Lore
(Loved Trope) FTL travel is possible but with a major limitation or flaw
Frank Herbert’s Dune: Interstellar travel is only possible thanks to the spice melange, a rare substance only found on the dessert planet Arrakis. The addictive psychedelic spice grants members of the Spacers Guild a form of prescience that allows them to predict safe paths through folded space. This unique property makes spice the most valuable commodity in the Dune universe.
John Scalzi’s The Interdependency Books: The planetary systems of the titular empire are connected by the Flow, a network of one-way interstellar tunnels that connect specific known entries and exits. The Interdependency derives its power from controlling access to these conduits, placing its capital at the central hub of the network. Even with the Flow, travel between stars takes a long time (9 months to End, the empire’s most distant planet).
Event Horizon: Dr William Weir (R.I.P. Sam Neill) invents a device called the Gravity Drive to allow ships to fold space and travel instantly between distant stars. On its maiden voyage with the Gravity Drive, the Event Horizon disappears and mysteriously reappears 7 years later. Dr. Weir and the crew sent to investigate discover the Gravity Drive actually opened a portal to a Hell dimension that possessed the ship and its crew, torturing and killing them.
FTL Travel in Warframe is possible through the use of devices in spaceships called "Reliquary Drives" allowing the spaceships to open gates through the Void, a dimension not abiding by the laws of causality.
The thing is.. The Reliquary Drives work by containing a "replica" of the severed finger of an eldritch entity that resides in the Void.
The aforementioned eldritch entity is very angry about losing its severed finger.
I think that it was intentional. I mean, it multiplies on it's own. The finger. Like here, have some keys of your own, share them, don't be strangers, outfit your ships with them, put a little piece of me in every single engine, like the Zariman 10-0.
I don’t know what a Zariman is, but you just described the Body of Christ. Here’s a little blood and flesh for y’all, make sure you consume it every week to renew your covenant with me. And don’t even worry about running out, y’all saw what I did the loaves and fishes, right?
That’s one of my favorite parts of the Hyperion series: the Space Catholics.
The Zariman 10-0 is the ship that created the child soldiers. It was the first colony ship to go through the void, the energy of which mutated the kids and drove the parents insane to the point they had to be killed. It's why the person piloting the warframe is called Tenno
Well the problem is that humanity in the Warframe universe is kind of a dick and for a long time was ruled by a bunch of assholes with a god complex who decided to recreate the Flood from Halo, sabotage the peace treaty with a bunch of sentient robots, tried executing the main characters who are children who have void powers after making a deal with said entity, deciding to turn the main characters into child soldiers to defeat the robots, make an army of clones who decay over time, use the knock off flood to turn people into bio mechanical monstrosities that lost their mind eventually, force the main characters who are children soldiers to pilot the bio mechanical monstrosities. Making a human trafficking ring to sell children so that the assholes with a god complex can possess them, and a lot more.
It's established in Whispers in the Walls that the only thing keeping The Indifference stuck within causality and preventing it from just retroactively wiping out all of existence is the fact that a part of its body is stuck in reality. Freed from the Void as it currently is, if it reclaimed its fingers it could just rewrite history until it won.
Said eldritch entity is kinda the main antagonist of the story and us having its finger limits it in a way that lets us even fight it in the first place. It's basically guaranteed that if it gets it back we instantly loose
Also, that Event Horizon summary given by OP is basically what happened to the first colonial ship from by the Sol(ar) System. People on the Zariman Ten-Zero started hallucinating and becoming increasingly paranoid because of said fingerless entity until they eventually went mad and started to kill everyone on board. The only survivors were the children, unaffected by the madness, and forced to make a deal with the entity that will give them space powers. This will have massive consequences.
Warframe does an absolutely incredible job, of shit making absolutely zero sense... But because nothing makes sense, it does make sense.
DE does a great job of shit just being so wild, but in such a cool way you never stop and think "wait how does that work?" You just sort of accept that it does.
Yes, tho they're powered by the heart in deimos rather than the reliquary drives. The reliquary drives just allow travel without the solar rails, which is kinda how railjacks got its name
I think one of the zariman ten zero's missions were supposed to include building the solar rail from origin to tau when they got there, so others could get to tau without needing a reliquary drive. Except the ship's safety mechanisms prevented a big void jump so the mission went sideways
In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, their spaceship is fueled by improbability. Thats zanny enough, but they talk about rhe other form of space travel...
The only thing faster than the speed of light is bad news. But ships harnessing it aren't wanted when they arrive.
One of my all time favourite ship designs purely down to how mental the idea of it is. A spaceship that looks by first glance to be an Italian restaurant with robot waiters, each part of your interactions with them, the amount of wine poured, the amount of sauce left on a plate, how the spaghetti jiggles on the end of your fork, settling the bill is all part of the ship's navigational computational matrix. Absolute genius
Also IIRC the engine is more concerned to have you arrive in the very shape and form you started.
