Hyperspace, FTL, Faraway, Quirium, 2b, FSD, - Details please!

Louis Calvert

Louis Calvert
I'm doing some research into Hyperdrive (FTL) Travel in ED and I'd like to find as many Lore sources as possible. Loremakers, if you're out there, I'd appreciate some of your insights too!

It seems that it's pretty vague - and given the retcons of earlier games, we can't even be really sure what came before FSD in anything but broad terms.

The timeline for Hyperdrives/Hyperspce goes like this (some dates taken from the timeline of previous games as an approximation):

22nd Century - Hyperspace Travel (of some sort) Invented.
2800 - Faraway Jump (used navigational systems to make Hyperspace safer - took hundreds of years to establish)
3100 - Quirium Drive (Single-ship safe Hyperdrive jumping using 'Quirium' as 'fuel')
3200 - Class 2B (Totally different type of Hyperdrive, possible wormhole travel)
3300 - FSD (Almost exactly the same as the Quirium Drive, but longer range and not Quirium Fuelled)

What (AFAIK) we have in Lore currently is the following:
Hyperdrive: https://community.elitedangerous.com/en/galnet/07-JAN-3303
MetaDrive: https://community.elitedangerous.com/en/galnet/17-FEB-3303
Antares: https://community.elitedangerous.com/en/galnet/02-AUG-3301
INRA Wormhole research: https://canonn.science/codex/almeida-landing/
And of course, we know how current FSD works.
The Thargoids appear to use a different drive system entirely, and lack Supercruise, tentatively tagged "wormhole travel".

We also have references in Premonition and Reclamation:
The Alliance reverse engineering Thargoid hyperdrives, and MetaDrive doing the same to make the wake-less drive - though these are from Bill Turner and therefore might be just his speculation - so treat with care. Also the fact that Tantalum is used in the new FSD tech (and wasn't in previous drives) is a big plot point of Reclamation. It's also stated in Premonition that the FSD is just as the start of the potential development - suggesting there's more possibilities, this might reference the ability to extend jump ranges etc. available through Engineering, or other, future, developments.

I've only read Out of the Darkness, Reclamation and Premonition currently so I'm not sure what other novels might mention Hypderive specifics. We also need to treat certain info in the novels with a little care, since it seems that the ones written before ED was launched treat FTL travel quite vaguely - presumably since it wasn't 100% confirmed exactly how it would work - understandably.

What I'm looking for is more information on early Hyperspace/Hyperdrive. Note that the language used in the Galnet article is very specific, it doesn't mention Hyperdrive until the Quirium drive, which it lists after the Faraway Hyperspace network - whether this is significant, I've no idea, it can be read as a successor, or that all hyperdrives from the 22nd Century onwards used Quirium...
From TDW by Holdstock it's clear that the Faraway network is more like a system of "stargates" (but without the gate itself) that do the calculations for the hyperspace jump, monitor traffic and maintain the lanes, it's suggested in that that a ship travels for a considerable time inside witchspace (there's a whole scene involving a fight with a pirate inside Witchspace, and it's said to have junction points and stations built inside it).

We know from non-Lore sources a lot more about Hyperdrive, but I'm not sure how much of it has made the jump to ED. For example
Drew Wagar collected an awesome history of hyperdrive from previous games and presumably from the writers manual (speculation there) that was transferred to the Canonn website, but that was prior to ED publishing the Galnet article, if you compare the two you can see a bunch of differences - were those edits for brevity, or were they Lore alterations?

I know MB and DB have done quite a few interviews and things, if anyone has links to videos, articles, anything at all that discusses Hyperdrive Lore, I'd appreciate it :)

Thanks very much :)
 

Louis Calvert

Louis Calvert
Thanks! Dave's pages are new to me, that's great, thanks for that :) I've plumbed the depths of FE2 and FFE and I'm really looking for more ED Lore sources (a lot of the dates from older games has been retconned and details altered).
 

Louis Calvert

Louis Calvert
So, you guys are suggesting that the actual lore of the Elite universe is incorrect and there really is gravity manipulation, and that everything that's been written so far is incorrect?
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
As I understand it from old lore: hyperdrive theory was invented just after the first generation ship launched, in 2097 (the Mayflower 97 launch date has transferred across to ED canon). However, it took a hundred years or so for the theory to be resolved into a one-man spaceship that had a reasonable chance of surviving the journey, and several hundred more years before it was safe enough for all but the most insane (such as the Achenar colonists who founded the Empire) to trust hyperdrive tech for colony ships - which is why 70,000 generation ships were launched without hyperdrives as their main propulsion.

