This can be anything from Hyperspace in Star Wars, Warp Drive in Star Trek, travel through the Warp in Warhammer 40k or anything else.
I’ve always liked “slow” FTL travel, where going a few light-years still takes a few days or so. I also really like travel through an alternate dimension like in 40k, Event Horizon, Witchspace in Elite Dangerous.
I wanna know your favorite versions, or do you prefer stories that obey the laws of known physics, like the Expanse or Rimworld?
I love the idea that navigators in Dune ripped a line of space cocaine to forsee the best path through folded space for travelling.
Space cocaine is the best take on spice I’ve ever seen.
Challenge accepted
I read all of that in Peter Capaldi’s voice. You made my day
Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engines I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.
Cubert: That’s impossible. You can’t go faster than the speed of light.
Farnsworth: Of course not. That’s why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.
Doesn’t Cubert later figure out that the engines don’t move the ship, instead they move the universe while the ship remains stationary?
Infinite Improbably Drive in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I find that highly unlikely.
I do love how the side effects (leaking improbability) were critical to the story making any plausible sense.
Throw in bistro-mathematics as an alternative star drive.
I thought the Expanse did this really well. For starters, most travel is restricted as we currently know it. They have the Epstein drive, but something like that is feasible. In any case, humans are still meat bags that can only accelerate so much.
But then the FTL component requires some otherworldly technology with gating. That leaves the physics mystery to having been built by some smarter species and I think that is perfect for suspension of disbelief.
So I really like the Stargates. They’re a lot more limited/less flexible in where you can travel, but with that limitation comes unique challenges and intriguing stories. The biggest pro about them? It’s the fastest form of FTL there is. You can travel literally instaneously to any other gate. And there are innumerable gates to travel to.
But there are a lot of cons too.
Convenience… gates must already be where you’d like to go. The gates are relatively small, unable to fit even a car through, and the gate has a time limit on holding it open so there is limited ability to send large quantitaties of goods through and absolutely no large objects.
Risk… connections are blind, so you don’t know what’s on the other side until you or a probe goes through and relay back details. And it’s a single point of entry, and only one way, so it’s easy to be trapped or ambushed on the other side without escape. The gate can also be damaged or have its dialing device missing, disabled or destroyed, making it functionally useless from that end. If your gate is dialed into, the only way to stop anyone from traveling through is with a barrier so close to the wormhole event horizon to make molecules unable to materialize. But even then, they can hold your gate open from their end for the time limit of the wormhole, and then immediately redial and prevent you from using it indefinitely.
Unknowns… Certain anomalies like black holes affecting the destination gate can also pose a cataclysmic danger to planet of the gate of origin. Random happenstance with solar flares can cause the wormhole to travel through time as well as space. Gates may be too far to travel without extra power, and there may not be power available on the other side to get back. Gates can be dialed at random or you may have a list of addresses, but without someone who’s been to these gates before, you have no idea who or what you’ll find on the other side until you dial it.
The typical use for the gates is cool, but the really interesting stuff is when things go wrong, or when people get really creative with the mechanics. Things going wrong like heading home to Earth but being gated unexpectedly to an icy cave with no exit and no dial device to be found and everyone having to figure out where you went even though none of it seems to make sense. And creative things like overcoming the gates’ distance limitations/extra power needs to cross between galaxies by daisy chaining hundreds of them in the void between the galaxies and setting up a macro to pass the matter buffer from one to the next without rematerializing the objects and people within in between.
Of course, traditional FTL ships exist in Stargate, but they are much slower than the instantaneous stargates, and have other dangers associated with them, like other armed ftl ships, pirates, replicators… Most ftl ships in stargate use hyperspace travel, but I believe that the Ancient’s inter-galactic stargate seeding ship, Destiny, uses a classic warp drive.
Definitely Warhammer 40k.
I was initially thinking Star Trek but I was also only thinking of how the FTL itself works; it’s based in actual theory which is cool.
But the “travel through hell and risk being haunted by ghosts and demons” thing in WH4k is dope af.
I was thinking of Event Horizon. That’s pretty much the same as you’ve described.
Fun fact: According to the writer, Event Horizon was written as being in the WH4k universe, at the earliest point man was known to cross into the warp. But without the actual licensing to call it Warhammer.
Cool! I have always loved them film. Never knew that fact. I haven’t done Warhammer since a kid but now you say it the gothic style ship interior does remind me of the chaos space marines.
Stargate is pretty good. Rotary phone 😀. It’s an elegant way to minimize CGI costs for the show. Not only that, the concept that you don’t know what’s on the other side is also interesting.
Chevron 7 locked.
I was just watching that, it’s still one of my favorite shows.
They had hyperdrives too but they were pretty boring in comparison.
Admittedly the “don’t know what’s on the other side” bit is a little iffy. Sure, they’ve got that little wheeled robot they use a couple of times, but after a while you’d think they’d do something as simple as “stick a camera on a pole through the gate first.”
This is covered in the technobabble of the show. The gate is one way to anything bigger than radio waves, so the camera would see nothing until enough of it had dematerialized for the rest to be sucked through.
The camera wouldn’t emerge through the other side until the whole pole is through though, the Stargates only pass matter to the other end once the full object has entered.
As others have explained, this is covered, the Stargate creates a minuscule wormhole, all matter is disintegrated transported and then reintegrated. But the Stargate acts in continuous chuncks of matter, so the camera won’t rematerializes until the entire stick crosses the event horizon, so you would need to attach the camera to a remotely controlled car, and you’re back to the robot.
