I have had some thoughts on hyperdrive design, but this isn't my expertise. ( I doubt if anyone is experienced in a working hyperdrive technology system. ) This will be complete fiction as opposed to my other posts. Feel free to call it a walk on the wild side as it is only a hypothesis.

I do have a degree in physics. BSc. Bottom of my class! One thing that they tried to teach us was that gravity travelled at the speed of light and yet, when we did the calculations, we had to assume an instantaneous value for gravity. A few of my fellow students wanted to use relativistic effects in the calculations to see how that would effect the numbers. The professor told us that they wouldn't work out properly. We all thought that this was a bit funny, but I had no urge to try ramming my head around relativity and gravity at the same time. I felt that this was a wrong approach. I couldn't prove it, but it felt wrong.
Every one will tell you that Special Relativity concludes that NOTHING can travel faster than the speed of light. Pure BS. Special Relativity does not deal with gravity at all and General Relativity PREDICTS that the speed of light is the speed of gravity too. Einstein was not happy with General Relativity. We don't know why. I propose that Special Relativity says that you cannot accelerate to the speed of light if you are a material object. You simply run out of energy. If you convert your whole mass into energy, you still cannot accelerate a similar mass to the speed of light.

A slight bit off topic. There is this idea of Dark Matter and Dark Energy going around. None of it is proven, yet. The Dark Matter theory is that there must be something pulling at the galaxy from the outside to accelerate the stars to their velocities as they orbit the centre. The problem is that Newton's theory of gravity tells us that as a body moves out in orbit, the period of that orbit is longer; the velocity slows. As it moves in closer, the period becomes shorter; the velocity increases. The stars don't behave in this way. The ones closest to the centre do behave that way until a certain point ( about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way from the centre ) and then they keep the same velocity regardless of their distance from the centre until they get near the edge and then their velocity drops off. Dark energy is the theory that there must be something pushing the galaxies apart because there was a sudden jump in the speed of the galaxies away from ours a few millennia ago. I propose that we don't have to dream up new materials to do the things that we see. We don't understand gravity at all. We see the effects, but there must be more to it than what Newton had in mind. We know that our physics formulas break down when they try to describe the interior of a black hole and the physicists surmise that we have one in the centre of our galaxy because so many other galaxies have them too. We know that the gravity close to a black hole is enormous and when we come to the event horizon, it's so much that light cannot even escape it. But what happens inside this event horizon? Does the force of gravity keep climbing? Let's suppose that it does. Black holes also rotate. The gravity inside would be churning and increasing. There must be some relief somewhere. Let's suppose that there is another sort of gravity. A fast gravity that we can't feel because it doesn't interact the same way with normal matter. It is too fast. It passes right through unless the matter exhibits a strong gravity field of it's own. It has to hit a star to interact with normal matter and then it changes back to regular gravity. Let's just suppose that there is more than one speed for this fast gravity. A sort of quantum leap for each level. As the gravity hits a star, it drops a level and another one and another one until it transforms to normal gravity so that it can interact with normal matter. If we take this thought experiment to this level, then we can see that the gravity coming from our black hole would start out with a whole bunch of quantum levels of gravity and as they were changed, the higher levels would be reduced until there was nothing left but plain old slow gravity. Isn't this what we are seeing at the edge of our own galaxy and others? All the stars are racing around at the same speed, regardless of how far away from the centre they are. Close in, the stars are behaving normally. The gravity is racing through those stars because it is too energised. Our galaxy is moving away from the others because the black hole formed only recently in galactic time. The other galaxies felt the change in our gravity field when the black hole was formed. Suddenly, our galaxy is not putting out regular gravity, it is putting out fast gravity and our stars are getting pushed out. Any change in our gravity wouldn't be felt by others for a long time from when it happened in a light speed restricted universe. I suspect that they are still adjusting to our new gravitational output.

Now the fun begins! We have fast gravity and slow gravity. If each quantum level of gravity mirrors quantum levels in chemistry, then odd numbers squared are the form that it will take. Now suppose that we had a way to control gravity. We don't generate it as much as change our gravitational potential at that point. Uphill will be where we point our gravity modifier if it is given enough energy to overcome the gravity of the region. If we could take that gravity modifier and put it through a device that moves it up a quantum level ( or two or three ) we could ride that wave anywhere we like. We didn't accelerate. We bypassed Einstein's theory of relativity all together. We would need a way to change course and I think that that could be accomplished by modifying the field input on one side of the device somehow.

www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp is an article with some of what I described. He says that the speed of gravity is between 20 to 120 times the speed of light. Let's say that it is 121 times the speed of light. Humour me; it's my first time at this. That will be 11 squared. If we use odd numbers, we can say, 3*11 and square the whole lot to find out it's speed.

Larry Niven wrote about a series of science fiction stories called Known Space. In it, he uses a hyperdrive shunt to do the work of moving people around his worlds. His hyperdrive shunt moves people at about 121 times the speed of light. Other items in his series also exhibit quantum levels and they are of the form ( base number * quantum number ) ^ 2. He also says that the devices don't work if you try to put one inside the other. The quantum levels are in the form of prime numbers. You can't have ( base * quantum * base times quantum ) ^ 2 . You can have a higher quantum or a lower quantum, but you can't have one that is divisible by any other number than one or itself. So, if we use this as a basis for our idea, then we can have a base speed of 121 times the speed light ( one is not prime ) times a quantum of three ( the first odd prime ) and square the lot. That is a speed of 1089 times the speed of light. This would be fast enough to travel around our local area at just under 3 light years per day. Another limitation is that we have to be far enough from our sun to energise our hyperdrive shunt. Out beyond the orbit of Neptune or about two light hours from our sun. Larger suns would entail further travel to ensure that our drive works.

Interesting, but we already have a thread covering the many possible propulsions for faster than light travel.

Where is it? Does anyone have a theory for fast gravity? Dark matter that isn't?