Space Travel: FTL and Folding space

There are many forms of Space travel throughout books, movies and other media. A lot of them overlap, like subspace travel, usually because its an excepted form of transportation. Also like hyperspace or the more realistic approach of wormhole travel.

With the universe that we are creating, I wanted to there to be more than one type of Distance space traveling. Be it FTL or Folding Space or something else. The main ones that I will talk about are the Human form of FTL travel and the yet unnamed alien races wormhole traveling. I wanted them to have different types of travel, because they have evolved technologically separate, and the humans are a younger space farer.

First of all, the Humans FTL. (The Higgs Field) -Jim

The Higgs Boson - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson. This basically give items mass, and with mass come interactivity with other particles. The idea behind the Higgs field is two parts.

1. The field is generated, which removes all Higgs particles from an object. This means that the object no longer has mass;  it is still held together because of the strong force, and the bonds between the particles are still there. Now the thing that makes this fiction is that the Higgs boson is theoretical, so coming up with the math to remove the Higgs particles is even more theoretical. What we have come up with is that since the Higgs boson is part of the Universal string theory, we have concluded that bouncing sound waves off a certain metal and said frequency removes this. Now we have a ship that has no mass/inertia and is ready for FTL travel.   "And with great acceleration comes great responsibility...." - Ben Parker

2. The next part is basically a mini-particle collider on the ship. It collides a certain particle together, and calculates and tracks the expelled particles from the other smaller dimensions. Check out LHC from the other post or Google it. Once it finds a particle going said velocity, the ship then attaches to it, and simply goes that velocity. Remember, with no mass you don’t have inertia, and therefore you wont get squished when there is great acceleration.

Pros: Since they do not have mass, they do not have to worry about objects in their way when traveling. It is very similar to neutrino particles, they don’t interact with things they come in contact with. This means the computer has to do very little calculations for traveling any distance.

Cons: Warm-up and cool-down. It takes time for the engines to make all the needed calculations for removing all Higgs particles: this depends on the size of the ship or object it will encompass. Also, the engines have to cool down once they have dropped the field. This will prevent them from "jumping" if they get in a pinch and they will have to rely on regular engines until the Higgs field is ready again.

Cons: Communication. Since they will be traveling faster than they could communicate to each other, this will make the captains of the ships more independent, but this could also cause problems. To compensate, they rely on a pony express of relay ships to bounce signals. These are ships that have very small crews and an engine. 

Next: Alien Wormhole Travel