I'm afraid this is above my limit of knowledge of FTL how can you detect something and not carry information on it? building your plates from one star to a other might indeed be a little bid silly (in the same way a space elevator is).
It's the one thing that violates the cardinal rule of sci fi, which is that all the science has to be realistic. As someone pointed out to me in a thread a while ago, perhaps this is science fiction's bit of magic realism. The story is precisely about what life would be like if that one thing about the universe--the impossibility of FTL travel--were different from our reality. That is indeed the essence of magic realism. Write it in Spanish about levitating priests and people who live forever and you'll win a Nobel Prize. Write it in English about an intricate interstellar civilization and the myriad ethical problems it entails and you'll be dismissed as a "genre" author.
It's human nature to label people, and it can't be helped I gues. I can't recall when ever a religious tinted novel ever won a nobel prize, but to my knowledge all religious novels are a bid of science fiction imagen if they would actually explain why deep meditation would result in people to hover around, such results could only halusanated when they 've smoked the ritual tobaco or sucked the ritual toad. In real live that guy should have to be in orbit to levitate and that's the simple truth. What is reality if not relative before baude and pascall if I would have asked what was in the emptiness of your hand you would proberly say absolutley nothing, now you know there is a interesting mix of oxygen and nitrogen in it, that in the right way could be pushed to produce lift. And if I would ask you now what is in the emptiness of space you proberly say there is nothing
