Well this one took me about two days.. one for each second of film! This is another 'prop' for my furry science fiction stories and so on that I want to do. (Yes I want to do them in Blender! Though I will probably end up with a comic style because of the time it takes to animate.)

This is the effect that one would see if you were to watch one of my space ships 'jump drive' activate. (Think something like hyperspace)

o==--- Warning Science Mumbojumbo ---==o

Ok, so what's a jump drive? Well instead of warp speed or hyperspace to take a craft from one solar system to another the 'earthlings' discovered an interesting little trick. If you have a small enough singularity (black hole) that you can control you can fold space/time in such a way that the distance from point A (say in out solar system) to point B (say in the Proxima Centari system) is zero (Or very very nearly that, one can never make it zero it would take to much energy!)

To illustrate this point in lay-mans terms I'll use the example they used in the movie 'Event Horizon'. Take a piece of paper and punch a hole in it on each end. Normally the shortest distance between the two holes would be a straight line, but if you fold the paper in half so the two holes line up you can pass a pen through from one side to the other in nearly no space (the thickness of the paper) Then once the pen is through you unfold the paper again and your pen is at point B. That's how a jump drive works. (I didn't come up with this idea, It's been around longer than I've been alive I believe. This is an actual theory on how we might be able to visit other solar systems.)

So why do I need a 'jump drive' for a story? The answer is simple. The real journey from here to Proxima Centari at the speed of light (which we can't even get close too) would take years. IRL that would be years of boring nothingness followed by a few days of shear terror trying to slow the ship down before you missed the system or slammed into some funky space junk like an asteroid, an Ort cloud, a planet, their sun, you get the point. A jump drive makes the travel time make more sense for a story, plus it allows me to create this cool little effect. }:8>

o==--- End Science mumbojumbo ---==o

Now when the jump drive activates it uses up some special matter that has been loaded onto the ship (jump mass or mass jump fuel) and the drive does it's voodoo and makes a porthole to the place you want to be.

What this animation is is what you would see if you were watching this from some ways off. You would see the flash of light, then the ripple in space time expand out and in at the same time... then ship would seem to shrink very very fast and fade out like it got sucked up by a big vacuum. Poof, Elvis has left the solar system.

On the other side you would see the flash, the ripple would appear exactly the same and the ship would fade in as it grows back to it's normal size. Then it's all over. The whole process from one place to another would take about two seconds in real time... then all you have to do is use conventional thrusters to go where ever in the new solar system you wanted to go.

Of course their are a few more rules to it than that, but it should get you the general understanding what this animation is supposed to be. :)

Update! The full MP4 is over on my Furtopia G Animation page. (1.3M)