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 the 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.

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. (1) There was a month of crunching a lot of different variations of this method...

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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 exit, 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...

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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)

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 unsurprised if some human powers considered this a cheap price 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)

Otherwise, all vibrational probabilities eventually breached the Veil and fed you right into the Warp, which would accommodate ALL your phasing hungrily...

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Using black holes as spatial gates... okay, this was technically possible, a combination of hyperjump and warp drive along the wormhole, basically sliding around the Warp on a hypercompressed tube of reality to the far side. But it was TL 17 shit to set up, and you had no control whatsoever over ingress and egress points. Sure, once it was set up and distributed, it would be fine, as long as you could maintain the tech level, and would turn black holes into massive on and off ramps, i.e. hyperlanes. (8) But nobody said the hyperlane was going to exit in the same galaxy, and how were you going to get back?

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There was a variant on this that looked for spatial tears and imperfections in reality to do the same thing, using gravity and heliofield interactions among cosmic strings between stars. The Warp REALLY wanted you to try those things, meaning they were actually little more than Helldiving portals... that would stay open rather too long if they were used... (9)

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Inertialess drives, removing inertia and so making FTL possible... (10)

Okay, the key here was developing an anti-neutrino and gray matter field that would actually enable you to avoid the impacts of matter and dark matter, or you’d just be pushed away from every star by ceaseless neutrino pressure. Furthermore, you had to have force fields that could shift aside normal matter, as at FTL even vacuum was almost infinitely dense. Trying to do this within a star system would be very limited in speed, or in any areas with lots of gas in the void, like a nebula... but the emptier the area, the faster you could go, as long as you developed an inertialess drive...

The Tekrons were confirmed to have inertialess drives, using a combination of gravity and polarized neutrino filters for propulsion for both tactical and strategic movement, letting them blink around in tactical ship combat, and run between systems at multiple parsecs per hour speed.

This would be the preferred method of travel, getting a Bergenholm to work and ‘going free’. However, the base tech was again at 17, so I would have to get there before I could understand how to do what was possible. Hrm...

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Tachyon Drive, using FTL particle saturation to change the extant physical laws to keep effective time stable, multiplying speed as you drew closer and closer to the speed of light-

The heck, that was possible? (11)

I checked the tachyon characteristics and the spatial harmonics again, in more detail.

Well, shit. It wouldn’t work in a major gravity well, but as long as you had some way of getting a significant fraction of the speed of light, it would do just fine in the short run... and if you could get a high enough percentage of the speed of light, it could rival inertialess, and might even be a precursor tech! Of course, that meant getting your sub-light speed to five sigmas of c...

Someone throw a Bergenholm we can replicate at me, please...

Okay, but it meant we needed a really good sub-light drive system, beyond mere propulsion or default gravity-jam engines. Most inertial compensators couldn’t deal with anything beyond .3 or .35c, especially in low vac where particle friction rapidly added up. The elvar could hit .4 with their solar sails, navigating the magnetics, particle storms, and gravity waves of a solar system like an ocean, but nobody else had that level of tech, and most just relied on brutally powerful engines for propulsion and gravitics for maneuverability. Engines combined with inertial compensators did make for better acceleration than gravitics alone, after all...

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Wait, what were those gluon numbers? And the weak force? Did those synch up with inertial harmonics? Gravity shearing? Paramagnetic bubble surfing? Strand theory? Psionic focus and redirection?

Holy shit, they did...

Atomic vibrational redirection, a neglected subset of the phase drive! Instead of vibrating atoms to be out of phase with normal matter, change them so they are vibrating in the same direction. So instead of requiring an exterior force to move in one direction, they are naturally vibrating that way under their own power. It was a directed field effect, instead of a kinetic transfer. (12)

Depending on how much atomic motion you could strip and redirect, you could acheive a considerable fraction of the speed of light. The better your inertial compensators, the higher your drive numbers could be. If and when you reached inertialess, you’d have a propulsion system right there and ready. As a bonus, since you were transforming vibrations into velocity, your matter got immensely strong, as the stress against atomic bonds was turned into unidirectional motion, meaning your matter got very, very tough.

And as far as I could tell, nobody was using this. The dead end of phasing technology meant this simply wasn’t a viable avenue to pursue. The energy demands of phasing tech + normal drives meant a sublight version simply wasn’t viable, and the increased vulnerability of a phasing vessel meant it couldn’t be used in any kind of a combat situation. Using the phase field as its own kind of drive was not something that had occurred to anyone.

I had my tech tree! I just needed to get to Eleven, and the Harmonic Drive and Tachyon Bubble Drive would be things...

I gave my researching thoughtstreams a rest after months of rigid analysis, commissioning more data of very weird sorts from multiple locations, processing metrics, matching up variables, and hoping for an easier solution than the ones I got. Oh, well...

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1 -There is actually both a Star Trek movie and SNG episode about the effects of Warp Drives on subspace, and it can indeed be torn open. 2- Translating into higher dimensions is also how ship travel in the Honor Harrington universe works. Translating into a LOWER dimension is how it works in Farscape! (https://farscape.fandom.com/wiki/Starburst  - thanks to WDC543!) 3- This is basically ranged teleporting. The Power Sources are from various sources, including Stargate, the Marvel Universe, Schlock Mercenary, and Lensman. 4- Used by the Tyrannid Hive Fleets and to a degree the Tau of Warhammer 40k. 5- Invented by Mick Fernette, a friend of mine. This is a Mythos-based FTL drive. 6- The Anti-Life are variants of the Pa’anuri of Schlock Mercenary. 7- This is basically all variant of sideways dimensional shifting using probability, as vibrating atoms out of phase basically means going sideways into parallel dimensions, another trope of travel. Shades of Hitchhiker’s Guide and Doctor Who, among others. 8- Another Honorverse tech, and Babylon 5, and any place that uses warp gates, spatial rifts, or hyperspace portals or any other such things to traverse long distances from fixed on/off ramps. 9- Planetfall’s tech. 10- Straight out of the Lensman books, the first true Space Opera series. Bergenholms had to be ‘invented’ by the Arisians, a race of virtual gods, justifying their TL 17. 11- My own invention! 12- This is how Northstar and Aurora of the Marvel Universe gain their superspeed.