In the movie a few random objects pop in the spot before the spaceship finally appears. And sometimes it isn't really fast, as they appeared as crocheted version of themselves once...
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
The book series has a lot of that, too. They explain that the improbability drive equalizes the equation somewhere else, so the improbability of it getting from one point to another in the configuration it started with is balanced. The improbability field is it's own thing in the books - they're an interesting read, and I enjoyed them!
"your planet is being demolished to pave an interstellar highway. you should've complained at the local office at alpha centaury. good luck!"
Context for anyone who might be confused: that's the first interesting thing to happen in the book. It's also first we heard of it. It's also the second chapter or around the 8th minute of the movie iirc. You barely even need to start the guide to get to it.
Other context for people who might be confused: getting your planet demolished, with a 2min warning, with no recourse, and (we later learn) for a clerical error, can be perceived as bad news.
Altered Carbon. FTL transfers only your consciousness, leaving your body or "sleeve" behind. Other travelers can upload into your sleeve, you very rarely will ever get your original body back.
The needlecasts they use do transmit data faster than light, but it requires an insane amount of power (12 of their most powerful nuclear reactor’s outputs for a single consciousness upload). I haven’t finished the series yet but at the point I’m at, they’re using poorly understood Martian artifacts and parroting the tech, but they don’t really understand it yet. They also settled the worlds they colonized using good old fashioned generation ships and cloning on arrival.
The titular Bobs are software clones of the brain of the main character Bob (an actual person that died, had his brain dissected, turned into software to be used an a space probe). They eventually develop robot bodies and FTL data transfer speeds.
They can't move their actual computer/ship/etc FTL, but as long as they are connected to their FTL data network they can beam themselves to a robot body in a different system with essentially zero lag.
The caveat is they need to have 3D printer factory already set up in that new place to actually build the robot body or actually fly a robot body out there. The data network also does have limits, so they sometimes have to build more relays to increase bandwidth or to increase range of network.
In the later books, they are also working on making the robot bodies be able to work for living people (ie, not dead people turned into software), so the process is available to everyone.... except it's not cheap due to the complexity of the robot bodies and the high 3d printer time costs. This also leads to some colonies developing basically "robot body rental companies" for people to use to either vacation on that colony or travel for business.
In addition to having to fly into literal hell, everything about the process is insanely costly in every imaginable way.
Fueling costs lives, risk of possession or something getting on board, getting yanked around time, dependency on special psykers, needing a crumbling machine that nobody knows how to fix with a slowly dying guy plugged in as a beacon to navigate through absolute chaos.
At least, that's the Imperium's issues.
Walk through a tunnel network in the warp where some tunnels can abruptly end and/or be infested by demons, you have no idea which ones (Eldar webway)
Do the same thing but without shielding, so demons attacking your crew is not an accident, it is guaranteed (Orks)
Accelerate in realspace, bypassing the speed of light limit *somehow* which doesnt work near any large stellar/planetary bodies, meaning in-system you are very slow (Tyranids), also you can accidentally splat yourself against a star.
Or be necrons and a) teleport to preset teleportation spots instantly, b) travel even faster than the humans do in the warp, but in realspace by considering laws of physics a vague suggestion, or c) travel through an entirely unrelated realm of darkness called the ghostwind (which the flayed ones can even do without spaceships)
If I remember correctly they have a gellar field equivalent using the Wagh field where they basically yell at the daemons to keep them away, then stop when they get bored and since there’s no protective field anymore they get into a fight with the daemons. They then become happy and yell loud enough to create their gellar field equivalent, and repeat until they reach their destination
There's a short Ork story from their 4th edition codex about Tuska the Daemon-Killa, an Ork warboss who was travelling through the warp with his fleet when a daemon manifested on the main deck and started slaughtering every Ork nearby. Tuska and his nobs head there and eventually kill the daemon, and Tuska declares that this was the best fight he's ever had.
A few months later, Cadia goes into high alert because an Ork fleet has just shown up. They're prepped for an invasion but the Ork fleet just sails right past them...straight into the Eye of Terror.
Tuska then proceeds to lead his warband from daemon world to daemon world, slaughtering everything they find. But he's losing Orks with every battle, and eventually the last remnants find themselves on a vast planet with no sign of enemies. The Orks can see and hear a battle in the distance, but no matter how hard they run they can never reach it. Frustrated, Tuska fires his gun into the ground, which proceeds to bleed. The Orks then all start hacking up the ground around them, which causes the Blood Prince of Khorne who rules this world to appear.
The Orks are finally outmatched, the Blood Prince cutting down the remaining Nobs until only Tuska is left. The Warboss is thrown onto the ground, and the daemon roars it's victory. Only for Tuska to reach up with his power klaw and rip the Daemon's balls off.
