Re: FT3 DEVELOPMENT QUESTION: FTL

Very broadly, I think there are three FTL approaches (Of course Atomic
Rockets has already done this for us:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php):

1. Albert Who? Ignore light-speed barriers entirely, and just go really
really fast. E.E.Smith falls firmly into this category with his
“inertialess” spacecraft. Not common nowadays.

2. Fly Through. You enter “hyperspace” or “warp”. Once in
hyperspace the flight takes a measurable time, which the crew-members
subjectively experience unless they drug/freeze themselves. Subtypes
include:

    a. Vulnerable. While in hyperspace, the ship can be detected and
attacked. Call this the Star Trek or B5 model. There may be “bad
things” lurking in hyperspace in addition to enemy spaceships.

    b. Invulnerable. While in hyperspace the ship is undetectable and
won’t be attacked until it re-emerges at the other end. Call this the
Star Wars model. As I recall the RPG Traveller works like this too.

3. Jump Through. You disappear where you were, and reappear at your
destination. The crew experience no subjective passage of time.

    a. Do It Anywhere. You can jump from any point in space to any other
point. Care must be taken to avoid jumping into the middle of a star
etc. Asimov’s hyperdrive seemed to work like that, as did BSG’s, and
B5’s big ships at least. This invariably requires some sort of
“jump-drive” in the engine-room.

    b. Jump point. You can only jump at certain points, and you will
always arrive at a certain point at your destination. These jump points
can be natural phenomena or artificial “star gates”. Passage through
the jump point may require a special “jump drive” (like the Alderson
Drive in "The Mote in God's Eye”) or not (the collapsar jump in “The
Forever War”, B5’s small ships).

Some universes seem to include both “fly through” and “jump
through” with jump-points simply providing handy strategic shortcuts.
The Honor Harrington novels are an example.

Both fly-through and jump-through are often subject to limitations on
how deep in a planet’s or star’s gravity-well you can enter or
emerge from FTL to provide dramatic chases, require “real-space”
propulsion as well as hyperdrive, and to make sure that the war-story
does not end on page one with the bad-guys materialising their
planet-smashing bombs in the Star Emperor’s private toilet. 

I enjoyed the “Hooded Swan” novels very much. They were among the
few SF novels that imagine space-flight on a model derived from civil
aviation rather than maritime traditions.