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 Infinite Probability Drive from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
It’s the Infinite Improbability Drive though, not Probability, that makes no sense :)
My bad 😥
Ha, good choice. After all these years it’s still among the more creative and fun.
I love the idea that navigators in Dune ripped a line of space cocaine to forsee the best path through folded space for travelling.
Space cocaine is the best take on spice I’ve ever seen.
Challenge accepted
I read all of that in Peter Capaldi’s voice. You made my day
His secretary drinks cat piss??
That’s how the latent poison works in David Lynchs dune
Is this character there in the books?
Thufir Hawat.
In the books he has been poisoned by Harkonnen and needs a regular antidote to survive. The Harkonnen slip it into hid food secretly so if he escapes he will die before he can tell any secrets.
In the Lynch movie he needs to milk a cat rat combo thing daily for the antidote.
🤣 Thufir Hawat milking a cat rat for the antidote sounds hilarious, thank you
Space mushrooms. Worms aren’t a single coherent creature, but are in fact the amalgamation of many microscopic cells. They were once aggregated into sand trout of a few inches, then when they’re ready, they turn into a whole worm. Then if you refine the output of that process, you get spice. The whole process was based around magic mushrooms and LSD.
Yeah they have some crazy complicated formula they use to fold space, but no one knows why it works. They made computers illegal so had to use drugs to make humans capable of doing the calculations. Over time the navigators mutated into worm-like creatures that live in tanks of spice.
I like Dune’s FTL the best of any since it’s not just beep boop… ship goes fast. They can go anywhere in the Universe, but there’s a huge cost to it and shit gets weird.
I prefer the STL in Card’s Ender’s Game series. They asymptotically approach the speed of light so the passengers only have several weeks pass when travelling to far flung locations but the universe around them experiences a normal passage of time which may be tens of years. This has really big implications on the plots in several stories.
They do have an ansible communications system that does allow instantaneous communication over astronomical distances.
goes Plaid
Hell yes Hitchiker’s haha
It’s a Spaceballs reference
I wouldn’t say it was my favourite FTL but it has some interesting implications.
The artificial wormholes of The Algebraist by Ian Banks. I can’t say too much if you haven’t already read it, but it’s artificial wormholes that have to be transported sublight.
All the new wormholes are of course lovely and high capacity, but much of the network is still the original tiny little ones first installed. So your military at least uses kilometer long needle ships that can fit through these small points.
Think fitting an aircraft carrier through a Stargate.
Infinite Improbably Drive in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I find that highly unlikely.
I do love how the side effects (leaking improbability) were critical to the story making any plausible sense.
Throw in bistro-mathematics as an alternative star drive.
It’s such a genius idea because it’s not only a super original way to do FTL, but it also gives you a perfect way out for any plot holes lol
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.
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!
I said to my wife that I thought it was more likely that we could change the speed of light than exceed it.
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.
I liked the wormholes from the Bobbyverse. You had instantaneous travel across interstellar distances but you had to get there via slower than light speed first. So no matter how technologically advanced you became your interstellar civilisation still grew at a rate of one or two systems per decade.
That series has a good progression too. It starts limited by light speed, then gets FTL communication, and finally FTL travel.
Came here to say this, glad to see Bobiverse getting rep ❤️
Silfen Paths from Judas Unchained. Aliens called Silfen walked from planet to planet directly via actual forest paths. Everything gets wonky time wise when your on one so you might emerge 100 years later. The technology itself is sentient and not maintained. The Silfen who lost interest long ago are asked how they manage the paths. They say they just let them do what they want. At least one path exists to/from Earth. But humans are boring and make things boring, so the aliens avoid Earth.
So if you’re on a walk and you get lost you may be walking to another planet.
In the Commonwealth Saga it’s trains! It’s portals with hugely demanding power consumption. They mostly have to stay fixed to one place and open. So they run choo choos. Their world is commerce and economics. And trains are a lovely symbol of that.
In The Final Architecture it’s jaunty. Unspace helps you go fast but you are always alone. Crewmates gone. When you come out they reappear. When you inside there is something coming to get you. Something that lives in unspace and doesn’t like that we use it for travel. The terror of its hunting you drives everyone to suicide. So instead they sleep. Magic “you sleep now” pods for everyone.
