1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
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.
It was clever, and also bugged the crap out of me
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.
Hyperspace in Babylon 5 is pretty cool.
Also in Star Trek TNG when the Traveller uses his mind to go crazy fast.
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.
So in the first Tolan episode, they contact the Nox so they can help the Tolan refugees. The Tolan mention their ftl, and Daniel says he thinks it's like the folding space theory.
Basically like folding a sheet of paper, so the two ends meet, and shooting right through, so when it unfolds, you're instantly on the other side, and the Tolan smiles and says "...No."
I don't recall the Nox ever mentioning FTL, just their invisibility, and they can also form wormholes without dialing.
I like you mate have a very nice day <3
I might have mixed some things up in the 20+ years since I saw that episode. For example, I could have also sworn it was Sam who made the wormhole comparison and was told "No." I do remember it being awkward though, like the question was embarrassingly naïve.
You might like Larry Nivens Known Space books (such as Ringworld, among many others) as it's hyperspace makes most people's minds freak out. Very few people are capable of looking out a window in hyperspace and not going at least a little bit loopy.
It's also implied that Things live in the gravity wells and that's why you need to be far enough away before you make the jump but this isn't really developed much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 like the version from BSG.
Andromeda was weird. Able to travel from galaxy to galaxy otherwise they travel at sub-light.
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.
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 .
