QuasiSpace
QuasiSpace is one of the "higher dimensions" that forms a space-time analogue to TrueSpace, home to the Arilou Lalee'lay and only recently discovered by Humans during the events of the Second War. It is only accessible from HyperSpace, leading some to suspect that it bears an analogous relationship to HyperSpace that HyperSpace does to TrueSpace, since HyperSpatial distances are enormously compressed in QuasiSpace. However, HyperSpatial relationships in QuasiSpace are even more distorted than TrueSpatial relationships in HyperSpace, and, unlike with HyperSpace and TrueSpace, there appears to be no correlation between the access points connecting QuasiSpace to HyperSpace and any natural phenomena like gravity wells.
The only Human to travel extensively in QuasiSpace was Captain Zelnick of the Vindicator, who was given free passage through QuasiSpace during the War by the Arilou as part of their effort to assist the New Alliance of Free Stars in their struggle against the Ur-Quan. During that time a number of strange, seemingly inexplicable and self-contradictory observations were made about the properties of QuasiSpace. Superficial observations of QuasiSpace show it to be similar to HyperSpace, a four-dimensional space-time in which time passed at the same standard rate as in HyperSpace. It was filled with a dense, chaotic permeating medium that appears to glow at a higher temperature than HyperSpace, radiating into the green levels of the visible spectrum rather than the red. However, upon closer examination, the energy formations in QuasiSpace appeared to act very strangely, forming short-lived localized regions of low energy appearing as dark spots on a map rather than forming high-energy flares as HyperSpace does.
Suspicious observers soon realized that observations for a region of QuasiSpace were exactly identical to readings for a similar region of HyperSpace, only all visuals were inverted -- to the Human eye. Humans' visual systems perceive the color green as an opposite to the color red, and QuasiSpace radiated a green color that complemented the red color of HyperSpace to the human eye perfectly; every observed "black hole" and "dark cloud" in QuasiSpace corresponded to a commonly observed energy flare in HyperSpace.
More bizarre than this was the behavior of the Vindicator's own systems in QuasiSpace. The Vindicator's systems appeared to respond exactly as they did in HyperSpace, expending energy to accelerate through the QuasiSpatial medium and being dragged to a halt relative to the QuasiSpatial absolute reference frame when acceleration ceased. However, upon closer examination the Vindicator's engineers found that, although the Vindicator's engines appeared to be firing, the Vindicator was consuming none of its fuel.
All of these considerations, along with the Arilou's use of the English term "QuasiSpace" in describing their home dimension ("that which appears like space but is not") support the theory that the physical appearance of QuasiSpace was an illusion, generated either by the minds of the Vindicator's crew or somehow created by the Arilou, and that the real structure of QuasiSpace obeys much subtler, stranger physical laws.
QuasiSpace provides access to Falayalaralfali, the home planet of the Arilou Lalee'lay, according to them moved from TrueSpace and kept in a giant TrueSpace pocket similar to a Hyperdrive bubble by some unknown technology. The creation of overlapping regions of QuasiSpace and HyperSpace appears to be a much more difficult, complex process than overlapping TrueSpace and HyperSpace, involving augmenting normal Hyperdrive with a more subtle form of manipulation of space-time known as "Dimensional Fatigue", a term coined by the Androsynth. DF appears to create a deeper, more basic change in local physical constants that allows dimensions even more disparate from each other than TrueSpace and HyperSpace to overlap.
Apparently Dimensional Fatigue is easier to achieve in QuasiSpace than HyperSpace. The local region of QuasiSpace features a very tight cluster of several portals into HyperSpace, probably all close together because they were all formed by the same Dimensional Fatigue event. However, there is only one portal to QuasiSpace from HyperSpace in our region of space. This portal is located in the the Chandrasekhar constellation; it manifests as a large region of green-glowing space visible from HyperSpace and mistaken for a variable star by the Spathi, as it only appears for a period of about three Human days on a roughly thirty-day cycle, such that its open times occur near the end of each month on the Human calendar -- a mnemonic Zelnick's crew used to locate the natural portal in their first dealings with the Arilou. Apart from this portal, QuasiSpace can only be accessed via a QuasiSpace Portal Spawner. Only the Arilou are known to possess this technology; the only time they have created a Portal Spawner for another race's use was their donation of one to Zelnick during the War, which was subsequently destroyed along with the rest of the Vindicator.
QuasiSpace Portals
This table shows the QuasiSpace locations and HyperSpace endpoints of the 15 uni-directional portals and the single bi-directional portal.
| QS portal | HS endpoint | HS endpoint description |
|---|---|---|
| 500.0, 500.0 | 43.8, 637.2 | center of Arilou space; bi-directional; open monthly 17th - 20th |
| 476.0, 458.0 | 409.1, 774.8 | northwest edge in Ur-Quan space |
| 502.0, 460.0 | 318.4, 490.6 | between Spathi and ZFP space |
| 468.0, 464.0 | 921.1, 610.4 | far west on the map; near Arcturus |
| 516.0, 466.0 | 567.3, 120.7 | between VUX, Mycon, and Yehat space |
| 506.0, 474.0 | 191.0, 92.6 | near Earth |
| 458.0, 492.0 | 860.7, 15.1 | far southeast on the map |
| 492.0, 492.0 | 5.0, 164.7 | in the middle of Ilwrath space |
| 476.0, 496.0 | 611.7, 413.1 | south edge in Ur-Quan space |
| 448.0, 504.0 | 565.8, 971.2 | far north on the map |
| 466.0, 514.0 | 230.2, 398.8 | in the middle of Spathi space |
| 520.0, 514.0 | 11.2, 940.9 | far northwest on the map, near the Slylandro |
| 530.0, 528.0 | 775.2, 890.6 | between Supox and Utwig space |
| 544.0, 532.0 | 36.8, 633.2 | in the middle of Arilou space |
| 488.0, 538.0 | 973.5, 315.3 | in the middle of Druuge space |
| 520.0, 540.0 | 585.0, 621.3 | in the middle of Ur-Quan space |