The listed explanation of the "Novikov self-consistency principle" sounds similar to the Hawkings theory about history protecting itself except that instead of disallowing time travel/FTL it just states that such travel couldn't alter anything.Stutterwarp jumps do not act as time travel
Special relativity shows that since there is no true ‘simultaneous’ defined for all observers any
form of faster than light travel can be turned into time travel. This is not normally observed
due to two reasons.
The first reason is macroscopic: for all practical purposes starships and solar systems are
almost at rest relative to each other; the time travel effects show up most clearly if speeds
involved are close to lightspeed.
The second reason is microscopic: the Novikov self-consistency principle states that if an
event exists and that would give rise to a paradox, or to any "change" to the past whatsoever,
then the probability of that event is zero. This is due to quantum mechanical interference,
where the wave function of the event from the future neatly cancels the wave function from
the past. The effect is that any attempt to communicate or change the past will either fail or
“already be there”.
The first clear demonstration of time travel was done already in 2094 at CERN, where Carlini
and his team used an early drive setup to send relativistic electrons into their own past or
future. His experiment also clearly demonstrated that it was not possible to prevent a
launched electron from being launched, validating the self-consistency principle. Since then
the experiment has been repeated numerous times, always with the same result. Time travel
(at least for a few nanoseconds) is possible, but useless
I was wondering what people thought about using this type of "fact by fiat" declaration in games or fiction to bypass the sci-fi catch-22 of "Relativity, Causality and FTL: choose any 2". If Causality is "protected" then your only left with two things to pick two of according to the "pick two" statement.
Is it a cop-out? One of the few plausible ways to get FTL in a "hard" sci-fi setting since recently something along this line was shown experimentally.