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?
The FTL in the game FTL.
It’s not really explained or important in the game, but Christ almighty have I put hundreds of hours into that infuriatingly addictive thing; so it must be my favorite FTL.
Going plaid in Spaceballs is pretty dope.
Ludacris speed, go!
Ludicrous speed.
Ludacris is the rapper, but I like your enthusiasm. :)
I just felt he should be included!
Ender’s sagas adresses not only near light speed travel, but also the relativity on communications between the traveling veasels and “stationary” posts via the ansible
I thought the Ender’s game universe was interesting with the instantaneous FTL communication with the ansible, but no FTL travel. They had some tech that could accelerate ships quickly to very near-light speed, which meant you could travel between planets in a few weeks ship-time thanks to time dilation, but years would pass for the people on the planets. So while you could talk with people on other planets instantly, if you wanted to visit them, they’d have to wait decades for you to arrive.
Then later in the books they figured out …
spoiler
that you can more or less travel FTL instantly to anywhere you want just by thinking really hard about it.
The Conquerors trilogy by Timothy Zahn had the opposite - FTL travel but no FTL communication. Smaller ships could also travel FTL faster, so you had a bunch of small ships running around to different star systems essentially delivering the mail. It’s been a while since I read the books, but I don’t really remember it playing a big part of the story other than a way to isolate the battlefronts because once the mail service gets shut down by the enemy you have absolutely no idea what’s happening outside of your local star system.
That is what I said, near light travel, not FTL. Ansible comms where instantaneous (speed of thought iirc), but not when the veasels/ships where in-transit, as they needed to “buffer” the communications somehow, in form of recorded messages. That is why Ender’s journeys took thousands of years, where only a lifetime for his siblings on earth.
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 just rewatched BSG a month ago or so, and yeah, that scene was so insanely cool!
it is kinda wierd the showrunners of the reimagined series tried to avoid building a lore around or the scifi-babble around it. they wanted people to focus on the “christian themed, end of times arc of the series” thats why they avoid the previous series of bsg tech. there isnt much info how they developed it in bsg.
I’ve never seen the original series but I really enjoyed how they downplayed technology in general. I could have done without so much of the god shit, but really the show was so damn good that I can deal with that part
from what ive heard, the criticism is about the showrunner, who is allegedly a mormon, so he wants a GOD-ANGEL-christian ending, similar to supernatural show, god-christian angel, ending. except with all the magic/ and advanced technology of the older series of bsg. thats why it deviated from the og show so mmuch, no lasers, no advanced 3rd race in teh universe.
also he dint like the “pewpew” scifi-tech of TREK-CLONE thats why. the original series had way more material to be honest, instead of the stuck in a ship, Voyager-esque show.
like how the older basestars are more harder to destroy than the new ones, yea they give an explanation its easier to build/grow. another plothole i dint like 40 years, and the 7 dint figure out how resurrection tech works, so they werntly left crippled if the hub was destroyed.
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.
Here here! I second that!
Also, my favorite line in that clip “Well, this oughta be different…”
I also loved that, as soon as they did that, the Galactica started falling
I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT ABOUT THAT.
That literally made my day, thanks lolol. THE KINO IS ABSOLUTE
I think it worked so well because they’d spent two or three seasons not doing that.
I like the A Fire Upon The Deep version where Earth is in the “slow zone” but the speed limit gets faster in other regions of space. It makes enough sense that you could easily imagine a universe working that way, at least if you don’t know too much about physics.
That book was a fun read.
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?
Correct!
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).
in the various series and different shows, they have some kind warp field in trek, that prevents them from being torn apart going ftl, its the same with hyperspace in sg1, theres a field surrounding as a shell of the ship to achieve the same thing.
sg1 used such a thing , hyperspace field to escape a nebula for different reasons.
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.
A hard choice, so many of them have been well done in media and text.
