Is there room in the BTu for alternate forms of FTL?

[iamfanboy]

Anyone who's ever had to struggle through daylight savings time doesn't need Einstein to know that time is a variable, not a constant - and the variation depends on where you stand relative to others. :P

???It's a fictional universe.  What exists is whatever you say exists.

Yes, but I can't say that the Whills in Star Wars are really pairs of invisible fairies, one evil and one good, that sits on each Jedi's shoulders and whispers in his ears to make him do good and bad. When observing a fictional universe, we have the data given to us by that fiction. Making up stuff outside of it is called fanfiction, and generally treated as poor fanfiction at that.

Here's the problem with that.  You're only counting large campaigns waged by the House ruler.  There's plenty of material from the early part of the setting of small raids being carried out by individual nobles, mercenary groups, corporations on their own.  In actions that do not appear in any of the listed campaigns yet were covered by written material and definitely happened in setting.  Where did they get the FTL transport for it?  There are too many cross-border raids in the early setting to be accounted for by the Jumpships they were supposed to be able to have at the time.  They were short enough on shipping that the biggest campaign of a Great House leader only attacked nine systems in his biggest wave in the 4th SW.  Yet once you start gleaning through the same early material you see mentions of dozens of raids occurring on each border within a fairly short time period.  Often not even by House forces but by individual merc units or the forces of various lesser nobles.

So, which fiction are we talking about here? The early GDL novels? Because Trellwan only had a single JumpShip, Verthandi only got visited by a new Jumpship rarely - it was cycling in and out, not stationkeeping over their world, and Duke Ricol is a freaking DUKE and member of the Black Dragon Society which definitely entitles him to his own transport.

In the first Warrior novel, there are several raids described, but they're months and parsecs and fronts apart. The later Warrior novels don't detail anything other than what's consistent with the NAIS 4th Succession War Atlas.

Or are we talking the Shrapnel fiction? Because not a lot of that is dated, and the dates that do exist span a decade.

Or are we talking about the mercenary command books from the early era? Because most of those detail maybe one or two operations a year, with the Wolf's Dragoons being the sole exception - and even they don't do more than that. Even so, those commands all have their own transport, so they can be regarded as fairly unique.

[Talen5000]

So, once they figured out how the Hyperpulse worked and rigged a system for ships, any advancement into other versions of FTL probably went into a closet somewhere and got burned up in an ensuing conflict.

However, some other science fiction genres like to use wormholes and linked systems.  In Heavy Gear, for example, these portals are based on certain gravity-based distortions, and some of the systems, like Caprice, would have been skipped over for garden worlds that could be jumped to directly in BT's timeline. 

But, could they also exist in the BTu? 

Then, there's warp drive.

There's also the possibility of extended periods in sub/hyper space like in Babylon 5 and Warhammer 40k. 

So, do you think it's possible in the fabric of BT reality? And, if such things were possible, like gate-point travel, what kind of effect do you think it might have when first discovered, versus later when it became common knowledge?

I personally think pirates would have a hayday using gates that nobody thought to look for while conducting raids.

Thoughts?

I can see some meddling taking place with KF Drive technology...and there may be one offs and the fact such tech isn't used doesn't mean it can't be played with, especially as a spin off of Fax or existing KF technology

But the KF Drive is one of the core pieces of setting technology that defines the feel and flavour of the universe. It places a hard limit on travel, not only in distance but time.

You can travel from planet A to planet B but each jump takes a week and then you have to spend time on a DropShip because no captain in his right mind would use an insystem pirate point unless absolutely necessary

It slows travel down and it separates worlds. Going from star system to star system is an adventure in and off itself.

 So, while I can see changes and designed based off of KF Drive analogues, and while I can see stories about one off experiments (that don't work out as planned), the KF Drive is too integral to the setting to be easily replaced.

It would be simpler and less disruptive to add shields and artificial gravity. They've even got rules for both.

[SCC]

You can travel from planet A to planet B but each jump takes a week and then you have to spend time on a DropShip because no captain in his right mind would use an insystem pirate point unless absolutely necessary

I think the risk here might have been true during the Age of War and the Late Succession Wars, but at the height of the Star League and after the Clans return? No, captains probably believe the risks are real but they probably aren't, how often are such jumps performed and how often do they fail?

