Quote Originally Posted by Anonymouswizard View Post
So was I. The presentation in the trilogy is relatively uplifting, but it's brief compared to the treatment in Galactic North



It doesn't. The universe takes offence and retroactively kills you. At the very least if you try doing it via inertia manipulation, the only method tried in the series.

Interstellar travel is sublight. Human starships are four kilometre* long cones (to deal with drag from interstellar hydrogen) covered in ice, with two spurs a kilometre from the end (which then tapers to a point) each with an engine attached. These engines invoice such a powerful energy source that they throw remass out at practically the speed of light, allowing practically constant adventuresome at 1g. Cue near-light travel, hence the name Lighthugger.

Basically, brute force and it's incredibly uncasual for a space opera. Most Lighthuggers are falling apart, take subjective years and occasionally objective decades to get anywhere, and the Conjoiners have stopped building the bloody things and won't give anybody else the plans.

* With one half sized exception.
Reynolds is also an astrophycisist, so he applies relativity quite consistently. A journey that takes a decade or two of "outside" time may only take a few years "ship" time.

This has the interesting side effect that ship crews (who don't go into cryosleep like their passengers do) have become their own isolated culture, the Ultras. Many of them are several centuries old in planetside time and basically never leave their mostly empty ships.