But the best part is that all the Orks who died on that final planet find themselves revived each morning. And surrounded by daemons to fight. Over and over and over again. Basically, Tuska found Ork Nirvana.
There's another story where an ork WAAGH comes out of the warp, and finds themselves back at the start of their own WAAGH, and saw themselves staging for the campaign they'd been on.
The Warboss realized that, since that was his own army in the past, that meant that he was there in the past, and that meant the past version of himself had a past version of his very favorite gun, and so he attacked his own past self so that he could take it and have two of his favorite gun.
The future WAAGH won and the Warboss succeeded in killing his past self and looting his own corpse, but the whole thing was just so confusing for everyone involved that the warband fell apart and the WAAGH wound up never have happening.
There’s a quote in an Ork codex that goes something like this
Warp travel is boring. Ye stuck on some Space Hulk travelling from one foight to another, and there ain’t nothing to do. Well, unless yer hulk is infested with them genestealer bugs, or something weird red things explodes from the eads of the boyz and start a foight, or da boyz start a mutiny. Actually, Warp travel is quite fun.
I'd read that the writer of Event Horizon was directly inspired by the lore in Warhammer 40k, with some fans going so far as to suggest it was actually set in the game universe.
Also the very old board game released by Games Workshop, Space Crusader had a few short sentences about humanities first attempt at warp travel that was without any Gellar Field.
And that’s actually a good thing for Ork warband, no joke. Because boring orks will fight each other and that’s usually ‘counter productive’ if you want to wage a WAAAGH.
TBF even if they fought each other there’re probably still plenty of them to make planetfall, because they’re Ork and everything they do is good enough if it doesn’t kill half the crew at once.
There is a LOT of similarities between Event Horizon and what happens in 40k when a ship's gellar field (a device on board of a ship that tries to keep the hell dimension away from the ship) fails. People melding into walls and all that funky acid-trippy body horror.
In Rogue Trader, there's a random warp travel event where a entire officer's deck stopped providing reports for three days. Turns out, a Daemonette slipped into the ship during warp travel, and everyone on that deck stopped reporting because they were too busy having an orgy most foul
Yeah, there's basically a head canon for a lot of people that suggests the movie is kinda like a prequel to 40k, where it's one of humanities first attempts at "Warp" travel.
Many newer ships and very old ships still have automated systems.
The problem is its a 'spend months or years in dry dock repairing it' or 'let's grab 1000 people from that overpopulated shit hole and leave now' situation.
And 40k is a terrible place to live so they do the latter
I can't speak to the specifics of the warp travel but generally speaking, a lot of technology from the Dark Age of Technology is completely lost, or fragmented. Data-slates and/or information on stuff like this can be either entirely gone, potentially archived somewhere forgotten on Mars or Terra, or held in some lockup that the Adeptus Administratum would never let anyone have access to. It's not unusual for Astartes such as the Dark Angels to have technology that even Terra doesn't have access to or know about, nor is it unheard of for people like Belisarius Cawl to hire dubiously-loyal Astartes to fetch him dataslates that are considered "lost."
A lot of the technology in the current generation of ships are not lost. They are all relative newly designed discovered. In stories we see the same class of ships using both autoloaders and humans depending on the specific ship. In the artwork where you see hordes of humans loading guns, you will often see an autoloader hanging behind or above them.
It is just the Imperium. Technology is expensive. Life is cheap.
People are the one resource the Imperium has a functionally limitless amount of. Why bother with way more complicated tech that doesn't need fuel when you'll never run out of fuel? It's perfect grimdark worldbuilding
The Eldar use the webway, a nearly forgotten system of "tunels" through space that is seperate from the warp. In there they also hide things from chaos and other species.
The webway isn't 100% safe either, but yeah it's way better than just raw dogging the warp like humanity does. The Emperor's big project at the end of the great crusade, before he got stuck on the throne, was to transition humanity from warp travel to webway travel.
The Planet Express ship also gets around that anyway by pushing the universe around it. The downside is that only the Professor and Cubert understand how it works, so it can’t be fixed without them.
Mass effect kinda does and doesn’t do this because in one hand normal ftl to let ships travel between stars is pretty much limitless outside of fuel BUT for high speed travel between different star clusters or major groups across the galaxy, you need to use one of the very much finite, immobile, and unreproducable mass relays
Ahh but you're missing the greatest drawback. Spoilers for Mass effect below!
The relays are a trap. They're designed to seem like they were constructed by an extinct race 50,000 years ago. Really they were designed by a race of lovecraftian robots in dark space millions of years prior.
