It breaks relativity as all FTL must; my question was aimed at whether or not the Outsider-verse FTL is exploitable as something that can cause serious paradoxes relevant for the characters. As far as I am aware, all these schemes showing FTL completely breaking sanity by producing unsolvable paradoxes are predicated on the existence of effective FTL communication (which Outsider doesn't have) and unlimited FTL (in the sense that you can travel arbitrarily, like, say, with warp drive in Star Trek). Even then, they usually need to involve a ship moving at relativistic velocities for time paradoxes to occur when this ship perceives effect preceding the cause and communicating this via FTL communication.Nathan_ wrote:While it isn't time travel, it is still a causal violation since the ship arrives long before the light of the ship making the jump gets to where it is. Whether this can be exploited to cause any wierdness is another matter.Arioch wrote:The system is constructed so that causal violations are essentially impossible. The entry and exit points of the jump are light years apart, so even if you did end up going backwards in time a fraction of a second, no one would notice.Victor_D wrote:(I wonder, Arioch, if you had given some thought to possible causality violations brought about by the existence of FTL; in a large part, these violations become far less likely if no FTL communications and no "free" FTL travel exists)
In Outsider, a ship moving at relativistic speeds in relation to local space (say, the Leido-Sala theatre) may perceive significant causality violations occurring all around, but it has no means of communicating anything it sees back to base in time to make a difference, hence why this cannot be used e.g. to warn the Loroi fleet of Umiak invasion before it happens and cause other kinds of weirdness.