Hyperspace Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Hyperspace is a book by Michio Kaku which attempts to explain the possibility of 10 dimensional space using string theory.
In science fiction, hyperspace refers to a region somehow alongside and connected with our own universe (in some cases displaced in an extra spatial dimension) which may be entered using some sort of energy field. While hyperspace is in some way anchored to the normal universe, it's much more compact, so traveling one mile in hyperspace is equivalent to traveling a thousand miles in normal space, or a billion miles, or a trillion. This makes for a very good explanation of faster than light (FTL) travel: pop your starship into hyperspace, move along for a while, pop back into normal space, and you end up light years from your starting point in original space, with only having spent several months, weeks, or even days in transit. In fact, hyperspace is the most common device used for explaining FTL in a science fiction story where FTL is necessary for interstellar travel.
In many stories, a starship cannot enter or leave hyperspace too close to a large concentration of mass, like a star; this means that hyperspace can only be used to get to the outside edge of a solar system, and then the starship must use other means of propulsion to get to or from the planets closer to the star. Sometimes this is simply a plot device so that a starship can't easily escape by conveniently slipping into hyperspace, thus ensuring epic space battles. Other writers have limited access to hyperspace by requiring a very large expenditure of energy in order to open a link (sometimes called a jump point) between hyperspace and normal space; this effectively limits access to hyperspace to very large starships, or to large stationary jump gates that can open jump points for smaller vessels.
Hyperspace is usually portrayed as either being completely empty, with a gray or black appearance, or as being full of shifting, luminous tendrils and clouds of... something; imagine a universe crammed full of nebulas.
Star Control II has an example of the latter, in it, Hyperspace has a strange red glow, indeed everything in it turns red (including your starship), and various strange patterns of flashes and shooting stars are in abundance. According to the Star Control version, Hyperspace ends at places of high gravity, such as stellar systems, and if two spaceships come into distance within each others fields of gravity, both will tumble out of hyperspace.
An idea similar to hyperspace, called hyperstate, was introduced by David Gerrold in The Voyage of the Star Wolf. In this setting starships used artificially-produced gravitational singularities (the space-time distortions found at the center of black holes) to transition between normal space and so-called irrational space, where faster than light travel was possible. The primary limitation of hyperstate was that the resulting gravitational distortions could be easily detected by other starships, so stealthy movement at faster-than-light speeds was effectively impossible.
The Star Trek universe equivalent of hyperspace is known as subspace. Although similar in concept to hyperspace, subspace plays a slightly different role in FTL travel. When a starship is traveling at FTL speeds (commonly known as "warp speed" in the Star Trek universe), the ship itself does not enter subspace. Instead, the ship is surrounded by a field of energy, a warp field. It is the warp field that extends into subspace, allowing the starship to travel at FTL speeds while it remains in normal space.
Other than being part of FTL travel, subspace is also used as a medium for propagating audio/visual signals at FTL speeds, thus allowing realtime communication across distances of several light years (a feat standard radio cannot perform.)
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