If you don't want to wait years and generations until you reach another star system, your science fiction stories have to imagine a propulsion system that allows space travel that is faster than light. At least that is one possible solution to the dilemma.

I needed this technobabble, that's how they called it in Star Trek productions, for my space operas, so I've created a consistent story about how humanity discovered the real nature of the universe a long time ago. A lot of my sci-fi stories will use it as the background noise of their universe and my first Alien race, that I've designed would have never been discovered without the FTL drives.

I called my solution the nine-dimensional Transspace. And bear with me, the idea is at least thirty years old and might seem a bit dusty compared to some modern twists, but it has some cool side effects, that acted as seeds of stories and ideas.

So no space opera without a faster-than-light drive. Let's finally dive into the topic.

My idea was not to bend space or fly through a portal. I've just extended the known space time with some useful additional dimensions (just like the real physicists did extensively for a while). Mainly I thought if the space is bending, where does it bend into. So there had to be more than the observable dimensions. That was my starting point.

A view of my imagined multiverse simplified through the looking glass of popular science comes with 9 dimensions.

• Three of them are the space dimensions - basically the ones we know.
• Three more are time dimensions. One of them is the linear time that we live in. The others are splitting up the world into a multiverse of possibilities.
• The last three are bound to gravity. Our existence is connected to two of these dimensions. We live on a gravitational plane, so to speak.

I especially played around with the gravitational part of the theory. There were immediate and reasonable associations to apply them to the daily life like the possibility to create ad-hoc force fields. This alone would be a life changing invention.

But there is also the possibility to access a higher plateau than the one we live on, which changes some relations between mass and distance and allows moving faster than light.

But let's start with the well known space dimensions first.

Space

Space as a concept already existed in some form even in early antique theories. Einstein gave them the twist that these dimensions are curved or bent and that mass affects the amount of bending.

The (imaginary) Transspace has given them another angle that changed or extended some of our imagination of the three space dimensions.

The theory itself has been discovered by humanity in a computer-assisted way. An AI and a quantum computer array have calculated most of the equations' solutions.

One of these equations predicts that all dimensions fold into themselves. Very simplified, you could say if you travel some billion years into the same direction, you might be able to reach your starting point again. Just like a two dimensional creature walking on surface of a sphere.

Some distant galaxy we observe with our telescope might even be our own milky way in its early days.

Gravity

We're getting one step more esoteric now. This part forms the perfect technobabble for space story essentials like anti-gravity and FTL travel and therefore it marks the core of this world building exercise.

Next to the space dimensions, there are also three gravitational dimensions, that our senses and brains can't perceive. Our existence incorporates two of these dimensions. We're living on a gravitational plane as told before.

Only on this plane, a meter is actually a meter and a kilogram is a kilogram. And more importantly, light speed and the gravitational constant are what they are. You move to another layer and things are different.

In the early days, after the theory had been postulated, people found out that a certain geometry of force fields could form a tube or a passage that allows shifting to higher or lower gravity layers.

That made it possible to use the different circumstances over there and travel faster - even surpass light speed. The theories have been taken over by engineers and it didn't take long to exploit the principles. But more on that later.

Time

Let's finish the basic dimensional concept first. The third group of dimensions after space and gravity form the time continuum. The beautiful symmetry of the theory also gives us three of them.

However, we humans can only sense one. We live our lives on a timeline moving permanently in one direction.

The theory says that the other dimensions could contain alternate realities and form the multiverse of possibilities. The timelines next to us contain a sequence of events that is very similar to ours. Timelines further away are forming significantly different realities.

However, it is technically not yet possible to prove the theories. Many scientists work on gravity effects, a handful also concentrate on the time effects of the theory. But there was no breakthrough yet. Thus, all of this remains theory for now.

The theory says that time travel is more complex than imagined. Going back in time means contaminating a timeline, which automatically forms a new one. So you can't go back into your own timeline and cause paradoxa.

The Discovery

The Theory of Transspace has been created by the dutch scientist Marla Lay. She started to work on it during her PhD phase at the end of the 2080s and published the groundbreaking paper in the year 2095.

The theory came with twelve base formulae and didn't contain any singularities any more unlike most of its predecessors. It was valid for all states of the universe from quantum events to massive singularities including the big bang. And still it could be considered a superset of the theory of relativity and the quantum theory for most aspects. Now, we could also predict the edge cases.

Although Lay was in the lead, she already had a rather big staff and one of the best quantum computer arrays to work with. Also later, she went through an unorthodox path and decided to involve the best scientists and engineers in the world not only to peer review, but also to work on practical proof and potential technical inventions.

By the year 2095, Marla Lays theory was complete and confirmed correct, but the practical implications as well as the potential to affect the world was either unknown or mere speculation.

