Smartfolding

Smartfolding is the widely-available FTL technology provided by the Intercessors to members of its protectorate. It is highly energy efficient and childproofed to prevent misuse and disaster, whether by accident or intent. As an Intercessor technology it is illegal for Protecorate races to copy it, or even study it too closely. Smartfold Executors are known to gracefully self destruct if tampered with, quietly as opposed to explosively. They can go from an extremely sophisticated computer system to scrambled blocks of inert carbon in seconds. This also means that, while we understand their use and the basic principals on which they function, we have little grasp of the specific mechanics (or even many of the underlying technologies) and are powerless to repair one in the event of any kind of damage or failure. Thankfully, the machines seem to be self-maintaining and can supposedly operate without Interessor maintenance for more than a century at a time.  

Smartfolding Theory

The underlying principal of Smartfolding is a space-bending technology not unlike that theorized for the creation of wormholes. However, space is not an even plane. It is actually a highly complex membrane, with many folds on it, big folds with smaller folds on top of them, and smaller folds on top of those, and so on. You cannot change the topography of space without altering all of the surrounding folds. Smartfolding plots the most efficient path by taking advantage of these secondary shifts, making small pinches that cascade into large shifts and then riding the shifting spatial topography closer to its destination, where the process repeats in a chain. Making a single large pinch of two distance points in space would require a massive amount of energy, but a series of thousands of very small pinches which have a cumulative effect much larger than the sum of its parts allows a ship to travel long distances without needing a stupid amount of energy. It does, however, have its disadvantages. Mostly in terms of time.  

A Quick Guide to Smartfolding

In order to initiate a Smartfold, you need a Smartfold Executor provided by an Intercessor. You can use that Executor to set a destination, and wait for the computer to plot you a course to that destination. It does this by tracing possible paths and setting up the chain of dominos that will carry you to your destination point, a process that requires it to actually 'dig' a path in preparation for you. After all, infromation cannot be transmitted faster than light. In order to see the topography of the next leg of your journey, the terminal has to pinch that part closer so it becomes visible in an iterative process. Pinching so it can see where next to pinch so it can see where next to pinch, and so on.   Digging a path can take anywhere from days to weeks. Longer trips generally take more time than shorter trips, but exactly how long it will take to compute is always effectively random. Sometimes the topgraphy between you and your destination isn't conducive to easy travel and it takes longer to find the best path, sometimes conditions change while the path is being dug and the Terminal is forced to start all over again, and so on.   Once the path has been 'dug' for you, initiating the transit is easy. You simply need to accellerate fast enough to carry your vessel through the series of micro-pinches that have been prepared for you and trigger the folding. While it can take weeks to dig a path in the first place, the actual travel time once the journey begins typically only takes several hours.   Sometimes something will go wrong with the prepared path mid-flight, but that just means that you miss your connection from one pinch to the next. This dumps you out somewhere between your start and your destination, but no harm is done and you can simply start digging a new path to where you were going.