I understand how FTL ships can produce an anti-Higgs Field to allow mass cancellation. However anything moving at that speed would be annihilated, so if a ship bumped into an atom it would be destroyed. At some of the speeds mention in the book even individual photons could be damaging. Do basic FTL ships have some sort of shield during FTL to stop something like that from destroying the ship? Furthermore, jump drives function instantaneously, in order for that to be accomplished the drive would have to bend space-time and take a short cut through the fourth dimension, in the process it would completely bypass normal space. Because of this it could jump anywhere even if it was surrounded in three dimensions. So is the jump drive just an amplified version of a normal FTL drive, does it function as mentioned above, or is there another mechanism that could accomplish the same thing*? OR am I spending way too much time working out the physics behind a book where physics doesn't apply and should probably just be calling it Magic and leaving it alone?
*Note I liked Bischof's idea for the dive. However, A Higgs field doesn't quite function in the way he described it. It merely interacts with charged particles and through this "bouncing" causes particles to appear as if they are traveling sub-light. A Higgs field would NOT be able to "launch" a ship by "squeezing" it.
According to what Abby says, the jump drive is a standard linear ftl with some modifications, and they cannot jump through object with too high of a mass.
