Continuum Beam

Descrption

The Dimensional Drive, invented by scientists thousands of years ago and recently completed by the The Interdimensional Flight And Research Administration at the turn of the 95th century (13.801552110x10⁹ standard time), is the pinnacle of drive technology. It allows a somewhat controlled jump into Plane Four, known as the Continuum, where a ship can traverse the void until it reaches another universe. The drive works by materializing a wormhole at its own location, then collapsing the wormhole with the ship still inside. To pick a destination, a ship must activate the drive and back up into the universe again if the orientation in 4D space isn't ideal. Once the destination lands in the chosen universe, the ship can simply go towards the new universe like it's trying to reach a static location in 3D space. Once the new universe has been reached, multidimensional forces will attract the ship towards the universal membrane of the target universe and the ship will simply land in the new Universe. Thanks to the physics of the Continuum, FTL travel beyond current drives and time travel forwards and backwards has been made possible, however due to the uncontrollability of the drive, this has not yet been fully realised.

2D Analogy

To help you understand how Continuum travel works, we will truncate everything down a dimension, so that the Continuum will be 3D space and membranes are 2D sheets with 2D people.

Imagine a 2D ship - for the purpose of simplicity, a little cutout square with 2D thrusters and 2D people. The 2D people can only see their little slice of a world with their 2D eyes, however you are able to see their entire world, looking down upon their little sheet of reality. Since you are a dimension higher than them, you are able to see every side of a 2D shape from above, while the flat beings can only see what their side-on perspective allows. This means that 3D objects can penetrate this sheet and end up inside the 2D ship without a clear entrance. The 2D beings, however, will only be able to see a 2D cross-section of this 3D shape. This should give you an idea of the difficulty of navigating the Continuum, as we can only see a 3D cross-section of the 4D space.

When the Dimensional Drive engages, it creates a wormhole on the sheet, which is pretty easy to imagine as a tunnel going under the sheet and reconnecting to another part, like in many illustrations. When the wormhole materializes on top of the ship, the ship falls into the tunnel and can park inside it. The fun starts when the Dimensional Drive closes the wormhole; the tunnel collapses and the spacetime under the ship disappears, effectively throwing it out of the sheet. The ship starts floating adrift in the air, no longer bound to any sheet, with the air being the 3D equivalent of the 4D Continuum. In the air, the crew may feel uncomfortable as air hits them from sides never felt before in their 2D existence and as they tumble in directions transcending the 2 directions they can rotate in. As the air stabilizes them, they can move forward and backward in a 2D plane perpendicular to the sheets they are navigating between. This gives them a limited moveset, but allows them to travel to universes previously inaccessible due to their restrictive 2 dimensions.

In Continuum Travel, the 2D beings can also ride the Continuum Jetstream - which, in this case, is just a bit of wind blowing in a direction rather than massive dents (similar to gravitational waves creating dents in spacetime) pulling stuff very quickly in the direction they’re facing. This grants them travel faster than anything their 2D drives have managed to get to so far.

After travelling for a while in an unknown direction, the 2D beings reverse out of the Continuum Jetstream and approach the sheet they call their Universe. Like Membranes, these sheets attract the 2D ship and its crew to itself, making rematerialization very easy. Imagine a magnetic sticker quickly approaching a metal pole. Just like a sticker, due to the nature of 3D rotation, the ship may end up backwards, mirroring it to its original rotation, something impossible without 3D rotation. If anything happens to be where the 2D beings are rematerializing, the beings will either absorb, merge with, or push the stuff below them out of the way with explosive force, depending on the sizes of what’s underneath them. Once rematerialized, the 2D beings can explore space like they usually do - with their basic 2 axis of rotation and movement, compatible with their quite literal flat brains. 

It should be quite easy to truncate this stuff in your head now, for example: 2D sheets, when they collide, create new sheets. Just like with membranes.

Physics

Universal Membranes are giant sheets of spacetime laying on the continuum of Plane Four (known as The Continuum). Membranes attract stuff (Matter, anti-matter, tachyons, neutrinos, anything in the relativistic quantum model), but membranes repel other membranes, keeping them at a distance. Sometimes if things go just right, two rapidly approaching membranes may collide, birthing a new Universe.

Winds blow through the Continuum like membranes have dents that create gravity. This can blow stuff and membranes around, creating currents between membranes that stuff can ride in, like how fast objects (such as colliding black holes) ripple the membrane of our Universe. While membranes have a variety of properties, they also move against each other and amplify Continuum winds, allowing ships to ride the current for travel FTL relative to the universe of origin. This method of FTL has no max speed whatsoever, but the wind of the continuum of Plane Four has to be blowing just right for a membrane to pass over our Universe at a respectable speed. Like air blowing through a hollow square cutout, the Continuum winds will blow through hollow 3D structures and ships, causing discomfort to any passing through the Continuum. This discomfort could be compared to being in proximity of a gravitational wave, or being shaken rapidly.

