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The engine is effectively a container for a large chunk of [[Kafkaite (3.5e Equipment)|kafkaite]], regulated and controlled by computers and connected to a vehicle's power source to generate a bubble of reality fatigue. With enough power and the correct amount of variables determined by the computer, the ship can focus its energies into raising the effective speed of light until the point where ships do not run into the usual time dilation and mass increases associated with high speed flight.
The reality fatigue creates a certain degree of unreality within ships, which gives them a progressively increasing miss chance at speeds where time dilation would normally be a factor. By the time a ship hits ''c'', it is experiencing 100% miss chance with the rest of the universe and thus has no interaction with matter outside of its bubble. When reducing speed, care must be taken to re-enter reality slowly. If you enter too quickly, or if you are traveling above ''c'' when you re-enter, you will be smeared across the universe and all of your atoms converted into energy, raising the overall temperature of the universe by a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Entering and leaving FTL travel is accompanied by a large gravity pulse as your mass enters and leaves.
For outside observers, ships within reality fatigue bubbles appear to become blurrier and blurrier, until they are barely a vague ghostly smear across the universe before vanishing completely. Inside the ship, effects are blurry and they are effectively blind, so care must be taken to accurately determine one's end point before the trip, or risk being lost in space.