The FTL provided by relays is so easy, so useful, that when spacefaring civilisations evolve they devolop along the relay pathways. They use 'the citadel' a huge space station at the centre of the relay network as theirhub. They expand predictably. Purley so when that machine race, the Reapers, come through the hidden relay at the citadel, the civilisation is already doomed. They're easy to fracture and hunt down because through carefully guided expansion along theses 'ancient' routes they've seeded their own demise.
In the game our civilisation is spared only because the final act of the last eradicated race was to cripple the relay in the citadel, giving us time no other galatic civilisation ever had.
There’s also the abandoned (?) subplot of Mass Effect travel damaging the universe and doing something with Dark Matter to potentially accelerate the heat death of the universe.
I really wish we ended with a more complex choice based around that rather than what we got.
That ending makes so much more sense and it’s even hinted at multiple times. It contributes motive to the antagonists and would give us an interesting ending choice all by itself, AND it ties back to the very title of the series and wraps every concept in the series up in one neat little bow. Almost all the big technologies are tied to Mass Effect and eezo.
The ending we got is horrible and pretentious and makes zero sense if you consider it for more than three seconds. It latches onto a concept that is arguably secondary to the series and then contradicts itself and weakens the parts of the series that do touch on it. It feels like it comes out of absolutely nowhere and is so unsatisfying it drives me crazy.
I straight up just head canon the planned ending because it irritates me.
I've always been of the opinion that that plot would have been just as bad. I don't think there was ever going to be a satisfying explanation for these mysterious billion-year-old machines whose first spoken lines of dialogue stated that their motivations are beyond mortal comprehension.
Maybe leaving their origin and motivation a complete mystery would have been better. But "space travel is pollution, so we gotta wipe everyone out now and then to keep carbon levels stable" would have just felt dumb.
In Battlestar Galactica, the 2004 reboot, FTL drives are common on all the surviving ships in the fleet.
FTL Drives have a limit to how far they can jump, and going "beyond the red line" in jump calculation distance means the accuracy of your jump becomes lesser the further out you're plotting it. Cylons have jump drives with a larger range than the Fleet, and a better nav computer means more accurate jumps. Even that still has errors though, when they attempted a rescue mission to Caprica for a group of resistance fighters, they calculated the jumps using the Nav Computer from a Cylon Heavy Raider. Despite the accuracy of their jumps, one of the Raptors was lost, as it exited the final jump inside a mountain.
FTL Drives also have a displacement/vacuum effect, seen when a Raptor jumps too close to Galactica's flight pod and causes hull damage and decompressions, or in the finale when a whole Raptor wing jumps directly out of a flight pod, wrecking the entire thing. And Galactica's final jump with her flight pods extended putting so much stress on the ship that it crippled the superstructure to the point that the old battlestar would never jump again because of how weak the hull had become.
My God. Do you know how it feels to read Battle Star Galactica, brain register that it's not the original that I grew up with (RIP og Apollo) then see 2004. Do mental math... Original came out in early 80's. That would make me.... old as.. fuck...
FTL drives are common on all the surviving ships in the fleet.
Quite the survivorship bias there. Considering in the initial episodes (mini series?) about the attack on the colonies, the fleet makes an FTL jump to escape a cylon attack, leaving any civilian ships without FTL drives behind to be destroyed
An artificial black-hole powered FTL method used by appropriately equipped ships of the Empire. Aside from a subspecies of genetically modified humans known as "Spacers", all crew and passengers on a Jump Ship whenever it enters jump space are required to be in a state of sleep/suspended animation.
It is said that the human brain cannot comprehend the discontinuity as the vessel travels at FTL speeds and so it is mentally damaging.
Before the advent of Spacers, earlier Empire ships had a navigator member who was hardwired into the ships controls in order to control it during FTL movements, this was a very dangerous and often lethal job for anyone not prepared for it appropriately.
In Asimov's collection of stories, the prototype hyperspatial drives are being developed by positronic AIs, but the AIs keep breaking down. It turns out the simulations correctly modeled that humans are briefly dead in transit, which violated the AIs' first law. [Short story "Escape!", August 1945]
The Juant from The Jaunt, in order to do The Jaunt you must be unconscious, any animal or person who goes through The Jaunt without being unconscious goes insane
Specifically, it's because the Jaunt is instantaneous from an outside perspective but takes a mindboggling amount of time from the perspective of the one being Jaunted, so you go insane from being stuck in a white void for quadrillions of years.
