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Four pages!

Page one of Release the Hounds! is written. It goes faster from here. I'm thinking about renaming the chapter "Cry 'Havoc' and Let Slip the Dogs of War!" although that quote was also used in Star Trek VI. Preference?

Where is everyone, tonight? Are you all glued to your TVs watching British voters commit harakiri?

Yabba dabba doo! Figured out a way to slip multiple bomber groups past 187 warships into planetary orbit without an asspull! Even gave it a nice religious element. I'm sure I'll blow the date, but I'm targeting to get the chapter up by the end of June.

Off to bed. Soon will I rest, yes, forever sleep. Earned it I have. Twilight is upon me, soon night must fall.

I'm such a geek.

It could be worse. As far as I can tell, if I want my disability benefits to continue, I have to let the IRS tax me as a resident of the U.S. even though I'm now living in Canada. That means two "resident" tax returns every year until I flatline. It wouldn't be so bad, except you have to declare all of your foreign accounts to each taxing authority every year, with fines that can bankrupt you, even for honest mistakes. So I have to tell Canada about all of my U.S. accounts, and I have to tell the IRS about my Canadian accounts, even though both idiotic organizations get this information electronically from the banks in both countries. Futuo!

That's a great idea. Thank you, Elisheva.

In my book, they're called starlanes and dark energizers.

What a crappy job. Imagine having that role with the 300+ lbs. King Henry VIII. Yikes!

Hmm. It occurs to me that I do need something other than "go like a bat out of hell." Without another dimension, I'm still in spacetime. If you recall, God claims in my book that Einstein made up General Relativity as a lark while soused. Nevertheless, any alternate explanation for what we experience in spacetime is still limited by the upper limit of light speed.

So we're, back to the starlanes. I still need a stardrive to shift to the starlanes, where everything in spacetime appears as ghostly images. Besides that, there are no flows. The stardrive simply allows you to go like a bat out of hell, or distances are shorter. I can either force the traveler to circumnavigate massive objects or allow the ships to pass right through the objects, including stars. I'm leaning toward the former (circumnavigating), otherwise you could fly through black holes, too. If the object has substantial mass, you have to go around it. Will ponder what to do about smaller objects (pass through them or deflect/destroy them).

Okay. Here's a much simpler FTL alternative.

Give ships the ability to simply point and go like a bat out of hell. No need for higher dimensions or flows. If the computer detects a massive object ahead of you (e.g., asteroid, planet, star), it slows and circumnavidates the object before resuming the previous course and speed. The starlanes, then, are nothing more than largely cleared paths through space to avoid as many obstructions as possible. Ship shields deflect smaller objects like meteorites.

Better?

The use of gravity in a higher dimension might be useful, although it adds complexity, since I need both flows and gravity. I also haven't defined whether the flows speed up the ships or shorten distances. I prefer the latter. I might just punt the flows and use shortened distances, although I need elapsed time based on distances travelled, otherwise travel is instantaneous, which would break a lot of my story. Roughly 6-8 hours travel from one end of human-settled space to the other.