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Originally posted by Solel:
**Well, considering that hyperspace and warp drives are not allowed by the laws of physics...
Specifically, faster-than-light travel is forbidden by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, as long as an object has mass. A warp drive that would create a space-time bubble big enough to hold a ship requires more energy than there is in the entire universe. Keep in mind?even if we did develop new unified field theories about the universe, Einsteinian physics, in all likelihood, would still hold true, just like Newton's laws of motion still hold true in the vast majority of cases.
However, the laws of physics do allow for wormholes, so if you could artificially generate a wormhole and control where its end is produced, you could traverse great distances quickly. And if you could figure out a way to convert a ship and its passengers into a stream of tachyons?theoretical particles that can move faster than light and have no mass, if they exist?you could consequently move faster than light. However, you would be moving backwards in time, and you'd also need to devise some mechanism to reintegrate all the tachyons back into all the complicated structures they originally were, not to mention input a large amount of energy just to slow the tachyons down when you want to land somewhere.
Right. But it's still nice and convenient to have a speedy form of transportation in the game to make those shipping deadlines. 
Regards,
Solel
**
Not to nitpick (okay, so that was a lie), but I find it interesting how you can declare that hyperspace and warp travel are ruled out by the laws of physics, yet seem think that it is possible to change particles into tachyons. While it is possible to change certain particles into others, the process is not really controllable since it involves annihilating the particles, turning them into energy, which then changes into particles with the same energy that may or may not be the same type as were initially destroyed.
Tachyons are particles that would have a negative mass, which through Einstein's equations would force them to always travel at superluminal velocities. Of course, it would also seem to imply that they have negative energy, since the equations for energy of particles all involve mass, except for those with mass = 0. Perhaps we would need to extend the theory, but as things now stand, they would be undetectable since negative energy is not detectable, as it involves complex numbers, which are again not measurable. Interestingly, we do know that some particles can at times have negative energy, but we are unable to detect them during this phase, only before and after (it happens during quantum tunneling).
And so long as we are using the word "theoretically" in a very loose fashion, warp travel is theoretically possible through manipulation of gravity and space time. Since gravity bends space, if you were to manipulate it in such a way as to contract the space in front of you and expand it behind you, you would "fall" accross the shrunken space at speeds not greater than light, but would travel faster then light would have covered that distance if it was uncontracted. Of course, while theory predicts gravitons, we have yet to observe them and certainly know of no way to produce or manipulate them.
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