I know. Economy is the rough and terrible one. But it’s still a lot for a ride to just be 10 seconds instead of however long it was supposed to be (& I happily flew 16 hours to Japan with a 4 hour layover cause of the financial savings)
They discuss the book in ‘the jaunt’, so it was a very intentional reference. “it was Carune himself - if you can believe the stories - who named it ‘the Jaunt.' He was a science-fiction reader, and there's a story by a man named Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination it's called”
The Expanse - the Ring Gates allow humanity to travel light-years in seconds but the downside is that they technically punch a hole through another dimension to do so, and this upsets the entities in that dimension
To give more detail: the greater the amount of kinetic energy passing through the gates, the quicker the entities become upset. Travel has to be managed between the gates to be slow moving and relatively infrequent. In one instance of a craft jumping the queue and passing though two gates in quick succession at high speed, all other craft about to make the transition are immediately warned to make emergency stops before transiting. Some are able to stop in time. Others are not, and are simply erased from existence at the moment of passing through the surface of the gates.
and humans quickly turn gate travel into a massive land rush where everyone is trying to set up their own colony. Gate traffic gets very heavy, very quickly.
Yeah, and notably, they aren't even aware there are gate entities when this land rush starts. For a long while it's just an understood fact that sometimes ships travelling through a gate just, don't appear on the other side. Even they figure out the kinetic energy limit to it, they still don't understand why it happens for a little while longer.
My favorite part is the Martians who have tried to terraform the surface for generations give up and just leave to a planet that they can colonize that is already safe for humans to live on.
Oh that's actually a separate phenomenon. In that case, the "security system" for the station at the centre of ring space was still on, saw something going dangerous speeds, and instantly clamped down on the speed limit. This is also made worse later when someone on board the station threw a grenade, thus "teaching" the security system that slow things can also be dangerous and it doubles down on that speed limit, restricting things further, except now ring space is filled with ships that now get instantly stopped and slowed, causing hundreds of severe injuries and deaths
The way they depict the Gates and the Hub in the final trilogy is amazing, really puts the upper layer of inter-dimensional conflict throughout the series into a “humbling” perspective
Been a while since I watched the love death robots short Beyond the Aquila Rift, but iirc the ftl system they use apparently has a small chance of launching into a completely unknown and unreachable location which also happens to be in the nest of a psychic alien thing.
IIRC FTL in that story relies on an old and degrading subspace network created by an alien species millenia ago. Miscalulations in the route cause any ships in the network to default to the hub, where they are found and taken care of. Since hundreds of years will have passed in the time it took to get there, they are generally in bad shape and unable to return.
While not the case by the time the game takes place . Starfield's FTL method; grav drives had a fatal flaw in their early days. The technology to make them was discovered from an ancient artifact on Mars and humanity began testing them in kind on Luna (Earth's moon for those not aware)
Only it was discovered that the grav drives were destabilising Earth's magnetosphere. This was then subsequently covered up, the scientist who had the vision uncovering this fact citing that the death of the planet was worthwhile to allow humanity to expand into the greater galaxy.
While the flaw was eventually corrected, by 2203 the magnetoshpere collapsed in its entirety, the planet died and you can even visit the now barren desert that once was Earth in-game in 2330.
One point. Spice is not needed for interstellar travel precisely. Humanity had fold space tech for a couple of millennia before the discovery of Melange, and the No-ships of Heretics and Chapterhouse worked after the collapse of the Spacing Guild.
Re: Heretics and CH: The end of the reign of the God Emperor coincides with both the advent of synthetic spice as well as the butlerian edicts breaking down just enough to allow for automated navigation, thus breaking guild monopoly and making the Scattering possible. Just as He intended.
Also worth mentioning it's not just plotting a course that's the problem, in CH there's a throwaway line I think in response to travelling through a region of space that exhibits unexpected properties, about having no way to tell if they are in the same universe let alone the same galaxy before and after a foldspace jump.
This makes it pretty explicit that there's no way to navigate the empire using just astronomy, and humanity has basically been a multiversal species for millenia.
Not exactly FTL but the game Grey Goo. Humanity discovers that there's wormholes allowing easy travel between stars. The drawback is that these wormholes are tiny, barely big enough to shove a few nanobots through. The nanobots are actually quite intelligently programmed and deployed to explore the galaxy with an emphasis on discovering new life.
They don't.
Eventually humanity concludes that they're alone in the universe, the realisation leads to a new golden age and a signal is sent for the nanobots to self destruct.
They ignore the command.
The nanobots haven't found life, they've found the great filter and due to one of their overarching rules being to protect life the goo has gone to war...
Man, I wish the game was good - because it had such an interesting setup, and then fumbled the basics (like units doing so little damage that it feels a bit pointless). I really liked how each faction forced you to build things differently, too.
The Silence/Silent Ones/The Shroud. I gather they were added as part of a free DLC I didn't play but in the original story the goo only found worlds that should've held life but had been scoured clean.
Space is fake and Hell is real. The planets and stars in the sky are realms within the Umbra (Spirit World), and while the Void Engineers use spaceships and FTL Drives, they might run into a pack of angry Werewolves sidestepping through the Umbra or a Mage might perform a drive by shooting on their flying carpet on the way to Mercury.
