Quote:
Originally Posted by CraigR
Researching a hyperspatial energetic phenomenon that applies a second absolute speed limit in hyperspace in much the same way that c applies to normal space?
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Or how to bypass that? In Niven's Known Space stories, hyperdrive ships can cross one lightyear per three days - it's the only speed available with a hyperdrive shunt. Except the puppeteers developed the Quantum II hyperdrive, which crosses one lightyear every 1.25 minutes (meaning someone has to be
constantly on watch to avoid crashing into stars and the like). The first Quantum II hyperdrive was test-flown by a human (no puppeteer, not even a crazy one, is going to entrust its life to an
experimental FTL system!), but its existence highly classified afterward, and its plans kept secret by the puppeteers. (The plans were part of the prize awarded to Louis Wu and Speaker-To-Animals for their participation in the first expedition to the Ringworld, and were promptly confiscated by their respective governments when they got home.)
In the Star Trek universe, when they rejiggered the warp scale in TNG and later series in order to give some sense of internal consistency to it, Warp 10 was established as the new top speed, with the energies needed to accelerate increasing asymptotically as Warp 10 is approached, similar to approaching lightspeed in Einsteinian space.. (Even the writers tended later to ignore the VOY episode "Threshold", which among other stupid things posited that Warp 10 was "infinite speed" at which the ship would appear simultaneously in all places at once, something more than a little reminiscent of the Infinite Improbability Drive from
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That wasn't even the dumbest thing in the episode; suffice it to say that a community willing to accept the TOS episode "Spock's Brain" and the TNG episode "Angel One" is still more than happy to pretend "Threshold" never happened.)