Hi TML’ers,

Anyone ever read the Traci Ganner book series by Brian Jeffreys? I’ve just finished reading them and can highly recommend them.

I especially like Jeffreys’ take on FTL drives;

In the early days of space exploration, interstellar travel was thought to
be impossible, requiring sleeper ships to travel at nearly the speed of
light in order to reach a colony world several generations later. It wasn't
until Anton Zeus theorized the existence of a singularity attached
between two stars that scientists discovered that they could see these
"strings" between stars, much like the strings between planets of a
child's nursery mobile. But even knowing that these strings existed did
nothing to improve their fortune, until they came to understand that by
drawing on the gravity of the singularity across dimensions, they could
tap into an amazing new source of power. The first experimental vessels
to attempt this simply disappeared under the shearing stress of being
pulled into another dimension and were then destroyed by the raw
gravitational power of the singularity. Modern vessels used a forward-
looking gravitational attachment system that grabbed the singularity
several hundred thousand kilometers ahead of where the ship wanted
to go. As the gravitational force of the singularity hauls the ship forward,

the vessel releases its grip on the singularity and grabs hold again even
further forward. This hand-over-hand method of crawling the
singularity, as Commander Ganner liked to think of it, relied on a crude
understanding, of course. It reminded her of the rope climbing course at
the academy, but obviously travel up a rope was ridiculously slow
compared to the velocities man could achieve along a singularity. It was
possible to use these hyperspace lanes between most stars, although
the stresses involved in the acceleration were different depending on
the star. In fact, survey ships would plot the stresses and make them
available in star maps for various ships to use. Not knowing the stresses
involved could make the first attachment to a singularity a very shaky
proposition.