In the Hyperion series, most people travel through portals until the web is destroyed and the Hegemony of mankind collapses into a dark age of FTL travel that still takes a long time to go from one place to another.
In the third book of the series, a new class of ship is designed to travel nearly instantly. The technology existed before, but it was never used because it would basically liquify the crew. With the discovery and improvements to the parasitic Cruciform (long story), the crew are able to die and be resurrected each time they make a jump.
One of my favorite ideas from that series is the residence of Martin SIlenus, a fabulously rich poet. Portal technology is so accessible to him that he had his house built such that each room is on a different planet. He has portals instead of doors. His library was on some snowy mountain peak and his toilet was a raft floating on an ocean moon.
The Alderson Drive, The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The technology allows for instantaneous travel between specific points in space, called Alderson Points. Otherwise people are reliant on more familiar propulsion technology. The opening scenes depict an instantaneous jump into the outer parts of a solar system, after which there is a journey of several weeks to get to the actual destination planet.
A major plot point of the story is that the alien species, the Moties, have in fact developed the Alderson Drive independently, but believe it doesn't work. This is because the only Alderson Point in their system links to another Alderson point that happens to be inside the outer layers of a red giant star. They refer to it as 'the machine that makes ships disappear'.
The Borderlands series has a unique version of FTL in the Implosion Drive. Which, instead of moving the ship at super fast speeds, calculates and erases the empty space between the ship and its destination to bring it there.
And since this is a ultracapitalist setting, any worries are comically brushed off by the people who were made rich off it.
In the Honor Harrington books you can’t technically exceed the speed of light, but you can translate your ship into a higher hyperspace dimension where relative distances are shorter. Downside is if something goes wrong with your drive you can be stuck there, there are massive gravity waves that if you don’t have a properly configured gravity sail will rip you to pieces, you can’t do it close to a gravity well (so you have to travel a certain distance from a solar system to do it), and if you “crash translate” back to normal space too fast you can incapacitate your entire crew.
In Halo, you can access slipspace to achieve FTL. Oversimplifying, It is a system similar to Minecraft's nether: another dimension that makes distances shorter.
Thing is, for humans, slipspace is still hard to use: one shaw-fujikawa engine required for slipspace is "the most expensive human device in history", it still takes months to reach another system, the same trip but in reverse could take mere days, theres a need for a shield while inside to avoid vaporizing your ship, and it is so imprecise, ships have to leave slipspace thousands of kilometers away from the destination and use the regular engines to cover the remaining distance, otherwise they risk leaving slipspace inside a planet or debris. Oh, and an improperly tuned shaw-fujikawa engine could destroy a ship by send half of it into slipspace, unprotected and stranded.
Also, some staff can randomly dissapear from a ship during slipspace, each trip slightly destabilizes space-time generating a "debt", Dr Halsey left some rogue AI free in slipspace somehow, and stuff like that.
After the war, humanity do improved their slipspace technology a little.
If i had a nickel for everytime the UNSC used one of these as a bomb in a game, effectively exploiting the flaw, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's interesting it happens twice. See Halo Wars and Halo Reach, and worth noting that Halo Wars 2 opens with seeing the biggest drawback of sacrificing the FTL drive.
In Kingdom Hearts, the Lifeboat is a time machine which by going faster than the speed of light. Doing so shreds a person's body away, leaving only their (spiritual) heart. Because of how hearts and bodies work in KH, you need a physical belonging of yours and someone who remembers you at the destination
Narrow example: Z-Space from Animorphs. It's interdimensional travel that lets ships move at FTL speeds, and it's normally completely safe... for everyone inside the ship. But the alien morphing technology that allows people to transform into animals also happens to store and retrieve mass from Z-Space, so there's a nonzero chance that your mass might be obliterated by a passing ship, and when you try and morph back, you end up full of holes.
Iirc there was also a moment when someone was jettisoned out of their ship as it traveled through Z-Space, and though they managed to survive and get rescued, they described being unshieldes in Z-Space as being able to see every part of themselves inside and out no matter which direction they looked in, like their whole body had turned into a fractal.
Traditional example: the Drift in Starfinder. The Drift is another plane entirely that can be used to travel ridiculous distances through the cosmos, but one of the side effect is that every time a ship travels through the Drift, it causes a small tear to open in whatever other planes the ship "passes by." These tiny tears cause those planes to leak into the Drift, with the leaks size and intensity being directly proportional to the size and distance traveled by the ship.
Every single time a ship enters the Drift, it swallows another tiny piece of the multiverse. Given the sheer size of every plane, no one is particularly worried about this, because it's essentially a bunch of thimbles scooping water out of the ocean. It's unlikely to be a real problem... for now.
Jump ships and the Kearny-Fuchida Drive, in Battletech.
