Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

I like the Stargate-lite system in the game Terminus (2000). Unlike Stargate, each gate connects 1 to 1 with another, so there’s no “dialling up” a new destination. In fact, these gates don’t go anywhere unexplored. They only go where we’ve already been (around the solar system).

See, in Terminus the space ships can only fly at realistic speeds (similar to real life rockets) and maneuvering is difficult (with pretty decent Newtonian physics). If you want to travel to other places in the solar system it takes an extremely long time, so the gates make it actually feasible to get around.

This all had the effect of making space feel like the age of railroading. You can get around but you’re limited to where the rails can take you. I don’t know why, but there’s something so romantic about that.

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.

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.

In the Bobibverse (book series) they used SUDAR for FTL. SUDAR was a gravity based communication. I believe this started coming out before the gravity wave discovery and we confirmed(/it became common knowledge) that gravity travels at the speed of light. It was a cool idea though.

One of the more interesting (and creepy, and appalling!) FTL systems I remember is from Scalzi's The God Engines. Way back in the day The Lord subjugated all other gods, and these gods are now prisoners of human ships, and responsible for moving them through the stars.

I'm fuzzy on the details, but I remember engineering was replaced by a priest caste, and their prayers kept most ship systems running (this Lord is a very active deity!) I also remember that the ship-gods can be very recalcitrant - I think the book opens with the captian having to whip the ship's god into compliance.

Cowboy Bebop 👩‍🚀🤠

What I like about FTL is how it works with the story.

My favourite examples are Elite Dangerous and Dune.

Elite Dangerous's FTL tech is based on alien tech and that allows the developers to do cool stuff that you wouldn't expect in an mmo (this is usually a loading screen so when this first started happening people were terrified).

And Dune's idea of having the entirety of interstellar civilisation dependent on one substance that can only be made on one planet, which also has other uses extremely important to different groups, sets the stage perfectly for what happens in the books.

I like gate type things and prefer them in space like babylon 5 and buck rogers.

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.

For visuals, Mass effect is great. Giant space guns that shoot spaceships across.

Hyperspace in Babylon 5 is pretty cool.

Also in Star Trek TNG when the Traveller uses his mind to go crazy fast.

I think later in the 3 body problem series they talk about ftl like a paper boat on water in a tub with soap on the backside. It accelerates by making that water it touches a little bit slicker and accelerates the boat in the process.

But it leaves a slight trail behind and you can’t use that same path because it’s already been made slick.

I love the idea that navigators in Dune ripped a line of space cocaine to forsee the best path through folded space for travelling.

Infinite Improbably Drive in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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.

For practicality: Whatever it is that The Nox do in the Stargate TV show. It's not well explained because, well, no other race is advanced enough to understand it. Something about briefly causing two distant points in space to touch. Instantaneous travel to anywhere.

For impracticality: #1 The ring network in one of Stephen Baxter's novels. Kind of like the eponymous rings in the better known Stargate franchise, but the ring source and destination are fixed and transport time between rings is light speed, so you arrive years after you enter. And IIRC, you come out as an approximation of what you were when you went in. A very good approximation, but still an approximation. The advantage is that the journey seems instantaneous to the traveller.

#2 Whichever story has it that travel in hyperspace / subspace turns out to be slower than travel in real space. This may have been a throwaway Internet joke, but it still amuses me.

#3 Stephen King's Jaunt.

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.

Whatever it is, I'm inclined to like the versions where FTL is a teensy bit dangerous. Not necessarily 40k's "FTL is actual hell and frequently fails in terrible ways", but more... it's risky. It's a mundane risk, maybe. But still, there's that little bit of risk in the background and it needs to be approached carefully...

Like, Babylon 5's hyperspace is an actual place you make trips into, but it's also highly nonlinear, and so it is entirely possible to get lost or stuck if your ship malfunctions. Also, there are living things in there which may not be friendly.

Even Star Wars' Hyperdrives can be dangerous. It doesn't get played up in the stories much, but a malfunctioning or improperly programmed hyperdrive can strand you in deep space, subject you to severe time dilation, or just splat you against a realspace object.

I think it was the Old Man's War series that had a really creative form of FTL travel that played off of the infinite multiverse theory.

Instead of traveling through space, they would jump into a parallel universe were everything was the exact same, except that their desired destination was closer to them and the same group of travelers were also jumping to a different verse at the same time.

Visually it's gotta be Leviathans' Starburst from Farscape.

That sequence never got old when I was a kid even though they reused it