[massey]

I think you could use large gates between systems that had regular traffic.  HPG stations already generate KF fields without having parts of the machine dematerialize and go through the jump.  No reason you couldn't build a large ring that has an inward-facing KF field.

If (for some reason) you can't, it looks like you could build a large ring (miles wide) that supplies power, then have an exceptionally powerful jump core at the center of the ring.  The jump core generates a large enough field that everything within the ring is able to go through the jump.  You could pass the jump core back and forth between two gates.  So with one core, you could send hundreds of dropships through at a time.  They wouldn't have to be attached, they'd just have to be inside the ring.

Makes as much sense as anything else (to me at least).

[Kovax]

One addition that might speed up transportation without disrupting the security aspect would be for major planetary systems to build linear accelerators between the planetary orbits and the jump points.  In essence, it could shave 50% or more off the transit times for cargo (passengers would still need to use the dropships to avoid the massive G forces delivered by the accelerators), but would be useless to an invader, not only because it would incapacitate the crews, because it could be shut down by the defenders at the first sign of trouble.

Another possibility would be a fixed jump installation in space with way more than a 30ly limit (like 300 or so), as "pairs" that transfer a germanium container back and forth every few days.  The cost and power requirements would preclude building more than a handful of such pairs across the entire Inner Sphere, but they could reduce REALLY long journeys to under a year, not half a decade to go from periphery to periphery.  Think of them as "shortcuts", only useful on really long trips between extremely distant points, where you'd generally still need to utilize conventional jumpships to go from the terminals to or from your actual source and destination systems.  Again, they're useless to an opponent because you can shut it down from either end.  You walk (dropship) to the curb (jump point), where the taxi (jumpship) takes you to the railroad station (jump terminal) in a nearby town, and after you take the train out of state, another taxi takes you from the destination station to the next town over, where you walk from the curb to the house.  It beats walking by a long shot, and is still a lot more efficient than paying the exorbitant rates for taxi service from one state to another state hundreds of miles away.  For shorter hops within the nearer parts of your own state, the taxi is still the better option.

[massey]

One addition that might speed up transportation without disrupting the security aspect would be for major planetary systems to build linear accelerators between the planetary orbits and the jump points.  In essence, it could shave 50% or more off the transit times for cargo (passengers would still need to use the dropships to avoid the massive G forces delivered by the accelerators), but would be useless to an invader, not only because it would incapacitate the crews, because it could be shut down by the defenders at the first sign of trouble.

Another possibility would be a fixed jump installation in space with way more than a 30ly limit (like 300 or so), as "pairs" that transfer a germanium container back and forth every few days.  The cost and power requirements would preclude building more than a handful of such pairs across the entire Inner Sphere, but they could reduce REALLY long journeys to under a year, not half a decade to go from periphery to periphery.  Think of them as "shortcuts", only useful on really long trips between extremely distant points, where you'd generally still need to utilize conventional jumpships to go from the terminals to or from your actual source and destination systems.  Again, they're useless to an opponent because you can shut it down from either end.  You walk (dropship) to the curb (jump point), where the taxi (jumpship) takes you to the railroad station (jump terminal) in a nearby town, and after you take the train out of state, another taxi takes you from the destination station to the next town over, where you walk from the curb to the house.  It beats walking by a long shot, and is still a lot more efficient than paying the exorbitant rates for taxi service from one state to another state hundreds of miles away.  For shorter hops within the nearer parts of your own state, the taxi is still the better option.

See, I think command circuits would be much more common than the game makes them.  Most trade routes between major worlds should have a dedicated set of jumpships that make that route and only that route.  Bob the jumpship captain should jump back and forth between Planet A and Planet B.  Over and over again, for decades.

The idea of the jumpship as sort of a long-haul trucker, hauling the same set of dropships for a year-plus, should really be the exception instead of the rule.  Whatever cargo you're carrying is probably valuable enough that you want to sell it as quickly as possible.  If it's valuable enough to transport across the Inner Sphere, it's valuable enough to get it there fast.

[Dayton3]

What happened to warships in the Battletech universe?      They get reconned out?   No,  I've no desire to see Battletech become a space battles universe (we've got plenty already) but I do see the complete absence of FTL warships to be pretty unrealistic.

[RunandFindOut]

The line developers decided that Warships and space combat distracted from the focus of the game (Battlemechs obviously) and arranged the events of the setting to get rid of them in-universe.