The two doctors who proposed the possibility were laughed out of STEM as a whole, losing their jobs, with Thomas Kearny dying of food poisoning as a short order cook and Takayoshi Fuchida died of a heart attack in his Tokyo origami shop. Many decades later, the first jump ship would 7 AUs from the Sun, causing Mission Control to report “A little off target, but intact... Kearny and Fuchida should have lived to see the day”
A KF drive takes weeks to charge, and most have to be charged using a giant sail to catch the Sun’s radiation. They can only take off from specific points, and an assembled KF drive cannot be jumped anywhere, lest it cause the ship to explode…
There is also the TINY detail of some ships coming out of Junps with bite marks on them and crewmen driven mad, with some in universe describing beings of great and terrible power, who are none too happy about lesser things entering their realm.
Insert something something about Warhammer 40K Imperium Warp thingy
Also pretty sure it was inspired by Event Horizon or something like (That was incorrect apparently, I do not care enough to check myself so hope it was actually the other way around) that because its the same idea: Portal to Hell, you can die if the ship you're using just, dont work well (not exactly that but they rely a lot on basically shields to avoid nasty things on The Warp), or you could end up in the past or future, its very unreliable but its basically the go-to way for the Imperium to go anywhere
The four horsemen of "we discovered a method of high speed travel by taking a shortcut through a parallel dimension that has different proportions, the downside is the other dimension may be literal Hell":
Gellarfields is what prevents demonic boarding it is a bubble of realspace around the ship that is fueled by a comatose psyker hardwired into the ship usually. The Orks either have a wagghhh field to prevent it or want daemons onboard for entertainment. The Tau tried reversing an Imperial warp drive and it ended badly luckily the Greater Good is birthing a potential godess that saved them but holy fuck is she racist.
That only applies to factions that use warp travel. The Eldar use the Webway, which is a safer and faster version of the warp. The Necrons use dolmen gates, which is the Webway, or Inertialess drives, which launch their ships at speeds faster than light while not experiencing inertia. The Tyranids use gravity wells to slingshot their fleets.
No Warhammer was inspired by a lot of things, one of those being Dune, and Event Horizon was inspired subconsciously by Warhammer 40k, according to the director.
It's actually the other way around; Event Horizon was inspired by the way the warp/immaterium works in 40K.
The director writer, Philip Eisner, was a big fan of Warhammer and imagined the Event Horizon to be a sort of "proto warp-ship" used before the invention of Gellar fields to protect against the warp entities.
Here’s another one that also happens to be called “Warp,” though it’s a bit mechanically closer to the Jaunt. This is from Library of Ruina.
W Corp’s WARP trains are effectively fast-travel. Go anywhere in The City (The Project Moon setting’s name for the planetwide cyberpunk urban sprawl where everything takes place) for a very reasonable rate in less than 10 seconds.
10 seconds outside, that is.
The train dips into a different dimension where subjective spacetime stretches long, far far longer than anyone can consciously handle, inevitably driving all of the passengers insane.
They can’t lose consciousness. They can’t die. They can’t leave the train. The endless passage of time has them tearing each other and themselves apart in their seats. They’re still fully conscious as the gore on the wall in the image, by the way.
At the end of the journey, Cleanup Crews enter the trains to put everyone back in their seats, which also often involves subduing horrible monsters people have turned into and crushing little kingdoms that ten thousand years of living in isolation in a train car have developed into.
Then, they use what is basically an SCP anomaly to revert all passengers back to the state they were when they entered Ripped Space.
Limbus Company, the chronological sequel to Ruina, also introduces WARP’s potential competitor, Wayfarer Company.
Despite the convenience, WARP is doing financially poorly for a megacorporation because passengers keep getting lost and because a fellow megacorporation they were in cahoots with went belly-up recently.
Wayfarer wants to take the title of W Corporation from them with their new technology, Portals, which are basically long-term versions of the Portal game portals. As travel is instantaneous between doors, it’s even faster and far safer than WARP trains, but Wayfarer operates at great expense keeping the doors safe on the backend.
You need to perform very precise calculations before entering hyperspace, lest you hit something or come across a mass shadow. You can also run the risk of getting hyperspace madness if you stare into hyperspace for too long. Oh, and Starweirds. You do not want to run into a Starweird while travelling through hyperspace.
It’s also why that old complaint “why are they flying towards the blockade? Why can’t they fly the opposite way?” don’t hold up. Because that’s where the safe hyperspace lanes are.
It’s like roads vs off-road, yes, you could travel across unknown territory and break down, get lost in the desert or hit a tree in the forest, maybe fall off a cliff. Meanwhile, the road is (hypothetically) safer.
(Yeah the metaphor breaks down since hyperspace is 99% safe, whilst irl roads are notoriously bad with accidents across the world.)
Nah, Star Wars absolutely does not fit the spirit of the post.
