This is a newspaper from the future after Alex Jones has lost all of his money and has retired to live as a farmer in rural Texas. The frogs are relentless.
Remember that interstellar asteroid that Avi Loeb thinks is an alien space craft? That's what the Doomsday Machine reminds me of.
Yeah, watching the movie, they weren't very clear at all how FTL travel was achieved. I still enjoyed the movie though.
In later novels, they shed a little bit more light on it, but not much more. Apparently, blasters, shields, anti-grav lifts, stasis fields, and space-fold (basically warp, really) all use the same tech, which uses tachyons. They don't explain how it's the same tech, or what the tachyons do, but...it's all interconnected...somehow. Tio Holzmann is Dune's Zephrame Cochrane, and tachyon fields are called Holzmann fields. The Dune world had their version of the Skynet war, and their fear of AI makes them abolish computers. Without computers, they have to use the "drugged fish" to navigate through warp. The lazy descriptions in the movie(s) makes it seem like the fish does the warping, but it's for navigation. They don't say what happens if you don't plot the right course through a space-fold. Spaghetti-fied? Time loop? Whatever it is, it's bad. Worse than crossing the streams.