We know that hyperdrives were in use for small one-man support ships on at least some of the generation ships, as we have the records from the logs of the generation ship Spear of Hope that a crewmember went on an away mission to repair one of the ship's fleet of survey probes; it was a "six month trip" each way, but the probe was "light-years away" - so the crewmember must logically have been flying an FTL ship of some kind, and the only FTL tech known to human science at the time was the hyperdrive. Old lore stated that the primitive first-generation hyperdrives took months to travel just a few light-years.

Quirium fuel was a rather illogical component of the original Elite lore. I say "illogical" because that game still had fuel scoops, which allowed you to scoop perfectly usable hydrogen fuel from a star without "turning it into quirium". Quirium was retconned out of existence in the FE2/FFE lore, which had instead an antimatter-based "military fuel" which could only be used in "military drives";; ordinary hyperdrives used plain old hydrogen. The lore of Sirius Corp is very closely linked to the creation of this "military fuel", which was sold to both sides of the early Federation-Empire Wars, thus enriching the Corporation to become the most powerful in Human space. The in-game system description of Sirius in ED still mentions this, so I assume "military fuel" still exists in ED lore, even though the FSD does not use it. However, I note with considerable annoyance that quirium has been "dis-retconned" back into ED lore via that Galnet article. I am reluctant to simply equate "quirium" with "military fuel", due to the numerous inconsistencies this would raise.

There has been much speculation about the drive system used on Human capital ships since, like the Thargoid ships, these ships simply come and go directly into Normal Space without passing through Supercruise. It has been speculated further that, due to the physical similarity between the "arrival clouds" of capital ships and the "arrival clouds" of FE2/FFE ships using hyperdrives, that Human capital ships must therefore still be using the "old-fashioned" hyperdrives rather than FSDs. But I have never seen any formal lore declaration on this.

The "Faraway" system is likewise "bad lore" that contradicts other lore - such as the founding of Achenar, which the Codex says happened in the "mid-23rd century" - more or less preserving the old-lore date of "in the 2310s". Achenar is 139.45 LYs from Sol, way too far away to have been colonized by generation ship that early - so it must have been colonized by early hyperdrive-capable ships, which could have covered the distance in a decade or so. Likewise, the war fleets sent by the nascent Federation to try to assimilate Achenar in the late 2300s must have been similarly hyperdrive-capable. I suppose the invention of the Faraway lore was deemed necessary, to explain why Humans with FTL drives never bothered colonizing anywhere further than 200 LY away from Sol until relatively recently. The Faraway system may also explain why inhabited star systems all have "Navigation Beacons" in them, which seem to serve no useful purpose in terms of navigation within a star system - perhaps they are imagined as relics of the old Faraway system.

Indeed, the entire Faraway system sounds to me more like a description of the evolution of FTL travel in the internal planning of ED - which was originally conceived as requiriing navigation beacons, waypoint charting through unexplored space, avoiding hazards such as "dark systems" - all of which were abolished once they'd settled on the FSD instead. But space travel, and certainly exploration, would have been much different if that earlier model had been implemented. Travel to the Galactic Core was originally deemed to be practically impossible, for example, since players would have had to carefully chart their way star by star. You can find early Q&A videos where FD staff respond with perplexity at the very notion that people would want to travel all the way to the Core.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Louis Calvert said:
So, you guys are suggesting that the actual lore of the Elite universe is incorrect and there really is gravity manipulation, and that everything that's been written so far is incorrect?
Click to expand...
The supercruise system compresses spacetime to allow apparent superluminal travel from an external reference frame. Gravity is caused by mass bending spacetime. A supercruise drive therefore is a gravity manipulator in practice.

What the Elite universe doesn't have is artificial gravity (other than faked through rotation or other constant acceleration). It's easy enough to handwave some limitations on the supercruise technology that would prevent it being used for artificial gravity, though.
 

Vasious

Vasious
Here is my attempt to reconcile the different drives as the loss of a super fuel universally used but still having a secret recipe never sat right with me

Use this for the Pen and paper RPG which I have run adventures covering different time periods

My theory on the history of FTL travel in the elite Universe or why quirium was just a brand name

Hi all Just some food for thought, as whilst we have received a Galnet new article on the history of hyperdrives here which was a recap of a summary I recall reading on Drew Wagars blog but cannot find now but Canonn has a backup however reading it I have some disagreements with Sima...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk

Not sold on the FSD being Thargoid based, as that one statement by Bill, who isnt a trustworthy character, flies in the face of all the in game information, like the INRA base files and the Thargoid visuals
 
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