You either misunderstood the Guide or I'm misunderstanding your position (it *is* pretty late right now)
There is no "light moving through the medium" in my explanation. Photon interaction really don't matter in my example because I'm dealing with gravitation.
Gravity bends the spacetime curvature. Light (which is not photons) "slows down" because although photons have zero rest mass, they have mass. As such, they are as subject to gravitation as any other mass particle. When light gets inside a gravity well, it follows the curvature of space time, taking slightly longer to its destination than if going in a straight line, effectively "slowing down" to whoever is observing it. This is important because as Einstein himself wrote it, the light speed is only constant to someone outside the gravitational field watching a light beam outside a gravitational field. For everyone else and every other light beam, light speed is relative, and can therefore slow down.
That's something called gravitational lensing, and you can calculate it's effects on light via gravitational potential with this:
Then, you can get the variable velocity of light expressed in coordinates:
Which you can then confirm the decreased speed of light in a gravitational field with:
Another important thing is that gravity can reduce the frequency of light, also affecting it's perceived speed. Photons really ain't all that, and regardless of propagation, the end result is that gravity appears to slow down light.
Which is the effect I mentioned affected the FSD drive. Gravity.
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