Except. You can only sleep if you are on a known route. Some rare people can feel out new routes. And they have to say awake. Most shows just follow normal routes. But the special ships with these other folks can go all over the place! At the cost of route terror.
The books are about coming together in the face of adversity cosmic horror. And unspace is a foil to that. You are alone. But we do what we can anyway. Your alone now, but not forever. Unless the monster gets you.
The Commonwealth Saga is so great.
The portals / train system brings the vibes of the commonwealth up to something like the EU, but on a multi-planetary scale. You have to go through specific points to get planet to planet but the infrastructure is so built up that it’s mostly a travel time problem. It becomes an issue later on that the society has gotten kind of hidebound into a gradual expansion so they never really ‘needed’ FTL for exploration, and now they do.
I get US robber baron vibes too.
Fair warning for those who decide to read it, the book doesn’t treat women particularly well. And it’s the best propaganda I’ve read for capitalism. Read it with eyes open and it’s fun. Great villains. Fun world building. It ends well. And trains!
And it’s like a 1000 page long novel split into two books.
And it has some of the most “alien” aliens in any book I’ve read.
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 do love me some Stargate. And Destiny is SUCH A COOL SHIP, I’m still mad about it…
Yeah, I get why it didn’t do a well. It was very tonally different from SG1 and Atlantis. But it was a solid sci fi drama/thriller and had a lot of potential that’ll never come to be. And I love Robert Carlyle in everything. It’s a major bummer.
SGU was a good show. But a terrible Stargate show.
Was ages ago since i watched it but I remember S1 being pretty bad and I almost gave up on the show. S2 was a lot better and I was disappointed when they cancelled the show. Presumably enough people didn’t like S1 to give S2 a shot
apparently the nakai ships in sgu has a different one than destinys, or a normal hyperdrive too. it seems more like catapult like system.
You can definitely fit a car through. In the novels they even transport helicopters and earth moving vehicles to set up military/mining facilities. Think about it, four people can comfortably walk into a Stargate side by side.
You’re right. The stargate is 6 Daniels wide as someone else pointed out. So probably not fitting an F250 through there, but a mid sized suv could pass through assuming there is enough clearance
the ori solve this issue with a supergate. although they have to use black hole to power such a large gate. offscreen atlantis used thier wormhole drive.
Hold my beer
thats why sg1,sga, sgu had the foresight of using probes, so they wouldnt be ambushed, they rarely are. the biggest limitation for a gate is how long it can stay open, unless you have unlimted power sorce, like black hole or zpms, or anubis gate destroying device.
ori solves this issue by using a supergate powered by a small blackhole, can be a natural one too. asgard solely use thier very fast intergalatic hyperdrives, so they dont need stagates all the time. aside from the zpm power atlantis, they can fly across the galaxy in a matter of minutes or seconds. while even the deadalus takes some time because its a weaker powered ship.
What annoys me about the SG universe is how inconsistent the gate addresses are.
They talk about how every gate address in the Milky Way is made up of five coordinates and the sixth glyph is the point of origin.
I am sorry but that sounds smart but is actually dumb.
I love SG1/SGA, but once you start thinking about it, it get annoying.
Ok, so the it is established that the last glyph in the address is the point of origin.
This makes me wonder why the address system is needed at all.
Think about it, if every planet has a different glyph as a point of origin, why not just use that glyph as the entire address?
In Children of the Gods, Til’q asks SG1 where they come from and Daniel draws the Å symbol, which Til’q recognizes, meaning that the Å symbol is only connected to earth.
So ever since then, it was established that a single glyph can be understood as a single planet. So why not use it as the actual address for a specific planet,
the other 6 points are coordinates to basically zero in to the planet your dialing, i think its explained more in the first few season, gotta rewatch the first few seasons where carter explains why they use 6 other costellation, and the "planet your own unique symbol is probably the constellation unique to that part of the space. the pegasus is this way too, but the SGU ones is based on a different system
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.
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.
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.
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.
No mention of Futurama? Screw moving the ship, just move the universe around it!