Halo’s Slipspace has always been my favorite. It’s another dimension where instead of being able to move in four directions, things can move in eleven. This results in travel being faster there than in normal space.
The fun part is that the UNSC and the main antagonists- the Covenant- use the exact same method of FTL travel. The Covenant are just dramatically better at it, to the point of UNSC ships that attempt to run away from the Covenant via slipspace sometimes having the Covenant fleet they were fleeing already there and waiting on them.
My favourite thing about Halo FTL is how it handles causality, basically relying on the universe to act like a sponge and “soak it up” as it reconciles it across spacetime.
Send too much mass (aka the Halo array) and it massively slows down travel galaxy wide, as the spacetime is “sodden” and takes longer to reconcile it. Meanwhile in the days leading up to the firing of the Halo array slipspace travel suddenly became easier and quicker than had ever been experienced, as the Forerunner realise that after the firing of the array the amount of slipspace travel in the entire galaxy will be nil.
Early UNSC Shaw-Fujikawa drives were a brute force punch into the other dimension, whereas Covenant adopting old Forerunner tech would slip into Slipspace more elegantly and with better accuracy. This allowed Covenant ships to slip within a single system, where UNSC ships might be within a few hundred thousand kilometers of their intended target and could not realistically attempt inter-system jumps, which I always thought was a cool detail.
Post Halo 3 when the Infinity gets Forerunner Slipspace drives and Forerunner Engineers to help adapt and implement the drives drastically improve Slipspace accuracy and speed was a huge turning point for humanity. Plus the ability to have small drop ship like crafts, Condors, have Slipspace capabilities was huge for ONI ops and smaller team excursions.
God I fucking love Halo lore.
My favourite is definitely BSG (
Big Sexy GiantBattlestar Galactica) where the big ships just go ‘poof’ in a flash of light and suddenly they’re somewhere else. Pure kino. :3The rescue where they jump the Galactica into the atmosphere of New Caprica, scramble Vipers, and then jump out again is maybe the coolest scene in TV sci-fi.
I also loved that, as soon as they did that, the Galactica started falling
I think it worked so well because they’d spent two or three seasons not doing that.
The setup is just perfect too. “All hands - brace for turbulence.”
And you’re thinking, No. No way he’s going to do that.
AND THEN HE DOES.
I just rewatched BSG a month ago or so, and yeah, that scene was so insanely cool!
I enjoyed reading Ursula Le Guin’s stories about instantaneous travel.
The process of instantaneous travel is so bizarre and unexplainable that every crew member experiences it differently. Some people think they haven’t gone anywhere, some people think they’re on the other side of the universe, and some people think the ship has disintegrated around them.
The only way for the process to succeed is for the entire crew to agree on a shared reality. It has the effect of making FTL travel a dangerous thing that requires training and planning. You can’t hop on a ship with random people and expect to survive. Everyone has to train together to really trust each other’s perception and experiences.
What story was this?
I think it’s called Shobie Story. It’s part of Fisherman on an Inland Sea.
A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.
My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven’t played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.
You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.
Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.
Then an aquatic species that doesn’t do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.
And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.
And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don’t have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.
So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.
I like the system in Asimov’s Escape (from the I, Robot series). Spoilers ahead:
Two field engineers experience bizarre, dreamlike disorientation during the jump; afterward Susan Calvin explains the Brain discovered that hyperspace causes a momentary cessation of existence (i.e., you’re effectively disassembled and reassembled), which would panic a robot under the First Law—so the Brain (ship’s AI) masked it with funny/benign hallucinations and only reveals it after they return.
I’d imagine that a lot of future experiences led by true AI would be philosophically challenging like this.
Going plaid in Spaceballs is pretty dope.
Ludacris speed, go!
Ludicrous speed.
Ludacris is the rapper, but I like your enthusiasm. :)
Looking forward to round 2 (upcoming Spaceballs movie)
Warp Drive in Star Trek. Largely because there is modern day physics that points to the possibility of it being an actual possibility.
From a story telling, fits into the narrative version, the FTL in the newer Battlestar Galactica series. Look no further than the Battle of New Caprica. That was fracking awesome.
Alcubierre drive, my favorite too
Allister Reynolds: Revelation Space universe. Its not FTL its near light speed with time dilation as an actual plot device. The only hand waving part is the power/device to get up to speed, but everything else is in the realm of physics.
Also love how (minor spoilers for Redemption Ark follow) FTL travel is possible in the universe, just so hard to do that if you get it wrong you’re lucky if it only blows up, rather than fucking with causality to the point where you never existed
Not only was it incredibly difficult (required sacrificing actual human minds for the calculations) and insanely dangerous (like that one tech who was at the wrong place and time of an FTL anomaly and every particle in their body vanished from all points in space/time), but the actual gain over lightspeed was only like 1% (the FTL ship was traveling at 101% light speed, chasing a LightHugger traveling at 99% light speed).
I hope Revelation Space gets made into a show one day, with spin-off movies (Diamond Dogs for example) and webisodes (daily life of an Ultra).
You just reminded me of the bit where they discover that fucking with causality is BAD.
spoiler
The poor scientist who is the only one who remembers their friend existed. As well as the lead who is left wondering how many scientists he accidentally killed.
I love his books.
