True Faster-Than-Light travel is impossible. Scientific discoveries repeatedly and continually support Einstein's assertion that light is the fastest medium in the universe. The sheer distance between star systems means that even at light speed the nearest neighboring star system is year away if you travel from point A to point B. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. However there are ways of working around the problem of interstellar distances.
The Von Frietag Continuum Convolution Device, and its more advanced descendants called jump drives, bypass the problem of distance by taking point A and point B and folding the space between them until the amount of space to travel becomes negligible. This allows massive distances to be crossed almost instantaneously. However there are still problems with this form of travel, some of which have been reduced, others continue to puzzle scientists and researchers.
The first issue is the limitations on how much space is taken on a jump. While decades of research have managed to find ways to shrink the three dimensional area that is taken on a "jump", no ways studied or attempted have been able to increase it beyond the original limit. The space taken severely limits how ships with jump drives installed can be structured. First the jump drive must be placed exactly in the center of the ship due to the area jumped being centered on the drive itself. Second, the ship cannot exceed any of the dimensions that can be taken on a jump; most ship builders work around this by leaving at lease a meter of leeway, though some ship models push the limits to the very precise edge.
The second issue is the most curious of byproducts: tachyons. Techyons are a poorly understood particle incapable of traveling any slower than the speed of light. When a jump drive activates, large amounts of tachyons form inside of the drive. Logic dictates that the tachyons would rip apart the drive due to the sheer speed they are traveling at, however instead they become trapped in the drive and prevent the drive from engaging until all of the tachyons are purged from the drive. Tachyons will be discussed in more detail later on.
The third problem with current engines is the heat that is generated with each jump, the further the jump the greater the heat generated. The longest recorded jump that the crew of the ship survived was in 2193 with a Reich prototype drive that managed a jump of 23.1 lightyears. The drive generated so much heat that the drive itself and everything in a ten meter radius melted to slag. Fortunately for the crew such an even was planned for and none were hurt.
The forth major problem is rarely an issue in modern times given the requirements for it to occur. Early ship builders attempted to work around the problem of purging a drive of tachyons by installing several drives into a single ship. In every case the drive activated would interact with the others installed and cause a short-lived massive localized gravitational field, or in other words a black hole.
Modern communications beyond a planet's surface operates in two very different ways. The first is only used for close range communications within 5 astronomical units while the second is used for distances exceeding the aforementioned distance.
The close-range communications are essentially data packets transported in a short laser burst. This form of communication can transmit text, audio, video, and almost any other kind of data file over its distance. While there is no actual limit to the distance that this form of communication could be used for, practicality limits its effectiveness to a very small distance.
The second form of communication utilizes tachyons developed as a byproduct of the jump drives activating. Encoding a message onto several tachyons, the tachyons are then guided out of the jump drive and sent in the direction of the intended receiver. The tachyon messages thus far are only capable of sending text or audio based messages, and research has been done in finding alternate ways of communications with little success.
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