[hider=Meanwhile! An Introduction To Faster-Than-Light Travel]
 Hey. I'm Doctor Slime. Today we're going to be talking about faster-than-light travel. Buckle your seatbelts, keep your Nurliffas close and prepare yourself for an educational, magical journey.

 Everything you see around you exists in what we call the Real. It's called that, because it's real! But it's not the [i]only[/i] Real, there are so many of them that we get a headache just [i]thinking[/i] about how many of them there are. So we don't think about that too much! But how come we don't see these other ones? That's because they're neatly stacked on top of one another, and they're separated by the [i]Unreal[/i].

 Now the [i]Unreal[/i] is a dangerous place. Think how scary the [i]Real[/i] is sometimes! There's monsters under your bed, warfare on a galactic scale and sometimes you run out of ice cream. The [I]Unreal[/i] is scarier than that. There are different rules in the [i]Unreal[/i], which make it even more scary, but there are ways of using the [I]Unreal[/i] to our benefit. One of these is being able to travel faster-than-light.

 Try to imagine a layer of oil on top of a layer of water. The oil is the [i]Real[/i], all thick and gloopy. Underneath that is the water, which is the [i]Unreal[/i]. The water has eddies and currents, but the oil mostly remains still. You can move a [i]lot[/i] faster in the water than you can in the oil, and the currents can whisk you away even further still. So if a ship could get from the [i]Real[/i] to the [I]Unreal[/i], it could reach incredible speeds.

 But how does a warp engine get your ship to the [i]Unreal[/i]? There's a lot of complicated science involved, but it's my job to break it down into bite-size nuggets of pure wisdom for you to digest with your brain-stomachs, so that's what I'll do. Warp Engines are all built around a very clever, very [i]heavy[/i] engineering marvel; the [i]Compressive Resonance Yield Engine[/i] (usually called the CRYEngine) which, when activated, is [i]so[/i] heavy it punches through the oil of the Real and into the water of the Unreal beneath it. The internal "flasks" of the Warp Engine are then filled with the Unreal, until the ship itself is so dense that it sinks into the Unreal. This is why every Warp Engine is designed with the mass of the ship in mind, as it determines just how large the flasks need to be. You wouldn't want to take on too much, because you might sink [i]too[/i] deep into the Unreal. If you don't take enough in, however, you might find you can't even reach the Unreal, or pop out of the Unreal at the wrong moment.

 Once safely in the Unreal, and at a suitable depth, the engine then squirts concentrated jets of the Unreal out in a jet stream, propelling the ship in the desired direction. This also has the effect of making the ship lighter, such that it as it travels along, it also goes up towards the Real, guaranteeing a safe return. Pilots have to calculate exactly how much Unreal to take on board and store in the flasks of their engine, so that they pop back into the Real at just the right time.

 Well, it looks like I've got a bit of time to fill, so let's take some questions submitted via the lecture-stream chat. Hmmm, okay. Here's one from XXX_Einheggar. This cheeky fellow wants to know about the flasks, and how they work.

 The flasks serve two purposes. Firstly, they contain the Unreal, and their exact material composition varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. They're all technically closely guarded corporate secrets, and I'm not going to lose my job by telling you what they are, but I'm positive that any amateur warp engine makers could find such information on the SpaceNet. Now their second purpose is to aid in the protection of the ship during travel through the Unreal. These flasks, being products of the Real, are [i]filled[/i] with it, even though they look empty, before they're filled with Unreal by the CRYEngine. The stored Real is squeezed out by the Unreal as the flasks are filled, and are used to reinforce the Real within the ship. Trust me, you want to make sure your ship, and everything inside it, stays as [i]Real[/i] as possible.

 Ah, here's a nice question. Can anything live in the Unreal?

 There's a saying, and that saying is "life finds a way". There [i]are[/i] things that make their home in the Unreal, but these creatures are very different from us. Truly alien and strange. They seem to be drawn to ships that travel through the Unreal, "swimming" alongside the ships, and you'll likely see them if you choose to travel through the Unreal yourselves one day. Life within the Unreal is just as diverse as life within the Real, and it is theoretically possible that structured societies and chains of restaurants could have formed there. Scientists have yet to see any sign of this, presumably because the strange, chaotic rules that govern the Unreal makes it difficult for such societies to form. Or maybe they're just very shy! Ha-ha-ha-ha-okay-next-question.

 Hmm, this one's a safety question. QoF_COR3 asks: "What happens if your engine is miscalibrated and takes too much Unreal in?"

 Well, you sink too deep, and that's that, really. The University of Lilistar did send some probes down there to simulate a miscalibration event, but they've yet to return. Until then, we can't be sure of what's going on in the furthest depths of the Unreal. One theory is that the probes will return, but it will take a long time for them to surface back in the [i]Real[/i], and so we just have to wait. Another theory is that it's been caught, trapped by something in the [i]Unreal[/i], and escape is impossible. Another theory holds that the probe will have sunk so far that it punched through into another [i]Real[/i] beneath it, whi- ah, right, that's got even more questions coming in.

 The [i]Unreal[/i] is beneath us, and beneath that, is another [i]Real[/i]. Above us, then, is the [i]Unreal[/i] of another [i]Real[/i], which we often refer to as the [i]Proreal[/i]. What we refer to as the Unreal is the Proreal of the Real beneath us, and our own Proreal is the Unreal of the Real above us. We've yet to find a way to become "light" enough to travel up through our own Proreal. However, we believe that the further "up" the stack you travel, the slower things are, and the further "down" the stack you go, the faster things are. Presumably, the stack is anchored at the bottom by a Real that is constantly going through the motions of explosion and collapse instantly, while the "top" of the stack is a place where time moves so slowly that it may as well be stuck.

 This concludes our lecture, "An Introduction to Faster-Than-Light". If you'd like to know more about the relationship between stars and other super-dense objects and the Unreal, sign up for our next lecture. 
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