o_

not to militarize

not to militarize space had collapsed once there was a thriving presence in space to protect—or prey upon. Nobody had a real 'space navy,' but there were quite a few armed ships. Most of the colonies had some sort of rudimentary defensive systems, and Terra had some pretty advanced orbital defenses. Most of them were aimed at planetary threats, but the existence of armed spacecraft meant they'd been designed to shoot the other way, too."
She sipped more coffee, and he remembered what she'd said about being a 'histortech.' He could believe it; she had the air of someone expounding on a special interest area.
"They had FTL, but they were still using reaction drives. Basically, they used what you'd call the Bussard ram principle to accelerate in normal-space before they translated." She paused at his puzzled expression, then shrugged. "I can explain that later—right now, just remember that they managed interstellar travel by first accelerating and then ducking into another dimension where the velocity attained in this one is effectively accelerated to a multiple of light-speed, then dropping back into normal-space and decelerating. That's one reason the trip would take them so long; they needed to accelerate in normal-space before they could kick in their FTL systems. Okay?"
"If you say so," he said dubiously.
"We manage things a lot better now," she assured him, "but all this was four or five hundred years ago, remember."