Blog post Number 51 Written: 07-27-2021 Uploaded 03-24-2023
Well since I talked about the science of things last time, might as well continue it this time, and touch on the topic of the science they use in the Halo. Because everyone knows halo, and there are some decent books set in the Halo universe too. I don’t know if there are any books set in the Mass Effect universe, I just want to make it clear that if there is, I am not insulting them, I just don’t know of them, while I do know of the halo books and I think they are a good read.
I’m actually going to use a reference here, so I’m dropping the link I used to the Halo fandom wiki for the spaceship engines in question here.
https://halofanon.fandom.com/wiki/Shaw-Fujikawa_Translight_Engine_(EXverse)
There’s the link, now I’ll give a brief summation of it since most people myself included don’t want to click on a random wiki article and spend twenty minutes reading. I’ve don’t the work for you in this case.
There’s even Lore about the people who developed the Fujikawa engines, how they were developed and the science behind them, and all that. It’s nice and well-developed lore and backstory and so on. This however is typical and by typical, I mean the common “slip space” style of faster than light engine. Which depending on how you subscribe to your physics may also be the most reasonable method of FTL, so I don’t blame or fault anyone who uses this in their sci-fi. Heck, I use this in my sci-fi.
Let me quote from the wiki here. “Shaw-Fujikawa Translight engine creates ruptures, referred to some times as wormholes, between normal space and an alternate plane known as slip space ( Also known as slipstream space and shaw-Fujikawa space) which allows a ship to travel faster than light. The engine creates these ruptures by using high-power cyclic particle accelerators to generate microscopic black holes.”
How you use black holes to create wormholes I don’t know, nor does it explain in the article, but that is what’s given to us. But this works much the same as it does in the star wars universe, for example, a fancy engine makes exotic power to break through from our plane of existence into another plane of existence where the laws of physics are different and you are able to exceed the speed of light. It kind of works like that in The Descendant, except my ships, still are not exceeding the speed of light, but they are tunneling from where we are into another dimension. But this time it is one of the dozen or so extra dimensions added onto “real space” by string theory. Where the laws of physics are the same, but the universe is a different size. I was actually inspired by the Nether region in Minecraft. It is one-third the size of the overworld. So even though you are traveling at the same speed there, when you come back out into the overworld, you have covered a greater distance. The Descendant works much the same way. These other dimensions that string theory say we have, have been made accessible my magic super-powerful space ship engines and the laws of physics there are no different than they are here, but because those dimensions are physically different sizes, where a Meter here could equal a kilometer there, and that makes traveling vast distances much easier and much faster, as well as much more dangerous, but that’s a different rant that gets explained in the lore of The Descendant. You’ll just have to read the books to find out. I’d like to keep talking about this, but I feel at this point, anything else would become redundant.
Long story short or TLDR, The space ship engines in Halo are possible, but from the description on the fan wiki how they work doesn’t seem to be clear or possible, the engine is used to create tiny black holes, how that translates into making wormholes large and sustained enough to shove an entire spaceship through I don’t know, but that’s what the wiki says. I left the link so you can go read the same thing I did. Anyway… see in the next one, have fun reading that sci-fi.
Chace Randolph 