Author: Dr Jone Brown

To: Department of History 

Subject: Interstellar travel

Travel is the biggest subject in the current day, perhaps even greater than politics or religion. You never stop moving, even if you think you're still. Movement in space is pretty straightforward; position your craft in the right direction and fire up the propulsion system. Doing flybys of planets or other massive bodies to boost your speed in the right direction was historically used before the advent of more sophisticated boosters and is still standard procedure today in many systems. Common speeds of most craft range between 350,000 and 450,000 miles per hour, with military vessels often going up to 800,000 mph and launched missiles and torpedoes averaging at 1,300,000 mph. While this has been shown to be rather quick, this hardly compares to light speed, which is a bit faster than that. Contrary to standard physics models, superluminal speeds have been achieved in the past, but require specialized drives that are very rare and is generally unstable due to the craft often phasing into [[INVALID MEDIA]]. This only accounts for two of the many various other issues for such a mode of transportation.

Fortunately, superluminal speeds are unnecessary due to the development of the hyperdrive, or Jell Drive. They allow for the creation of a temporary crack in the fabric of space-time that leads to hyperspace. Hyperspace is the outermost layer of Jell and is compressed enough for objects to make thousand-year journeys in months. The process of emerging from hyperspace is identical to that of entering, in which a craft will open a crack in hyperspace that leads to standard space. While hyperspace travel is always faster than standard space travel, the actual travel efficiency is wildly inconsistent and may take between days to years to reach the same place from the same starting point in different trips. On top of this, most hyperdrives become unstable after use and require up to a couple weeks to re-stabilize, lest a ship risks a drive breakdown and is marooned wherever the failing hyperdrive spits it out at.

The most reliable hyperspace corridors are referred to as "highways", and act as the interstellar analogs of roads or shipping lanes on terrestrial bodies. These lanes and systems that lie on them are fiercely contested, though combat in hyperspace itself is extremely rare due to energy beams and projectiles below a certain mass threshold naturally phasing into standard space. This is also why space walks or probe deployment in hyperspace is infeasible, making any damage on traveling ships very dangerous.

The use of "wormholes" is also fairly popular outside the Gergosphere, but wormhole gates must be physically constructed at a fixed location and are very energy-demanding. While faster and more reliable than hyperspace, wormholes also retain the same issues as that of hyperspace highways (prone to crowding and generating conflicts). In the Gergosphere, wormholes are primarily found between systems of high population and value, with the most notable ones being the Nosopotamian-Urban route and the Veneteria-Cisplatine route. 

Other known methods of interstellar travel are typically avoided due to impracticality, limited knowledge, or both. "True Interstellar Vehicles" (True ISVs) make the journey between stars by brute force alone, taking tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years to reach a destination. Such vehicles are no longer standard practice and haven't been in millennia, though there are an unknown number of True ISVs that are still currently adrift in space going to destinations that may or may not exist anymore. As mentioned before, superluminal drives mitigate the long times, but are arguably worse than a standard brute force True ISV for all their issues. Thresher raiding fleets bypass both caveats, for instead they seem to take advantage of interstellar gravitational storms to "ride" faster than light through the use of specially designed "sails". This has proven effective for them, but is only limited in or near the Divide where storms are frequent and reliable. 

"Compression jumping" is not a proven method of safe or reliable travel, and has resulted in catastrophic failure nearly every time it has been attempted. The same goes for "glitching", "displacing", and other theoretical/pseudoscientific undocumented methods that have each resulted in lost ships and dead men. Any reports of such methods working are either fabricated, misinterpreted, or occurred under extreme circumstances that are unlikely to be replicated. These will not be elaborated on to deter copycats.