Continuum Beam
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Summary
The Dimensional Drive, invented by scientists thousands of years ago and recently completed by the The Interdimensional Flight And Research Administration, 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, then has not yet been fully realised.
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.
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.
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.
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.