Tachyon Spaceship

A tachyon spaceship is a spaceship that always moves faster-than-light. It must be converted from tardyon (slower than light) matter into tachyon (faster than light) matter at the start of the journey and then back again at the destination.

There are a few techniques for a tachyon FTL drive:


 * Placing all the ship’s atoms in excited tachyon states so that they could all be triggered at the same instant is done by optimizing the transition from tardyons to tachyons. Complex modulated electromagnetic waves can control the transition using microelectronic components.
 * Using quantum mechanical tunneling, a particle with insufficient energy to pass "over" a barrier instead passes "through" it. If a ship can get close enough to the lightspeed barrier, it may be possible to "tunnel" across using tachyons, and then the ship will have to lose energy to go faster.
 * Wave phenomena can be represented by complex or imaginary numbers. Since tachyons have imaginary mass, a full 90o rotation would correspond to a conversion to tachyons. Getting a spaceship off the real-line in complex space and onto an imaginary-line would require that it makes a right angle turn in mass space, turning the ship into a tachyon.

Tardyon and tachyon interactions obey the laws of relativity and possess symmetric equivalence. Travelers in tachyonland should observe what appears to be another tardyonic universe. That is, a tardyon starship moving at 0.5c in our universe which suddenly converts into tachyons will be traveling at an effective 2c relative to our universe; but in the tachyon regime, where the vessel really is, it will still appear to be moving only at 0.5c.