One year later, Lay with her good reputation and massive network of fellow scientists could convince seven other leading physicists and three engineers of a two-year project called "Enclave". Project Enclave started in 2096.

Together with 50 other doctoral candidates and technicians, they founded a science think tank in Noordwijk, Netherlands, which provided infrastructure for both theoretical context and practical construction and experimentation.

They kept their discoveries close until the designated end in the year 2098, thus the project title Enclave.

The results were

• a working, faster than light propulsion prototype
• the so-called Grava drive that could project the first artificial force field
• a science paper that was considered the seed of all later inventions

G-Tubes

Two of the participants in the Enclave project, Charles Frempton, an engineer and Janice De Jong, a data scientist, have worked on the possibility to enter deeper layers of the gravitational dimensions. This technology was considered the basis for Faster Than Light travel.

The problem had to be solved with raw computing power. It took them 18 months during the enclave to find a geometric field that theoretically could have worked. Towards the end, they could present the first prototype, that generated a small 80 cm diameter portal to a 25 times deeper gravitational layer - making everything 25 times faster than in our world without additional effort.

Later on, Frempton created a probe that fitted through the hole. It made it to the moon in 42 minutes using normal ionic propulsion.

They called that tube geometry "G25" but that was not the end. Over the years, other solutions have been found. The current maximum is G180k. So it went from 25 to 180.000.

The conquering of the galaxy, that's what humanity was striving for after the discovery of the G-Tubes. At that time five big mining companies had already been the lords of the solar system.

The first human transspace flight in a G25 vessel engineered by two of the enclave participants, Wells & Bellman, was launched just 3 years later. It took them 7 hours to Mars and they reached 3% of light speed.

The most versatile drive was invented in the 2140s, around 45 years later. The so-called Dublin Drive was specified as G121 and took 16 h to Titan, the moon of Saturn and an important outpost of Earth at that time.

Zodiac, one of the mining corporations found a specification for cargo and huge ships at G1013 or G1k as it was called later. This drive was replaced only 21 years later by the G21k Starbase Drive, which itself created the kickstart into colonising the neighbouring star systems. It took about 1 week per 10 light years.

Things that travel at the speed of light benefit most from the anatomy of space time that the teams on the Enclave workshops had discovered. So FTL communication was one of the first thriving engineering fields that emerged.

Even the miniature G-Tube geometries that were useless for humans had been good enough to send probes, robots and drones into transspace. The first series of transspace communication phalanxes had settled at G171, which brought the moon into high-speed real-time communication ranges of 8ms latency. And the delay for communication from Mars went down to 3 seconds on average, good enough for live streams. The communication in the whole solar system had changed completely after the rollout of the first generation.

Today all colonies are connected through a fourth-generation communication system running on the mentioned G180k. This renders a reaction time of 22 ms with the Titan colony and 90 minutes with a science station in the Rana system about 30 lightyears away.

Force Fields

On an early milestone date, January 1st 2100, a company formed out of the enclave think tank launched a product they called "Grava", a brand name that would become a synonym for force field tech afterwards.

Within two years, all excavators in the construction business had been replaced. Other companies licensed the technology and developed highly efficient planes, air trains and hoppers (shuttles that could enter space above Earth's atmosphere).

In a modern space hopper, you will find 16 different Grava appliances. One of them is responsible for a constant force vector, another for acceleration and again others for accident protection or compensation of acceleration forces.

The space travel sector with its formerly expensive and risky launches profited the most from the new Grava-based hoppers.

Time Travel

The last chapter of this world building exercise focuses on things not invented yet. Let's go back to time travelling. No pun intended. Even 100 years after the enclave, scientists have no practical idea how to do it, although some groups have worked on it since the beginning.

The current state of the art speaks of two devices. The first is a temporal converter (or Verter). It allows to slide along the regular time axis into the future and the past. The other one is called temporal polarizer (or Poler). This allows going from one timeline to another. It can find your own home timeline again.

Both devices have been confirmed by theories as well as micro experiments. But on a large scale, their complexity exceeds the mental and cybernetic capacities in the known space. It seems as if the universe could prevent a paradox just by making it too complicated to execute.

This is not the End

THe theories end here, at least the ones concerning the bare mechanics of this Transspace world. But I have found much more resources in my old notes. There were drawings of starships with phantastic drives that resembled a mechanical octopus or an egg with a saturn ring. There were also schematic drawings of FTL flight modes and timelines that spread trees of possibilities. I must have spent a lot of hours in my youth.

But I never took the next step of bringing this universe to life with real stories. In the meantime I have started to work on two. But I'm sure many more will follow. I'm so curious.