The Agathon, FTL Technology
The debate over the use of FTL (faster than light) technology in Sci-Fi books rages on. When writing The Agathon, I wanted to come up with some sort of “realistic” feel to how the ship would travel faster than light. The accepted thought around this whole area is that FTL technology doesn’t mean anything in Sci-Fi as the laws of physics strictly prohibit the possibility of accelerating a mass to the speed of light. The energy requirements become infinite. So how do we get around this for the purpose of story telling. I have always believed that if I wrote a sci-fi book, the ship would absolutely have to be able to travel between star systems. The Agathon uses an “FTL” ring that spins around the ship perpendicular to the hull creating a gravitational waves that distort space time creating a “warp bubble”. It’s pretty much the same concept used in Star Trek. (They really knew how to move a ship). The warp bubble contains the ship in an artificial pocket of space time warping the surrounding space around the ship. See !… Easy !. 
The idea for the FTL ring, other than it being really cool, actually came from the design of the spinning platform from the movie ‘Contact’ with Jodie Foster.. A clip of which I have attached below.
The FTL ring attached to The Agathon is a single ring of metal, as opposed to several rings on the device that Jodie Foster sits in at the end of the movie. I have always thought that you would need some sort of moving gravitational device attached to a space ship to create a warp bubble. Anyway I will be posting some fan art of what the ship should look like soon. Can’t wait to see it!…
Forward we go..
Colin
