Hyperspace

Hyperspace is a parallel dimension “above” or “outside” of the normal dimensions of space-time, making it useful as a kind of bypass for space vessels. Distances are vastly distorted in hyperspace compared to ordinary or normal space, allowing a space-faring vessel to travel much greater distances in the same amount of time. Typically, the technology to access hyperspace uses gravity generators to “fold” space, creating an aperture. The same technology is used to exit hyperspace back into the normal universe. Not all faster-than-light vessels use hyperspace technology: some create “warp fields” to travel faster than the speed of light within normal space, but hyperspace technology is fairly common amongst space-faring species and worlds. Indeed, it is essential for civilizations to extend beyond one star system.
Hyperspace is also used as a medium for transmitting faster-than-light signals across vast distances of space, although quantum entanglement, psionics, and other means of FTL communication and transmission are known. A signal beamed through hyperspace can be picked up by a hyperspace communicator at its destination, although hyperspace signals can also be intercepted en route and even blocked, if the transmission and reception points are known.
Hyperspace itself appears like a vast “silver darkness” (as the Lor have called it), shimmering with a faint rainbow sheen. While thought of as a lifeless void, starfaring civilizations abound with tall tales of encounters with strange forms of life within hyperspace, as well as derelict “ghost ships” adrift in the void for who knows how long. There may even be a kind of “current” in hyperspace, pulling such hulks off course and depositing them into a kind of “cosmic graveyard” of wrecks, floating alongside rubble, debris, and the corpses of vast and alien creatures.
More advanced civilizations (beyond even galactic societies like the Imperium and the Unity) have additional capabilities for manipulating hyperspace, even to the point of doing away with space vessels altogether and using hyperspatial gateways to move between worlds as easily as between rooms. They appear to have accessed (or created) deeper levels of hyperspace, which may connect to other dimensions and realities. Certainly scientists theorize that hyperspace may be an “arterial” dimension, interconnecting parallel realities which all float “inside” of it, so the hyperspace of Earth-Prime’s dimension is the same, ultimately, as the hyperspace found in every parallel universe.

Type

Dimensional plane