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From my intro to 'Soft Target', a 'Convention' tale:
Space is BIG. One leisurely light-second to the Moon, five, ten, twenty light-minutes to Mars. Then the numbers run wild...
About eight light-hours out, you reach flatter space. Beyond the deep bell of a star's g-well, cheeky math can bend the c-limit, wrap, wrinkle, warp or bubble space to cross light-years fast...
Imagine 'OverSpace' as an ocean-- No, not the 'Silver Ship on a Silver Sea' beloved of TriVid, think of Cape Horn.
Stars' g-wells form iron-bound island coasts, with summits clad in cloud. Their solar wind's heliopause is breakers on a harbour bar, their bow-shock a barrier reef.
Cutting the galaxy's magnetic field generates incredible aurorae, re-connection arcs writhe, snarl and spit St Elmo's Fire. The neutrino flux is a grim, cold current. The galactic wind howls, slashing at your ship with cosmic rays. Gravity waves ripple, slap or crash across the ship like an earthquake. A great star's paroxysmic death may raise a tsunami...
Between the stars is not empty. Dust and gas mascons gather, swirl like drifts of pumice or weed. Oort clouds' nascent comets drift across the space-lanes like so many titanic ice-bergs. Dim 'Brown Dwarf' sub-stars lurk like Orcadian sea-stacks.
And now it gets hard...
