My main concern for FTL(faster-than-light) travel at first was simply a name that sounds... like it might do that? I don't believe I had seen Cowboy Bebop by the time I had started to imagine them, but upon seeing its solution to interstellar travel with hubs/gates - wait no I'm pretty sure I'd played Mass Effect by the time I started this and they are also akin to the Relays, at least to say they are large structures which are necessary to travel great distances - because science and it seems like it would take a LOT of energy to do. So I came up with Warpshot Hubs, and the most basic mechanic of them as a gate to pass through into a special travel state - a ring to fly into that is all warpy in the middle.
I've recently been revisiting the project, and besides work on a story for some players I've also recently been thinking about some of the brief impulses that led to my choice in the name Warpshot, one of which was ideas about "propulsion" through warping space-time more than something like super-powered engines. I know it isn't a new concept again, and space-time on a theoretical and mathematical level is crazy and I'm not gona say I know a ton about. Oof, all in all I just keep slowing this down to make clear I'm gonna do some fake science for this, and here let me give it a try then-
Instead of moving the object, the idea is to move the space-time that it occupies, perhaps a small buffer around it I would assume and maybe hope. So my stretch takes us from gravity is the warping of space-time, gravitational waves are a thing(that I know little about), waves - sound has waves and pressure, and things that use lift are "moved" by differences in pressure and the reactions caused by that. So, the large structure is used to generate not only a very specific gravitational wave, but whatever process essentially encapsulates the ship in its own space-time.
Observations of a recent neutron star collision also came with gravitational waves, and if the gravitational waves were indeed from the same event, it suggests to me that the effect of the waves transfers at the speed of light, since they seemed to be observed together. I suppose it still isn't perfect and I don't think I should expect it to be, but I will keep developing it. But there you go - a hopefully science-fiction lore for my interstellar travel in a game setting.
Sorry for reading through that mess, but if you did, thanks! You're super, and maybe you're interested in sci-fi and rpg's, if so look forward to eventually see more of the Visceroth Cluster, as it gets another pass of polish and development.
-Alturiigo
Below is something I did to create a list of part names of what might break, and maybe how, why, and what the effects might be - but mostly just so I had something engine-soundy to tell them has broken and they now need to repair. This is unrelated to warpshot stuff, but I had it accessible and I like how it came out for how simply I approached the concept.
