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?
Robotech (or Macross for the purists).
Folding space, essentially.
And taking a chunk of it with you.
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.
Wish they didn’t bail on consoles.
Hyperspace in Babylon 5 is pretty cool.
Also in Star Trek TNG when the Traveller uses his mind to go crazy fast.
transwarp both voth and borg, slipstream , and xindi/spherebuilder vortex drive.
I like gate type things and prefer them in space like babylon 5 and buck rogers.
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.
Most unfortunate name since ISIS in Archer
i see the stargate in expanse, lol.
I like how Stellaris does hyperdrive; certain systems are connected by hyperplanes. Presumably something “man-made” in those systems generates the field and “throws” the ship to the next system.
Similar to Mass Effect except that whereas in Mass Effect, one generator can connect to any other, in Stellaris each one only goes between two points, like a subway.
One of my favourite upgrades in stellaris is the jump drive, because a 120 stop trip to go what is barely above me is rough and id rather just hop the gap.
Going plaid in Spaceballs is pretty dope.
Looking forward to round 2 (upcoming Spaceballs movie)
Ludacris speed, go!
Ludicrous speed.
Ludacris is the rapper, but I like your enthusiasm. :)
I just felt he should be included!
I love the Farcaster network of the World Web from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos (for anyone who hasnt read the books, they’re essentially frameless stargates that are always on). Such a cool concept of being able to build a series of them linking the main commercial streets of the biggest cities on different planets together; thus making one gigantic and near endless market across hundreds of worlds… and anyone can just walk from one planet to another across hundreds or thousands of light years.
What I really like about that book series though is that the Farcasters are not the only means of FTL… and that there are sound reasons to use another method over them OR even to oppose your planet getting connected to the Farcaster network. Just seriously good world building.
In the later books, the alternative FTL is wild too. The acceleration is so brutal that on every jump, you will be smashed to a pulp and then spend days being put back together.
“Raspberry Jam Delta V” everyone gets inside “Resurrection Creches”. Which just hold your goo for later reassembly.
Funny thing is that, while a similar principle, they’re safer and more ethical than the Star Trek “suicide booth” transporters.
Oh, but they had those too. Imagine a luxury house linked together by instant transporters, so you go to a platform on an ocean planet to poop.
I was so disappointed with that book, but agreed that was a cool system. The way the one house is described with different rooms on different worlds, and how he gets used to the differing gravity between doorways is incredible.
Oh yeah… the poet’s house was dope as fuck.
I would love a series about an “Interplanetary University” that had its campus setup across several dozen planets using Farcasters. That would be an interesting setting in the Hyperion universe.
Would make for an epic setting for a Sci Fi show like The Magicians.
Fuck!
Turns out my “quantum superposition rifts” where certain spaces (biomes) exist in multiple locations at once allowing seemless passing between worlds, are not as original as i thought.
Well i don’t know how Dan Simmons Explained the science behind it but in effect it would end up very similar.
It was a bit of “handwave-ium” and sentient AI. Here’s the Wiki for the series if you want to compare your concept…
Here’s an article about the Farcasters themselves and here’s the article about the World Web that AI and humanity ran with them.
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 thing I’ll say is that I prefer gates or portals to “Teleporters” for the obvious “it actually kills you” thing
Recently read Hayden’s World and there’s some FTL in there that (mostly) obeys relativity and the associated time dilation issues, so that was fun to see. Also, a generally unpleasant experience for the humans on the craft. Otherwise I liked KSR’s Red/Blue/Green Mars, how the story developed travel technology organically on a timeline.
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 remember hearing about this! Never got a chance to actually play it though.
The concept of different races travelling differently reminds me of David Brin’s Uplift series, though. Everyone uses Hyperspace, but different species use different “bands”, which behave differently. “A-level” behaves somewhat similarly to Hyperspace from other settings, and is preferred by oxygen breathing species. There’s another level that’s used mostly by hydrogen-breathing species, and is inhabited by quantum-order life. The one that sticks out for me is “E-level”, which is mostly used by memetic organisms - you have to shift your self-conception to traverse a changing landscape. It’s… really trippy.