If I had to make a choice I would pick versions that match up with what we think could be possible. And that means anything based on or similar to the Alcubierre drive theory. The “slower” travel around a system in Elite Dangerous uses this idea of moving the space the ship is in faster than light, avoiding any relativity issues. Stephen Baxter’s “Flood” and “Ark” novels (mainly Ark) use this idea and his descriptions of what it looks like from inside and departure/arrival are fantastic and not intuitive (Elite Dangerous gets the leaving right, but not the arrival maybe because it would look weird). When the ship arrives it would suddenly appear from nowhere, but then its virtual image would move away into a point as the light catches up.
For a great video of it, here’s a wonderful collection of potential future interstellar ships with the Alcubierre drive as the final solution to
.
What an amazing video! Thank you so much for sharing that. I’d never seen it before. Beautiful production quality.
Erik Wernquist has a short list of amazing CGI films he’s done. You might be familiar with the short “Wanderers”, set to one of Carl Sagan’s excerpts from A Pale Blue Dot.
In the Battletech universe, the Kearny-Fuschida drive jumps a ship instantly up to 30 light years, but then the jumpship needs to deploy a huge solar still and wait two weeks to charge the capacitors. They also can’t jump (safely) except to the low-gravity Lagrange points, and then dropships need to detach and make their way to the planet or whatever.
deploy a huge solar sail and wait two weeks to charge the capacitors.
The one exception are JumpShips (usually WarShips) with Lithium-Fusion batteries, which allow for a second jump without the recharge time. Those are functionally extinct in the Inner Sphere outside of Comstar, though.
Or if there’s an intact Star League-era charging station.
It’s such that, for an individual booking passage, you’ll spend a week or more on a dropship, half accelerating, half decelerating towards the jumpship, dock, the “jump” is experienced as an unpleasant and disorienting few seconds, and then your dropship undocks and spends another week in flight to another planet.
It’s not the lagrange points; the whole thing about a lagrange point is the significant effects of gravity. It has to be anywhere outside a significant gravity well, typically they use far above/below the ecliptic plane, though if calculated carefully you can get a lot closer into the system.
Or, if you’re Jaime Wolf, you can just jump into low orbit over Luthien “Inside the orbit of our closest moon.” Happens in the second or third book in the Blood Of Kerensky trilogy.
Oh, and further points for Hyper Pulse Generators. So many sci-fi shows depict “supspace radios” or whatever that just let them communicate at whatever bandwidth they want in real time; Captain Picard can just Skype Starfleet Command whenever he wants. In the Battletech universe, the only real stable currency, the C-Bill, is backed by HPG transmitter time. Bandwidth and speed of communication is built into the setting in a way it just isn’t in other franchises.
One thing I’ll say is that I prefer gates or portals to “Teleporters” for the obvious “it actually kills you” thing
The warp from warhammer 40k.
Just because of how grim dark and batshit it all is.
Also as shown in the prequel movie, Event Horizon.
Julian May’s Galactic Milieu trilogy from the '90s has a fun FTL concept involving a ship generating an upsilon field to break through superficies into a “grey limbo” hyperspace. Each translation (in and out) causes physical pain; the tighter the catenary and the longer the jump, (the faster the trip) the more pain is caused.
There’s a theory about Even Horizon that it was basically the Warp from Warhammer 40k.
The Event Horizon fan theory may not even be a fan theory, and is instead confirmed thanks to screen writer Philip Eisner commenting on Twitter in 207 that “I played the sh*t out of 40K, so it was definitely an influence, conscious or otherwise.” Writers who went on to work at Games Workshop to help shape the universe returned the favor, with an attempt to name drop the ship in one of the game’s official codexes, but the U.K.-based company stopped it from seeing print. Still, it’s a comment straight from the twisted mind behind the film that the classic tabletop miniatures game’s gothic setting had an impact on the film.
https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/event-horizon-ties-sci-fi-universe.html
Whatever the hell this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVEQRj_WJG4
Robotech (or Macross for the purists).
Folding space, essentially.
And taking a chunk of it with you.