Also if you're the same Dayton3 it's been years since I last saw you around before SB permabanned you.

[Maingunnery]

What happened to warships in the Battletech universe?      They get reconned out?   No,  I've no desire to see Battletech become a space battles universe (we've got plenty already) but I do see the complete absence of FTL warships to be pretty unrealistic.

There are still some WarShips, mostly with the Clans. But we do have a lot of Pocket WarShips now, and those are a lot more numerous and disposable.  :)

[iamfanboy]

What I find most impressive in CGL's removal of WarShips from the setting is this:

It followed exactly the same pattern as in the First and Second Succession Wars.

That is to say, they were simply too lethal to each other! On top of that, there was always a trump card in nuclear-tipped missiles which only a tiny fraction of WarShips could survive - and even if you did, would you be able to fight back? Or could they spend another cheap nuke to destroy your fancy expensive WarShip?

WarShips, in the Battletech universe, have always been white elephant projects: Big and impressive to make the idiots with stars on their shoulders feel important, but impractical even at BEST. The First Succession War, as well as the Jihad, just proved it.

[Dayton3]

The line developers decided that Warships and space combat distracted from the focus of the game (Battlemechs obviously) and arranged the events of the setting to get rid of them in-universe.

Also if you're the same Dayton3 it's been years since I last saw you around before SB permabanned you.

That was years ago IIRC.    You still post there?    I spend most of my posting time on wordforge.com,   politicalforum.com and a few others.

[RunandFindOut]

That was years ago IIRC.    You still post there?    I spend most of my posting time on wordforge.com,   politicalforum.com and a few others.

Actually it's gotten so bad there I literally only post about stories I'm interested in.  In fact right now I'm on a two week ban.  Because of things we can't discuss under the rules of this board.  But the mods have been getting more and more zealous and overbearing for years to the point that I've decided just not to post about anything beyond fiction I'm reading there after this last incident.  The fiction is worth hanging around for they have some very good writers in creative writing.

Honestly I don't really mind them writing out the full on Warships.  Because they didn't really make a lot of sense in-universe given their vulnerability to cheap nuke spam and expense.  It does make perfect sense that they would die out again once wars got serious and their replacement with PWS is reasonable in-setting.

[Thunderbolt]

random quick-as-possible thought:

If you imagine the "fabric" of space-time, the same clearly divides the surrounding higher-dimensional "hyperspace" into hyperspace "above" and "below" the fabric of space-time.  This site applies the terms "positive-" and "negative-hyperspace" to those regions of "The Deep".

Unlike that site, however, on the grounds that the "shortest distance between any two points is a straight line", thusly seems more natural to me to suppose that hyperspace jumps propagate through the "lower", "negative" hyperspace, straight from gravity well to well:



Hypothetically, then, the intervention of an orbiting planet (or other massive body) into the "jump path" of the "hyperspace traveler" could cause a "collision" of the craft with the unexpected gravity well of the intervening object:





Might make a semi-plausible storyline plot element for fan-fiction or other writers ???

[Lynx]

Eh, nobody remembers Renegade Legion's T-Space jump setup? You run up to speed and then expend a whole bunch of energy to hop into T-Space, and just go really fast in a straight line proportional to your entry speed. In only a straight line. And if you stay in T-Space for more than a month, welcome to disintegration. No exceptions.

Always thought that setting was cute. Crowbars (maglev cannons) at 30 paces and all that.

As for Warships, the problem with warships really is that whoever has a warship will tend to look at every problem as a nail and the warship as a hammer. Sure, there will be ground objectives that "need to be captured", but the contingency when someone has access to a Warship would likely be "deny the enemy said objectives" by glassing it into the ground.

[glitterboy2098]

Gates can't work, but you could use a type of shuttle, the Ryan Ice Cartel managed to refit jumpships so that three of them could lug along a massive chunk of ice, but gates are no go as the drive itself jumps, it just happens to take everything with it.

The ryan ice cartel only worked because the worlds they serviced didn't mind that their deliveries arrived in many tiny pieces. They weren't refitting ships at all, just stationing jumpships in a formation to that their KF fields don't overlap but don't have appreciable gaps between them, so that when they jump they take the largest chunks of comet along for the ride.

[Sartris]

Do you want warp demons? This is how you get warp demons  :))

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Jump drives operate under the assumption that the shortest distance between two points is Nothing. If a ship goes into hyperspace and discovers that there's Nothing between it and its destination, they must be adjacent. Misjumps are caused when Nothing happens to the ship.