Early versions of Stellaris had something similar, but reduced in scale- it’s a 4X grand strategy where you’re basically controlling a spacefaring species you create, if you’re not familiar with it.
They did away with multiple FTL systems at some point, but early on in the games lifespan when creating your species you’d pick between hyperdrives, wormholes, or warp iirc.
Hyperdrives were basically Star Wars style space travel- predetermined FTL ‘roads’ in space that you can travel along.
Warp was ‘the ship teleports from where it is to where it’s going’.
Wormhole was the most interesting one to me, because it used giant ‘hubs’ you’d need to build in space to… well, make a wormhole from the hub to wherever the ships were trying to go. The downsides were that you had to build hubs and they were expensive, and you could only actually leave from the hub itself which had a limit on how many wormholes it could make. The upside was that it had dramatically better range than the other FTL options so you could build one on the borders of an enemy and then basically show up wherever you wanted.
I really love roguelikes and I’m mad that their version is unsupported and basically unplayable right now
edit: The Pit. I want to play that on my steamdeck so badly.
I like the kind where they didn’t try to explain it. Trying to show how they make their sausage never works out well. I can suspend disbelief for FTL but not for their stupid explanations
Macguffin it just enough to be maybe plausable, give it enough rules to make it interesting, be consistent and then shut the fuck up about it.
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.
Visually it’s gotta be Leviathans’ Starburst from Farscape.
That sequence never got old when I was a kid even though they reused it
andromeda slipstream is very similar to STD sporedrive, probably stole it from andromeda.
Did Farscape ever depict how any other FTL drive works?
You’ve got wormholes, that turned out to be as spiritual as they were technological or natural, you’ve got the Leviathan starburst which is unique to them, no other ship can do anything like starburst because at least once Moya starbursts away and then Crais and/or Scorpius turns to an underling with the Darth Vader brand “You failed me so I shall callously murder you” look on his face. And yet they do have FTL travel. Somehow.
The word “Hetch” is used as a unit of speed, but they BARELY establish that. “Barely hetch two” is apparently quite slow. Also, can Moya travel at FTL speeds without Starburst, or is that just how leviathans move at FTL speeds?
EXTREMELY soft sci-fi series, but it worked.
They didn’t depict how any FTL drive works, but then again, nor does any show that I know of.
Hetch drives are FTL though.
I dunno if Leviathans can travel superluminally without starburst.
One of the first things we hear Pilot say in the first episode of the show is [D’argo ripping the bits out of the control console to remove Moya’s slave collar caused damage ] “Leading to our current top speed, which is barely hetch 2.” So through…whatever means Moya can propel herself at “hetch” speeds, usually in excess of “2” but that leviathans are also capable of a unique thing called a starburst. Which depending on the episode is either an instantaneous experience or a state the ship spends at least a little time in.
Again, Farscape is extremely soft sci-fi. Rigel somehow farts helium. He doesn’t eat food that contains a lot of helium, yet he farts helium. That’s the approach to science taken by Farscape. There’s more than a little actual magic in the show. It’s a show mainly about its characters and how they cope with (usually ridiculous) situations.
The helium thing is certainly true, but I don’t think the FTL stuff is related to hard- or softness. FTL is impossible, so it’s not like you can give details on the proposed method which make it more realistic.
Maybe you’re thinking of another series/canon where FTL travel is presented in a way that would qualify as “hard”?
I’m trying to think of any TV series with hard sci-fi rules actually - I think the medium is unsuited to it, with its varying writers.
Mind you it’s a scale. Star Trek is harder than Star Wars, which is harder than Farscape. I think the hardest sci-fi out there is going to be The Martian. We could plausibly fly an Ares mission as depicted in the book, the main technology handwave is the lack of thin, light, radiation shielded fabric for EVA suits and Hab canvas.
only trek and sg1 try to explain it in a scifi/pseudorelistic way, all others avoid, because they dont want to have to explain in a real way that would have to add real science to the discussion. BSG avoids it altogether, somehow the series, the humans and cylons suddenly had the tech out of the blue.
Moya could travel at Hetch 9 The Locket. She was faster than a Marauder (Hetch 7) and only slightly slower than a full Command Carrier.
Starburst was actually travel through another dimension of space. Self Inflicted Wounds
