Foldspace

This article refers to elements from Expanded Dune
Pages for this subject as it appears in other canons:

[[../|Original Dune]]

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Foldspace was the dimension in which Guild heighliners traveled, allowing them to go faster than the speed of light. When going through folded space, the heighliner traveled in-between the fabric(s) of space and time, enabling it to enter another dimension, separate from our space-time continuum.

The theory was based on a model that suggests that if time as we knew it was a straight line, the line could be "folded" at two distinct points to allow the vehicle to jump instantly from one point to the other. Space travel without the folding effect would have been impossible, taking possibly thousands of years at the farthest distances in the galaxy, even if the starship was travelling at the speed of light itself.

Original Dune[]

In Chapterhouse: Dune the space travel mechanics are briefly explained in a bit more detail. The Holtzman-engines create a "Warp-bubble" and the entire Known Universe actually moves "through" the Heighliner and its Warp-bubble to the exact point the (at the time artificial) Navigator(-Thinking Machine) computes.