337 Far Future, Ch. 47– Time to do Some Research (1/2)
Now, it was time to take data and make some impossible deductions from it.
I didn't get my Ranks of knowledge by studying Imperial Axiomatic Modular Technology. No, I downloaded them right out of the Akasha, that psychic network that connects all of the human unconscious, where all that has happened is recorded, and if you can muck with time, all that humanity WILL experience is recorded, too.
This meant I could dip into knowledge way outside that of the Mekkers and the Empire, including a lot that was lost, forgotten, or suppressed, and I could bring all of that shit together for effect.
The key thing was knowing so many possible ways to do FTL. However, the level of sensory data required to deduce and construct some of these things was TL 15 and higher... or only gainable by a Caster or Psi of that level, who could directly perceive the variations and changes in reality to that level and so give me the information that I wanted to know.
Happily, I had enough connections with academia and the Umbrans that getting hold of the proper theoretical data actually wasn't all that hard. After all, the Mekkers used the Scientific Method ad nauseum, trying to rebuild the technology they were slowly losing a grip on, and so they had done massive amounts of work on gravity, particle physics, mass, space-time, and how all sorts of energies and powers interacted with them.
They wouldn't supply me with the technology to actually do all of that stuff, however, but that was fine. What I wanted at this point was the data, the metrics and measurements.
There are a ton of different FTL systems. The thing was, some were possible, and some were not, dependent on the particle and dimensional physics of wherever you were at. If you knew the possibilities and the key datapoints to look for, it actually wasn't all that hard to find out what was possible, and then I would just have to finetune whatever I made to the specific set of data for the Warp Realm. Eezy-peezy, right?
Well, no. Most FTL stuff was TL 11+ and higher to actually invent. Theory you could do at Ten. But at least I'd know which way to direct my attention.
So, I got endless amounts of data on physics, paraphysics, non-physics, anti-physics, neophysics, phypsics, metaphysics, and manaphysics. Living in realms where magic, psionics, and spiritual powers can manifest gets very complex and messy. Some of the information I was looking for the local intellectuals had, but literally didn't know what it actually was or could be used for. That was fine by me. It had kept them from exploring tech trees that could have really alleviated a lot of the problems they were facing... or blown the galaxy apart, take your pick.
The Empire used an FTL system called Helldiving. Literally, they were ripping open the Veil and diving towards and along the edge of the Warp, using dimensional relationships through a fifth space to decrease the distance between two points. What they called a Throne Field, and I called a big Protection from Chaos effect, enabled by the temple-esque construction of and Law Runes scribed all over their damn ships, kept them mostly safe from demons in the Warp, who all had Chaos as a trait and so could not touch them.
The problem was that the Warp was a place of great Evil, and not ALL the things there were Chaotic. In addition, space wasn't the only thing in flux in the Warp; time could be going forwards and back, too, especially if a Warp God had an interest in something. Ships were lost in the Warp all the time, from Throne Field failures or simple temporal storms depositing them into the past or the future, or storms of psychic energy sweeping them who knew where...
Hell-diving. Who invents a bloody system to go diving into madness and insanity and thinks it's actually a viable FTL method? And even puts great glowing golden ”Eat Me” Terrestrial and Celestial Beacons out there to show the creatures of the Warp exactly where all the fat food and tender souls are located?
Ugh. Just, ugh. Oh, look, the Morpheus system actually had a historical record of someone trying to use etheric translation into the realm of dreams to do this. They drove themselves right into id-demon catastrophe, and the entire system had nightmares of them being tortured insanely for the next decade, which drove the entire population mad and ended in having to Omega Sanction the whole system... (13)
So, research materials. Math, data, information gleaned from advanced systems I'd never be allowed to touch, but the raw information was fine. I began to figure out the underlying physics of this reality, and so I could affect change as soon as I hit Eleven.
So it began...
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Star Trek Warp Drive was basically spatial bending in all its various forms and configurations. Unusable, the Veil was too unstable. Using this method would rip the Veil open and spill out the Warp into Reality just like gutting someone. It would be an unmitigated disaster. Someone had probably tried it out and been sucked into the Rift, and then all research down that path was frozen. There were a month of crunching a lot of different variations of this method...