[Charistoph]

Jump drives operate under the assumption that the shortest distance between two points is Nothing. If a ship goes into hyperspace and discovers that there's Nothing between it and its destination, they must be adjacent. Misjumps are caused when Nothing happens to the ship.

I think it would be more appropriate to say that Misjumps happen when something is where nothing was expected.

To go back to an earlier point, natural wormholes may exist in the Battletech universe, but just not natively inside the normal transits of a stellar neighborhood, but could interfere with a Jump and alter its transitions.  This is assuming that nothing else went wrong such as faulty hardware, power surge, or a poor calculation, and results in appearing over an unknown system with a tool-using avian species on one of the goldilocks planets.

[RifleMech]

).

The Honorverse has the alternate dimension, where you can only exit where the gravity is low enough, and at or below a certain speed to arrive safely.

The Honorverse actually has two means of travel. Hyperspace and wormhole terminals.

Hyperspace can only be entered or exited at certain speeds and at distances from a gravity. It still takes time to travel places. Wormholes are rare and can only be entered at near zero speed but is instantaneous.


As far as Battletech goes there is some variety in the types of KF Drives. I think it'd be great if there were more primitive jumpsuits. They could be used as warships but with reduced jump range reducing their threat some.

It'd be nice to have more experimental jump drives too. I would think they're huge expense would keep them rare and houses from getting too adventurous. I'd see these mostly used to investigate the clan homeworlds and other distant periphery realms. They'd also be used as rapid messengers and emergency redeployment.

[Retry]

The idea that in Battletech the physics are "maximum jump range = 30 light years" is something that is a constant, and it lets you play with the variables.

Technically not true.  There's two flavors of Super Jump Drives, one made by the WoB (theoretically infinite range but accurate up to 900 LY, with the side effect of breaking the jump drive after use), and one allegedly developed by Interconnected Unlimited (higher cost and weight but 120 LY range, and doesn't destroy itself).  So it's physically possible to make longer-ranged jump drives in BT.

[Lynx]

Technically not true.  There's two flavors of Super Jump Drives, one made by the WoB (theoretically infinite range but accurate up to 900 LY, with the side effect of breaking the jump drive after use), and one allegedly developed by Interconnected Unlimited (higher cost and weight but 120 LY range, and doesn't destroy itself).  So it's physically possible to make longer-ranged jump drives in BT.

It is but usually, there's no real need for it.

The odd thing about the BTu is that people seem to think the map represent everything in existence. People have to remember it doesn't, and Comstar is a tricksy bugger too. The maps only represent where significant human population are, or systems of interest. Over the centuries and Succession Wars, hundreds if not thousands of systems dropped off the charts. WoBBies exploited that in the Jihad.

The borders that you see drawn in the map? Totally a placebo. There are stars which you can quietly jump to and recharge your drives, and proceed on to deeper targets far behind the borders. There's nothing other than the risk of losing the jumpships and cargo in the dark if/ when you have a drive failure. The risks during the Succession Wars are high enough, and Jumpships so irreplaceable, that nobody really wants to take that risk, but as technology comes back and make replacing jumpships much more viable, deep raids become much more viable.

Are "Super Jump Drives" really needed? From a strategic and tactical point of view... considering the costs involved? Marginal utility IMO. A "suicide burn" one-way unlimited jump drive might be useful but for any troops involved it's a one-way trip, so that's pretty much last resort. If the reliability of existing jumpships can be improved such that "quiet recharge in the deep dark" is less of a risk, the need for "better" jump drives is not that critical.

[Ogra_Chief]

As mentioned by others a smaller and unique alternative to the K-F drive would add some nice nuance to space travel provided the means of traveling adhered to established lore. Specialized dropships/tramps would be a welcome addition moving forward in the timeline. Prototype and one-off designs can easily be retconned in as they have in the past.

It is called 'Battle-Tech' afterall. Why not give AeroTech some.  :)

[Lynx]

As mentioned by others a smaller and unique alternative to the K-F drive would add some nice nuance to space travel provided the means of traveling adhered to established lore. Specialized dropships/tramps would be a welcome addition moving forward in the timeline. Prototype and one-off designs can easily be retconned in as they have in the past.