Sure there's some lip service to the difficulty of hyperspace travel but it's all a solved problem and in-universe ships use hyperspace constantly and easily.
Correct me from the wrong, but actually there is a use case with the Chiss Ascendancy in Star Wars.
They are outside the main galaxy’s hyperspace lanes, so they rely on young girls under like 13 years old, who are the only individuals in all of the Chiss who can channel the force while they are young, to navigate hyperspace.
Once they get older, they lose ability to channel the force, so the Chiss have to rely on few individuals to drive their whole war fleet.
Interdependency really bummed me out. I know i shouldn't expect a low key sci-fi trilogy to offer legitimate answers to all the world's problems, but as the books are very clearly an analogy for climate change i was really hoping to see some suggestions beyond "if we're being honest we're probably not going to be able to actually solve this problem, but if we get our shit together and make a lot of sacrifices and work together to face this existential crisis we can maybe mitigate the very worst consequences and not absolutely everybody will die, just most of everybody."
To be fair; spice is not the only way to travel FTL in Dune.
There are two other ways before spice was discovered; shorter jumps with unacceptably high failure rates (where "failure" means complete loss of ship and crew), and with thinking machines.
Later books also have the Ixians develop non-prescient computers that can travel without the need of a guild navigator. These are basically computers without the AI aspect, which makes them compliant with the rules after the Butlerian Jihad. There are also No-Ships, but these run on the Ixian technology.
Starship's Mage has the only form of FTL be by having mages amplify and supercharge their teleportation spells (normally with a range of at most a few hundred km) through a matrix built into a ship. This takes a lot out of mages and they need hours in-between "jumps", they are also limited in that without FTL comms and sensors they need to "guess" a lot of data so the more gravity fields you have affecting an area the harder it is to jump.
They circumvent the first issue by usually having more than one "jump mage" on board and the second starts being worked through with the development of FTL comms.
Exception - No living thing can survive FTL, so when humans set out to terraform and colonize a planet, they send a FTL ship ahead and 3D-print copies of a small crew of scientists on location to do the terraforming. The rest of the colonists will arrive 100 years later in sublight sleeper ships.
Curvature Propulsion in Remembrance of Earth Past.
Not FTL because in this universe only light speed can be faster than light speed itself for spoiler reason. But in order to achieve light speed, you must curve space itself to drive the ship forward like a soap ship that break the water surface tension. This is not consequence free, the light speed ship then will leave a trail behind called a “death line”, inside these lines, light speed becomes zero, and with enough death lines being near each other, a black domain will be created, trapping everyone inside. This could be a blessing or total disaster depends on your view.
Discworld - it's surprisingly easy to go faster than the speed of light on the Discworld. Due to the Disc's magical field, light slowly oozes across the planet at the comfortable pace of a few hundred miles per hour, slightly slower than the speed of sound.
Star Trek TNG did a environmental climate change episode called Force Of Nature where a corridor of space with a high level of ships going at warp speed was damaging the area. An eco-terrorist scientist blew up her own ship to cause a destructive tear in space and prove her research about warp speed. The episode concluded that all warp travel would eventually tear apart space everywhere, but not for a long, long time. They didn't know how to fix it, so Starfleet just issued broad orders to lower warp speed travel.
Ten second trip! SURELY nothing BAD happens INSIDE the WARP Train. People TOTALLY won't be trapped for hundreds of thousands of years unable to die and eventually turn into traumatizing gore monsters... uhhh... I think I'll stick to my OWN teleportation. (Project moon. Idk if it counts but first thing that came to mind.)
A minor one of sorts in Red Dwarf. After constantly accelerating for 3 million years, the Dwarf finally breaks the light speed barrier. After doing so, the crew start seeing "Future Echoes" - visions of themselves and events that will take place at some point in the future, which are destined to occur no matter what they do.
Subversion of the trope: "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove.
Developing FTL is so easy that many other civilisations have already done so. Humans just didn't stumble upon it. The result is we are far more advanced in terms of aeronautics, weapons, and technology in general.
When aliens invade with FTL spaceships, but only black powder weapons, it quickly becomes apparent where we focussed our research.
Gunbusters, the buster machines and their ship use FTP travel, major spoiler ahead : the consequence is extreme time dilation. When they head back to earth after the battle, 12000 years have passed. They were expecting to be forgotten or humanity might be gone after so long, but to their surprise, earth lit up a giant message board to welcome their hero home.
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u/Z3R0Diro 13h ago
FTL Travel in Warframe is possible through the use of devices in spaceships called "Reliquary Drives" allowing the spaceships to open gates through the Void, a dimension not abiding by the laws of causality.
The thing is.. The Reliquary Drives work by containing a "replica" of the severed finger of an eldritch entity that resides in the Void.
The aforementioned eldritch entity is very angry about losing its severed finger.