Hyperspace (science Fiction) - Travel

Travel

Generally speaking, the idea of hyperspace relies on the existence of a separate and adjacent dimension. When activated, the hyper drive shunts the starship into this other dimension, where it can cover vast distances in an amount of time greatly reduced from the time it would take in "normal" space. Once it reaches the point in hyperspace that corresponds to its destination in real space, it re-emerges.

In other words, some (or all) paths in hyperspace may have a travel-time less than the time it takes to traverse the "shortest-path" in normal space, defined above. The time it takes to travel in hyperspace is measured in the same way time is measured in normal space, unless the hyperspace is discontinuous. For example, the path in hyperspace may not be smooth but a sequence of points, and the time change from jumping from one point to another may be abrupt. In this case, add the time jumps. Some may be positive (jumps to the future), and some negative (jumps to the past), depending on how the hyperspace is defined.

Explanations of why ships can travel faster than light in hyperspace vary; hyperspace may be smaller than real space and therefore a star ship's propulsion seems to be greatly multiplied, or else the speed of light in hyperspace is not a barrier as it is in real space. Whatever the reasoning, the general effect is that ships traveling in hyperspace seem to have broken the speed of light, appearing at their destinations much more quickly and without the shift in time that the Theory of Relativity would suggest.

In much science fiction, hyper drive jumps require a considerable amount of planning and calculation, with any error carrying a threat of dire consequences. Therefore, jumps may cover a much shorter distance than would actually be possible so that the navigator can stop to "look around" -- take their bearings, plot their position, and plan the next jump. Maneuvering in hyperspace may or may not be possible. The time it takes to travel in hyperspace also varies. Travel may be instantaneous or may take hours, days, weeks or more. Some theories state that a route traveled for a long time may continuously stay open.

A different concept, sometimes also referred to as "hyperspace" and similarly used to explain FTL travel in fiction, is that the manifold of ordinary three-dimensional space is curved in four or more "higher" spacial dimensions (a "hyperspace" in the geometric sense; see hyper surface, tesseract, Flatland). This curvature causes certain widely separated points in three-dimensional space to nonetheless be "adjacent" to each other four-dimensionally. Creating an aperture in 4D space (a wormhole) between these locations can allow instantaneous transit between the two locations; a common comparison is that of a folded piece of paper, where a hole punched through two folded sections is more direct than a line drawn between them on the sheet. This idea probably arose out of certain popular descriptions of General Relativity and/or Riemannian manifolds, and may be the original form from which later concepts of hyperspace arose. This form often restricts FTL travel to specific "jump points".

A difficulty with interstellar travel through hyperspace is navigation. At small distances like the local solar neighbourhood, the astronomical background cartography will not have changed much and coordinates can be extrapolated. However, as the distance traveled increases, the background cartography changes more dramatically. If slower than light speed were used for travel through normal space, it would be easy to record the change in the cartography, but because the view of the cartography is hidden when in hyperspace, it is impossible to keep a record simply by visual reconciliation alone. Science fiction has a myriad of solutions to this problem.