Interstellar

Blink Travel

For most passengers, travel through blinkspace is hard to distinguish from normal spaceflight. The ship moves at a comfortable g-force, passengers can walk around in plain clothes (if the ship is large enough and pressurized), eat, drink, sleep, exercise, and so on. If they look out through a porthole, they will perceive blinkspace itself as blindness. That said, blink travel takes only a moment to travel through the Blink Gate; most people who have transited the blink don’t perceive it at all.
Early test pilots described blinkspace as a void – a space outside of human perception that is at once blank and cacophonous, infinite and without form. The NHPs that accompanied those first pilots have since been retired, their handlers citing recursive ontological tail-chasing and paracausal obsession; since then, NHP protocols have been updated to include sense-exposure doctrines, allowing them to do as organic pilots do and simply accept the unreality of blinkspace without cascade.
Prolonged exposure to blinkspace is possible and evidenced to be sustainable in rare cases, though the precise processes and long-term effects are thus far unknown.

Normal Spaceflight

Conventional realspace travel makes up the overwhelming bulk of day-to-day transit in the galaxy. Most ships rated for long-haul interstellar travel run routes between blink gates, ideally accruing no more than one to ten years of realtime debt (anywhere from a few months to a year in subjective time) during their journey. Longer journeys are sometimes required for journeys to especially distant worlds and sectors, military deployments, long-range expeditions, new sector surveys, and new colony ventures.
During realspace travel – in the course of a normal acceleration or deceleration pattern – passengers can walk, talk, eat, and drink, and do anything else they could do on a world with anywhere between .1 and 1 g. Gravity might get a little uncomfortable at peak speed (if that speed is higher than what passengers are used to), and always pulls in the opposite direction of travel: “Behind” is always “down”.

Nearlight Bolt

A nearlight bolt (called a “nearlight ejection” in combat and emergency scenarios) is a sudden, often traumatic acceleration to .900 or .995 c. When prepared for a bolt, passengers are usually strapped into pressurized crash couches, medicated appropriately, and secured. Without these precautions, there is a very real and significant chance of pulverization as the ship suddenly, violently moves.
Nearlight bolts are uncomfortable but are often a necessary form of travel for military, government, and emergency response personnel, undertaken when one doesn’t have the luxury of time for a slow, comfortable acceleration. Nearlight ejection is not a common way to get around: it’s an emergency acceleration that serves to disengage from a situation that would otherwise be deadly.
A nearlight bolt is dangerous when you’re prepared and deadly when you’re not. Ships equipped to perform bolts are equipped with crash couches that generate opposing bursts of contained artificial gravity in order to counteract the g-forces that would otherwise crush their crews.

Interstellar travel is common for certain classes of people: military personnel, diplomats, explorers, merchants, Union personnel, colonists, migrants, scientists, and a variety of other wanderers. Many people have reason to travel between the stars, but the necessary equipment is difficult to obtain. Generally speaking, travelers with direct access to this equipment are rare – military personnel on deployment, Union officials, representatives of corporations, universities, or patrons, and those who are simply fantastically wealthy. Other travelers are limited to public blinkships, which travel from one blink station to another according to predefined routes.
Although blinkspace travel is not the only form of interstellar travel, it is the one most people know. Other methods include nearlight bolts and old-fashioned spaceflight.