Faster-than-light technologies

Faster-than-light 'jump' drives are a critical underpinning of human space, in the same way that automobiles and aircraft were in the 20th and 21st and oceangoing boats were in the 19th. Without the ability to transit between stars, the scattered worlds of humanity would be seperated by years and decades and centuries.

The basic operating principle behind a standard jump drive is simple; upon activation the drive and a volume of space surrounding it undergo a macroscale translocation (the 'jump') to arrive at a distant location. The actual mechanism is vastly more complex of course and relies upon the reality-modifying and information-processing ability of delta dust. Suffice to say that a jump drive cannot (at least with current understanding and engineering) be used to violate causality and act as a time machine.

The actual jump itself is not instantaneous; the effect (and thus the ship inside) propagates at a measurable superluminal velocity. Early-generation units from the late 21st century had pseudovelocities of 100-200 c while modern drives can travel two orders of magnitude faster. However, jump pseudovelocity as a measure of transit speed is deceptive as jump drives operate on a node-to-node model and a ship must travel through normal space between 'jump zones'. A doubling of pseudovelocity does not equate to a halving in transit speed, particularly over long distances.

In addition, the vast quantity of information being shunted and edited by a jump drive results in a huge buildup of waste. This is both literal waste heat and informational 'static' in the drive's delta dust firmware. The former is dissipated via conventional cooling systems (and why most FTL drives are situated in proximity to the primary fusion reactor or plasma drive systems - to share a cooling circuit). The latter can disrupt the proper functioning of a jump drive by increasing the local entropy and is more problematical.

There is a direct relation between propagation pseudovelocity and entropic informational buildup; in essence a drive that flies faster is also generating more static, and as it generates more static its hardware generates more waste heat. First generation drives were slow enough that no significant measures needed to be taken to deal with this entropic buildup as it dissipates passively. However, higher-performance 2nd generation drives required active cycle systems in order to clear for another jump. Resetting a drive's buffers is one of the critical limits on how fast a ship can recycle its drive for an interstellar-range jump.

Almost all ships can 'sprint' over short distances (2-4 jumps) by only doing a partial drive reset between each jump and then having a longer-than-normal recycle period at the end. This helps to create some of the trade patterns in developed space; in short, local travel is substantially faster than long-haul.

For comparison, a bulk carrier with a jump drive rated at 200 c takes approximately 18 days to cross a nominal 10-LY jump. With another 4-5 days spent in-system to travel between jump zones, it would have an effective velocity of 160-165 c.
A military cruiser with a drive rated at 10,000 c would cover that same distance in only 9 hours but would still spend 3-4 days recycling its jump drive. As a consequence its effective velocity is approximately 830-1100 c.
Higher propagation speeds as a control on the functional transit sped of a ship are thus are swiftly eclipsed by the time taken to reset the drive.

This had major implications during the Breakdown when most ships were using 2nd generation drives; capable of 3-5 times the effective velocity of first-generation drives they had pushed the earlier models to the edges of profitability. However when the RFM-1 virus compromised stress management controllers across known space almost all FTL ships were grounded; a significant number of ships pushed too hard with a failing stress controller in a mad dash to reach an inhabited system and arrived with their jump drives burnt out from localized thermal spikes and informational burn in superficially undamaged hardware and even those that didn't were stuck with jump drives only one or two jumps from suffering the same fate.

However the remaining 1st generation bulk carriers, colonial sleepers and cargo crawlers were unaffected by this. With rugged drives that generated placid drive flux they could continue to transit between stars at their plodding pace. There were only so many left in the core though, in numbers sorely inadequate to support interstellar commerce. Efforts were made to bring more into service but these crash efforts were hampered by both economic crash and the archaic nature of the techology involved. By the time any substantial number of such ships were built other breakthroughs had ushered in the first 3rd generation drives.

Catapults