(1)
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Transwarp Conduits, compress that tearing down to a localized tube for even greater effect. Sure. Instead of slicing space open, let's just burn a solid line of it, and when the conduit collapses, you are trailing a hungry and ever-widening swathe of a planar breach behind you, that's going to eat you and the star system you are going to when you get there...
So, no, compounding and amplifying a mistake does not make it better.
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Star Wars Hyperdrive, trying to access a higher space... no, that didn't work, because hyperspace and subspace both led into the Warp, which had basically shifted meta-dimensional configurations in their pet Realm to be the end of most of them. Higher and lower dimensions both led into the Warp, so this was basically just an excuse for the Warp to come in and wave greetings to the unprepared. Those who had tried this had jumped into hyperspace and never come out. (2)
More months lost as all those avenues ended up in the Warp...
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Traveler-style jump drives, basically teleportation variants. This was technically possible, but not without psionic energies. Doing it at an interplanetary level was TL 13, between neighboring systems TL 15, and open-ended galaxy-crossing TL 17. The amount of energy required meant Point Singularity power sources, increasing to White Hole, Zero Point, or Dark Matter Quantum Waves, and yeah, the recharge rate was a thing. But without a psion with that level of skill to plug in, you basically tore the Veil apart at entry and exist, and the hole would get bigger the larger the ship was... and stick around rather too long... (3)
Again, someone had likely tried it, and the Warp had reached out, ate them, and probably a nearby planet. If they tried it at 17, it probably ate a whole system. Teleporting that much mass was not going to be something easy to do. Teleporting between planets and stars was going to be limited to excessively powerful people, on the level of Archmages and Archpsions.
It would have been quite sweet if this could work, but no. Every variant that dealt with that much mass resulted in enough spatial rips to make it totally unfeasible without a divine hand cleaning up after you...
There was a weird version of this that involved extremely advanced illusions, i.e. making illusions reality, so simply fooling Reality into putting you where you wanted to go. The mechanics were all there for this to work... if you were a TL 14+ Magic Caster, and here in Warp Realm, that meant the Warp Gods had your soul. Just an alternate style of Teleporting, Gating, or Portaling for those that liked to mess with reality. If you were dumb and tried this without their approval, you'd probably find your illusion changing in ways you really, REALLY didn't want... and then your reality was going to be the absolute worst... (13)
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Starfalling, riding gravity waves towards a distant target, basically hypergravity distorting space-time, ever-accelerating as you went, yet being shunted back to normal space and inertia as soon as the effect was dropped. This would work outside a galaxy, as the lump masses of gravity could be congealed, but would be slowed and diverted by multiple gravity wells inside a larger system. It was viable for extragalactic travel, but would slow down tremendously the denser the stars were. This was used by the xenosym bio-fleets, from what I gathered... (4)
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Necrojumping... the fuck. That actually worked? (5)
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I looked over the signatures of FTL records of the past few millennia for various races, and the Mi-Go ships and the Greys both used this drive, along with the cerevores and the cephalids. The negative energy they left behind was a telltale marker.
It required the sacrifice of a living soul, basically using the momentary opening to the afterlife to bridge the Warp in and out, hiding the breach within the aura of death, sealing the opening smoothly in and out behind the jumper. It was basically a version of hyperjumping, with the same kind of energy requirements... but also requiring the sacrifices of living beings; the bigger the ship, the more sentients had to die. So, mass slaving or cloning, and then incinerating them both physically and spiritually... perfect Mythos travel method...
I flagged the probable energy signatures for this, as I would be very, very surprised if some human powers considered this a cheap cost for doing this kind of thing.
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Flow drive, riding dark matter conduits. Ahhhh... unfortunately there were dark matter entities who didn't enjoy bullets speeding through their living areas. They were called the Anti-Life, since they were made of non-baryonic matter, and given the absolute interdiction on playing around with Dark Matter as a power source, it seemed there were some real consequences to messing with them... (6)
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Phase drive: go out of phase with matter, and ignore all spatial restrictions on mass once you do... okay, if you tried this at FTL speeds, the bonds between and within atoms couldn't keep up and you basically disintegrated, your phase field went down, and all that FTL kinetic energy released itself nicely in normal space in a happy storm of freed gluons, probably shredding everything within a considerable distance. (7)