyper speed is zipping along at warp 85, or nearly 2.7 million times the speed of light, which is fast enough to cross the galaxy in a matter of days. (Meanwhile, communications signals sent through subspace can only travel at warp 40 or so, which means that a ship with a hyperdrive can outpace most transmissions!) Faster hyper speeds are measured in factors refered to as "marks past hyper speed", which follow the same forumla as warp factors, but where hyper speed mark 1 (2.699 million C) is the multiplier. So mark 5 past hyper speed is 5^(10/3)*2,699,803 C, or 0.57 billion times the speed of light, fast enough to make a short trip to the Andromeda galaxy in a matter of days.Finally, the jumpdrive, which is the rarest FTL technology of all, because it creates a stable wormhole between two distant locations, allowing for near-instantaneous travel to any point in the space-time continuum. But wormhole navigation is very dangerous, because you have to account for time as well as space. As if it weren't easy enough to get lost in space, there's always chance you'll take a wrong turn and end up 1 or 10 or 10,000 years lost in time. If you've gone forward, no problems, but backward... that, in the immortal words of Cmdr. John Crichton, "screws the pooch". Alternate timelines, unrealized realities, grandfather paradoxes galore... jumpdrives are the perfect tool for the cruel DM who wants to mess with his PCs! <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" /></blockquote>

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