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Janet, how did the bookstores find you?

I'm not. Almost by definition, FTL travel requires some kind of technology. I'm just trying to define something very simple that functions the way required by my story. One requirement is that most of my other ship tech (shields, sensors, thrusters, weapons, etc.) function the same way they do in spacetime. It also has to include elapsed time in the starlanes (e.g., 30 - 60 minutes between nearby stars, without relativistic effects). In addition, I want all spacetime objects (e.g., planets, moons, etc.) to be visible from within the starlanes, only ghostly in appearance. The starlanes, then, are relatively cleared paths that minimize the number of objects that have to be circumnavigated.

I've been identifying/sorting all of the paragraphs I need for the chapter. Who lives? Who dies? I have one last thorny impossibility to work out, after which I can actually write. It's an amazing pain in the asinus when there are so many story threads to pull together. After this, I'll be able to coast until the end, about three chapters further out. Doctor's appointment and grocery shopping are in the way tomorrow, but I should have time to solve the aforementioned impossibility. Basically, I need to get a bomber group past 187 warships to drop a few gigatons of death and destruction. It will be glorious! Kdot will be so proud.

I'm quoting the part of your post that I understood. :-)  If I shorten distances, then scanners ought to work. Ditto for my "sublight" thrusters. I think.

I wonder what technobabble Data would use. And what's a particile?

What is the relevance of propagate vs. travel and travel vs. momentum here?

Flight cocoons!

Yup. Checked out Stargate SG-1 and they were built by the Ancients. I'm not surprised that Mass Effect uses it too. It's a staple of sci-fi dating back to Arthur C. Clarke among others. So much for artificial connections. I'll stick with the natural flows.

Okay, now that flight cocoons have been largely discarded, I could use some help with interstellar travel. I created something called the starlanes in chapter one that serves that purpose. As one might expect, it provides FTL travel by way of a higher dimension. Ships use a stardrive (aka the Hinkley drive) to reach the starlanes and travel through them. They then drop back into spacetime  once they get where they're going.

The starlanes are more like Star Trek than they are Star Wars. You can still see stars, planets, and other ships in the starlanes, but there are visible connections (flows) between stars. The flows connect all stars to each other, but the closest stars have the strongest flows, yielding the fastest travel. Imagine tubes interconnecting all the stars, except they're ethereal.

Ships travel within these flows to hop from one star to another. The overall route is then a series of starhops. The closest stars are one hop apart. Travel time can be as little as thirty minutes. To get from one end of colonized space to the other is 13 hops, which takes about a day. Travel from one end of the galaxy to the other is 10,000 hops and takes a year. Although it is possible to travel directly from any star to any other star, it is generally the case that it is faster to star hop your way to distant stars, along the strongest flows.

Flows are hazy with fuzzy boundaries. You can see what's out in spacetime around you (planets, moon's, asteroids, etc.) but things appear ghost-like until you drop back into spacetime.

My original idea was that these flows are natural and omnipresent, connecting interstellar bodies powered by nuclear fusion, hence all the stars connect to each other. Hadn't considered until just now what happens when a star becomes a black hole, but let's roll with it.

This is a lot to take in in a single dose, so I spread things out across several chapters throughout the book. Based on this description, can you envision the starlanes? Basically, it comes down to fuzzy tubes and starhopping.

One variation of this that I'm considering is making them artificial, constructed by some dead race of sentient beings. In this case, the only connections would be between starhopping points, and the number of them would be vast but finite. Even so, there would be something visible that has to be traversed between connected stars. Imagine all the highways feeding into NYC from surrounding areas, where NYC is the star. Newark, NJ is another star. Although I call it starhopping, they are not jump-gates. Perhaps I need a better term than starhopping, huh?

Thoughts?

Thanks
Dirk

I like this one best so far. What most intrigues me about your story is that there's a character who can live in his books. Plus it covers the threat to the real world, all in two sentences.

Professor R. Hinkley is from Gilligan's Island but with Roy abbreviated. It's intended as an homage. Too similar?

Congratulations, Janet. Keep it up!