Ask Lemmy

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.

Going plaid in Spaceballs is pretty dope.

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

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

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.

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.

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 sail 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.

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.

My favourite is definitely BSG (~~Big Sexy Giant~~ Battlestar Galactica) where the big ships just go 'poof' in a flash of light and suddenly they're somewhere else. Pure kino. :3

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.

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.

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.

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

There's a theory about Even Horizon that it was basically the Warp from Warhammer 40k.

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.

I like the version from BSG.

Andromeda was weird. Able to travel from galaxy to galaxy otherwise they travel at sub-light.

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 .

Robotech (or Macross for the purists).

Folding space, essentially.

Implosion drives from the Borderlands games.

Can't travel faster than light in realspace? Fine. We'll just annihilate all realspace between here and our destination.

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.

Warp Speed from Star Trek, I think, is the one I remember the most.

Whatever the hell this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVEQRj_WJG4