It would be interesting to have a smaller K-F drive that has less range, but more tolerance for gravity fluctuations.

Current drives can only jump to where gravity is sufficient low, zenith and nadir points being the norm, with temporal null points (pirate points) being a risky but possible route. Having a K-F drive that can jump deeper into gravity wells will change things significantly. Make a ship carrying a short-K-F drive dockable to a Jumpship, and then we suddenly get range extension beyond typical. Heck, intra-system K-F jumps become much more of a possibility too.

[Retry]

It is but usually, there's no real need for it.

The odd thing about the BTu is that people seem to think the map represent everything in existence. People have to remember it doesn't, and Comstar is a tricksy bugger too. The maps only represent where significant human population are, or systems of interest. Over the centuries and Succession Wars, hundreds if not thousands of systems dropped off the charts. WoBBies exploited that in the Jihad.

The borders that you see drawn in the map? Totally a placebo. There are stars which you can quietly jump to and recharge your drives, and proceed on to deeper targets far behind the borders. There's nothing other than the risk of losing the jumpships and cargo in the dark if/ when you have a drive failure. The risks during the Succession Wars are high enough, and Jumpships so irreplaceable, that nobody really wants to take that risk, but as technology comes back and make replacing jumpships much more viable, deep raids become much more viable.

Are "Super Jump Drives" really needed? From a strategic and tactical point of view... considering the costs involved? Marginal utility IMO. A "suicide burn" one-way unlimited jump drive might be useful but for any troops involved it's a one-way trip, so that's pretty much last resort. If the reliability of existing jumpships can be improved such that "quiet recharge in the deep dark" is less of a risk, the need for "better" jump drives is not that critical.

The IU-spec super-jump drive, with 4x the range of the regular jump drive, can effectively cover 4x more border than a regular ship.  Furthermore, such a ship would cover 16x the area of a regular jump drive.

An IU super-jump drive warship based on the border can threaten a far larger part of the border than a traditional warship, and can in fact jump over those ships at the border to hit more rear-ward objectives up to 120 light-years away.  The Fed Suns could easily put most of, say, the Capellan Confederation or the Taurian Concordat at risk with a well-positioned strike force of these enhanced ships.  If the super-jump drive can equip a battery, then it can jump back to safety nearly immediately.  A traditional warship or jump ship doing a raid from uninhabited sectors would require several weeks going to the target, and several weeks coming back.

To effectively cover a Great House's borders from one of those deep raids, one would only require maybe a half-dozen task forces of Super-Jump + Battery warships located at strategic points to effectively cover their entire territory from strikes in real time.  One SOS HPG signal from the victim planet to the appropriate warship task force (ok, well, a few signals from HPG emitters and relays due to their 50 LY range), and the fleet is able to react nearly instantaneously to your space pirates, mercenaries, or daring house-based strike fleet.  You can't really do that with the range of conventional ships at all.

And that's just military.  4x the range can likely cut down on transit time for trade runs.  Going from Sian (CC) to Atreus (FWL) in conventional craft would take 9 jumps.  Or from Sian to Terra, also 9 jumps.  You can cut that down to 2 jumps with a 120 LY range, in both cases.  With a battery, cargo can be loaded on Terra, shipped out, and unloaded on Sian the next day.  It'd take months of transit time with a conventional Jumpship.

So no, I don't agree that there's limited utility in increasing jump range.

[Lynx]

So no, I don't agree that there's limited utility in increasing jump range.

How to I put this.. The limited utility isn't from the lack of applications; 120 LY range is 120 LY range. The limitation comes from really how many can you get into wide usage, and the opportunity cost. Put another way, it is putting tactical/ operational speed vs. strategic speed.

If the bulk of your transport fleet are limited to 60LY per month, then you run the risk of out-running your logistics and reinforcements; if you can get one of these 120LY Jumpships at the cost of 2 or more normal Jumpships, then you are reducing your lift capacity at a strategic level for every "super Jumpship" you use. If your recharge rate of these Jumpships is slower than the average Jumpship, in strategic speed and lift capacity you actually lose out.

So yes, I totally agree that there are some very good uses for such improved K-F drives, but the utility at a strategic level may be hamstrung by other factors. If these improved drives are economical enough to be widespread commercially, then strategic thinking would change... but if they are, then the other side got them too, which brings us largely back to a stalemate. It's only if one House can exclusively own a technological advance that would really provide a strong strategic advantage.