New membranes come into existence in the rare event when 2 or more membranes manage to collide, creating a new membrane that expands rapidly, inflating like our Universe did when it was young. Some membranes die when they collapse and reinflate into a new Universe, others lasting forever and expanding less over time, forces in the membrane preventing it from stretching or collapsing. When a membrane expands rapidly and eventually tears itself apart like a sheet of fabric, it may burst into many membranes, starting many new universes. A membrane's age is measurable by how much entropy has affected the entire membrane, with dark and dull Universes being the oldest.

Some membranes may be more delicate than others, resulting in shorter lifetimes and stronger gravity when distorted by stuff, while stronger membranes have weaker gravity, longer lifetimes and wormholes more resilient to collapse. Gravity makes measuring the elasticity of a membrane very easy.

Membranes may have time and space switched much like in the interior of black holes, allowing for time to be navigated exactly like a spatial dimension while objects are swept away in space. This can be utilized for travel into the past and the future. An optimum membrane for time travel moves closely to our Universe and has a very slow space current so that a ship does not deviate much from its location in the origin universe. The Continuum operates under the Novikov Self-consistency Principle, so causing paradoxes utilizing membranes is not possible.

When a ship enters the attraction field of a Continuum, if it rematerializes on top of a large collection of matter big enough to dent a ship with some velocity, then the extreme pull of the membrane will cause it to push the collection of matter out of the way with explosive force. When medium sized collections of matter no bigger than a speck of paint are rematerialized upon, it causes nothing more than a small dent in the internals of the ship. With small and very sparse collections of matter like gas clouds, the gas may merge with the ship and fill small gaps in the structure.

Finally, stuff may leak into the space between membranes if the part of the membrane they are on collapses, which can happen in a dying wormhole, allowing the Dimensional Drive to work. Stuff leaked into the Continuum is known as Continuum Junk, and may pose danger to ships passing through Plane Four if some planes are especially weak and have lots of wormholes.

Due to the aforementioned properties, Dimensional Drives may not work in especially strong membranes. Because of this, travelling between membranes has a huge risk to it that may leave ships marooned in foreign universes.

While winds may blow through the current of the Continuum like spacetime twisted around a spinning black hole, the multidimensional physics have strange side effects to 3D beings and some laws of physics change due to the nature of the Continuum, it is usually thought of as just space with an extra coordinate and a bit of turbulence, and is usually treated as such in flight.

An Aliquam Heinlein signal is one that transcends a membrane and can be used to communicate between membranes. In principle, a membrane can be vibrated in a specific way, and will also slightly drag the Continuum with it. Such signals are extremely hard to decipher, being encoded in a language that can be interpreted in a number of forms due to the extra rotations 4D physics introduces - imagine being 2D and trying to decode the 3D soundwaves of the air. You need to be able to decode the 3D-spoken language whether it comes in from an emitter that is above the plane, from perpendicular, or if it was rotated around an axis. The Heinlein cipher took hundreds of years to develop due to these complications and has facilitated communication between membranes, however is extremely insecure as these signals can be picked up by everyone in the Universe as long as they can decipher Heinlein.

Side-effects Of 4D Travel

Just as a 2D object can be mirrored by performing a 3D rotation, sometimes ships returning from Plane Four may end up mirrored to their original self. This surprised many after the first voyage of the Dimensional Drive, when the ship came in completely flipped to its original blueprints.

Iterations

There have been several types of Dimensional Drive, ranging from ones that can punch holes in the toughest of membranes to others that utilize membrane physics to power the wormhole generator without bringing a large power source and have been compartmentalized into ships just hundreds of meters wide.

Type I - Generates a wormhole and collapses it

Type II - Advanced wormhole generator that can punch holes in extremely elastic membranes

Type III - Self-powering and compact, can propel a ship like a hyperdrive as well as the basic membrane-hopping functionality

Typically, spacecraft are equipped with a Type III Dimensional Drive, however cheaper craft may use Type II Dimensional Drives and drag along a bulkier, albeit cheaper, power source. Type I Dimensional Drives are nothing more than a cheap backup unit if a ship's primary Dimensional Drive breaks down.

Type IV - An in-the-works Dimensional Drive that can traverse 5-space - a dimension higher than the Continuum - for time travel free of the Novikov Self-consistency Principle. The administration began working on 5-space wormholes for similar time travel with ill intents, before they were stopped by the Coalition of Virgo and The Eleventh Vlanoan Republic. The TIFARA has begun work on 5-space travel utilising a theoretical form of wormhole that exists as 5D extensions of the Continuum, much like how wormholes are 4D extensions of 3D membranes. Currently the main challenge has been finding out if these exist, how such wormholes would form and how 3D objects could punch holes in 5D objects.