Hyperdrive technology allowed sentients to bypass this barrier, making use of a trans-physical effect to create ripples in space-time. A hyperdrive-equipped ship would propel off these ripples to "jump" into hyperspace, allowing it to traverse the galaxy at speeds of hundreds or even thousands of times the speed of light. Hyperspace was an alternate dimension of space-time, similar to subspace or otherspace, that was coterminous with realspace: each point in realspace was associated with a unique point in hyperspace. Essentially, a ship traveling galactic north in realspace as it jumped to hyperspace would travel north in hyperspace too. Every object in realspace, like stars or planets, also had a "shadow" in hyperspace at the same location it occupied in realspace.