[Daryk]

What's the cost multiplier for the 4x range jump drive?  Because I'm positive if it's possible at all, it will become widespread very quickly.  Commercial pressure (profit margins) will make it so in a short time.

[Thunderbolt]

Technically not true.  There's two flavors of Super Jump Drives, one made by the WoB (theoretically infinite range but accurate up to 900 LY, with the side effect of breaking the jump drive after use), and one allegedly developed by Interconnected Unlimited (higher cost and weight but 120 LY range, and doesn't destroy itself).  So it's physically possible to make longer-ranged jump drives in BT.

As @Charistoph posted above, misjumps occur when an unexpected gravity well intrudes the jumppath

Understand that is why standard jump points avoid the orbital plane, eg Jupiter has so much mass it can create significant curvature in the fabric of space time out to a range of around 6AU = 0.001 lyr or so

Space time warpage is approximately proportional to object mass over range (M/R), so a super Jupiter of 10 Jupiter masses could cause significant curvature to 60AU = 0.01 lyr...

Maybe something for star system designers to consider, a super massive planet could push the safe jump points far far above / below the orbital plane?

Anyway, if you use that relation to calculate a "considerable curvature cross section (pi R²)", along with the space density of stars near the Sun, you find that your mean free jump path is quite close to your 900lyr figure...

Suggesting that the WoB figured out how to perform the maximal hyperspace jump, before it starts to become exceedingly likely you will encounter significant space time distortion which would impede, disrupt destabilize your jump?

Also turns out that most of your curvature cross section actually comes from the few super massive OB type stars out there along your path (the "shadow" of your hyperspace path projected back into the fabric of space time)...

So prominent star forming regions, like the scorpius centaurus association along the periphery of the LC, could create veritable "walls of warpage" which might be very dangerous to jump through??

[Charistoph]

The Honorverse actually has two means of travel. Hyperspace and wormhole terminals.

Hyperspace can only be entered or exited at certain speeds and at distances from a gravity. It still takes time to travel places. Wormholes are rare and can only be entered at near zero speed but is instantaneous.

Honorverse wormholes are a "a stable gravitic anomaly that caused a flaw in normal space providing access through hyperspace", or "a piece of frozen hyperspace in real space".  One cannot disconnect wormholes from hyperspace here. 

But that's a completely different universe and probably has no bearing on how wormholes may operate in the Btech universe if the developers choose to introduce them at all.  Even if it did, the nature of the Honorverse wormhole is such that no Btech ship could use them, as they require gravity sails and highly tuned sensors to properly navigate.  But hey, if they could do that, transit times would be tremendously altered by having Thrust ratings of 700-1000 alone.

[RifleMech]

Honorverse wormholes are a "a stable gravitic anomaly that caused a flaw in normal space providing access through hyperspace", or "a piece of frozen hyperspace in real space".  One cannot disconnect wormholes from hyperspace here. 

But that's a completely different universe and probably has no bearing on how wormholes may operate in the Btech universe if the developers choose to introduce them at all.  Even if it did, the nature of the Honorverse wormhole is such that no Btech ship could use them, as they require gravity sails and highly tuned sensors to properly navigate.  But hey, if they could do that, transit times would be tremendously altered by having Thrust ratings of 700-1000 alone.

My reply was more to say that the Honorverse had more than one way to travel between systems not so much that Battletech should have them. They're also kind of limited. They only link two places so you can't use them to go wherever you want to go. If Battletech did have wormholes they wouldn't have to have the same mechanic to operate them. They seem to operate different depending on the universe. They would speed up travel time though. That's why I like the newer KF Drives.

[Charistoph]

My reply was more to say that the Honorverse had more than one way to travel between systems not so much that Battletech should have them. They're also kind of limited. They only link two places so you can't use them to go wherever you want to go. If Battletech did have wormholes they wouldn't have to have the same mechanic to operate them. They seem to operate different depending on the universe. They would speed up travel time though. That's why I like the newer KF Drives.

I was pointing out in the first paragraph that the Honorverse wormholes were still hyperspace, just a very focused form of them.  It would be like saying you have two forms of travel to get to your store, driving the freeway or driving the arterial streets.  You're still driving and not flying, swimming, or burrowing through the ground.

The second paragraph was more to keep the discussion on topic and striving to avoid a complete derailment.