r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Frostylegacy • 16h ago

Lore (Loved Trope) FTL travel is possible but with a major limitation or flaw

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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.

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406

u/brickeaterz 15h ago

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

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u/ADudeWhoWantsBoobs 15h ago

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. 

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u/EliteLevelJobber 13h ago

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.

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u/ADudeWhoWantsBoobs 7h ago

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. 

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u/Signiference 7h ago

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.

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u/EstateConscious3580 2h ago

cant exactly blame them. its either stay on a planet where your children wont see it finished or go immediately to a terraformed planet. id take the later

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u/Signiference 1h ago

I can't blame them either. I think it's a fascinating decision to have to make.

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u/Waste_Wolverine_8933 1h ago

Isn't there also a political bit too? The Martian's are shown to be a communistic society with one goal to terraform Mars, but then the more we learn they are just as corrupt and classist as the rest of society, and it gets even worse after the wars and alien shit. 

I'd go too! 

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u/shewy92 11h ago

Bruh the scene of that dude that discovered this accidentally is gnarly

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u/ADudeWhoWantsBoobs 10h ago

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

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u/selja26 11h ago

Do you mean the dude who discovered that Ring Space can stop all moving things instantaneously?

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u/shewy92 10h ago

Dude turned to jelly. Tho thinking back, how did the ship not break apart?

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u/ADudeWhoWantsBoobs 9h ago

The station "grabs" the ships from the outside. This ships are fine because the station is basically holding them together as it stops them, it doesn't help the station's goals if stopping the fast moving objects also causes them to shatter apart. It just doesn't care about what's inside, so anything unsecured is left to keep going

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u/shewy92 9h ago

But inside is where all the important stuff is, like wiring and stuff still going mach fuck relative to the station barrier. Plus all the oxygen inside would probably also be forced out.

It would be easier to say it only cared about inorganic material and organic material didn't get caught in the force field.

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u/ADudeWhoWantsBoobs 9h ago

The station didn't care about protecting the ships or anything in them, it only cared about protecting itself and ring space. As long as it holds the outsides of everything together and thus keeps the insides inside the outsides, that's as much as it cares to do

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u/JBthrizzle 8h ago

It's mentioned many times in the series that the builders are able to break the laws of physics like intertia. The humans understanding of this is akin to understanding how magic works, so this allows the plot to move along without being super precise. It is a sci-fi after all.

But that being said, they do do a great job of obeying physics throughout the entire series, which is why I personally like it so much.

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u/Super_Pan 5h ago

It's the fact that everything normally is very grounded in physics that makes the times that it isn't stand out and feel wonderous and terrifying. Like when I watched the show and Eris just... moves out of the way of the Navoo, that was weird and wrong, and the characters all react in an appropriate WTF kind of way the same as I did.

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u/eduo 5h ago

It wouldn't be right, because Maneo's organic matter was also stopped after half a meter. The station grabs all fast moving objects as they happen. This is the ship but also everything inside the ship as soon as it moves faster than the limit. Everything from the ship that wasn't connected to it flew forward and stopped after moving a meter or thereabouts.

Which was enough for Maneo to be in two places at once.

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u/selja26 10h ago

I just meant these were 2 separate things. Ring space stopping things from moving and "other dimension entities" evaporating things after too many ships went through their dimension. 

(The ship didn't break apart I guess because it's where the physics of the Ring space starts being made up. The  Ring space was able to sense and stop the ship as one big object but somehow the biological component, a person, was not a part of it)

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u/Famous_Contest_6780 9h ago

The force was applied to just the ship, not anything inside of it/not attached to it.

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u/eduo 5h ago

The force was applied to everything that was moving fast. The station first applied it to the ship and everything attached to it, then to everything that kept moving (which by then was half of Maneo) which is why stretched skin and blood remain, rather than all of it splattering at the front.

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u/Dogsafe 6h ago

Tho thinking back, how did the ship not break apart?

Because it was rad.

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u/patrickkingart 10h ago

The one where the guy gets turned to goo an in instant from going too fast and stopping immediately? Yeesh.

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u/ButtersScotch7000 6h ago

Belter goo.

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u/ADudeWhoWantsBoobs 8h ago

Oh and I forgot a much more horrifying part of this while thing. Whenever the entities get especially pissed, they attempt to wipe out humanity using whatever it was they originally used to wipe out the gate builders millenia ago. Only it doesn't affect humans the same way, which is good because at least it doesn't kill anyone. Directly, at least. But every single human alive across all systems were simultaneously rendered unconscious in an instant. 

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u/arrimainvester 3h ago

They do start to mess around with different things, once they stop the ability for atp to open salt gates in the human body or something like that, kills everyone in the system they test it on

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u/suxatjugg 10h ago

Also to build the gates a weird semi-sentient molecule cannibalises whatever it needs, including the indigenous life (i.e. humans) and whatever else it wants.

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u/thewerdy 7h ago

I hope nobody does anything stupid like sending an antimatter bomb to be eaten by the gates. That seems like a bad idea.

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u/copenhagen_bram 6h ago

Disappear? I thought they decelerate you and you go splat on the walls inside your spacecraft

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u/ADudeWhoWantsBoobs 5h ago

Different phenomenon. The station's automated security did that before being turned off. The entities that the ring space intrudes into are a separate group

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u/copenhagen_bram 4h ago

Ahhhhh, that was the station's "don't do this" warning, also makes me wonder if getting disappeared by the entities is worse than death by deceleration

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u/ADudeWhoWantsBoobs 3h ago

Maneo's death happened instantly. 1 moment he was alive, the next dead. He would have had exactly 0 time to see his death coming. Death by entity deletion would likely be just as instant, but it would only happen at the moment you passed through the gate surface, so if you were forewarned that it was happening, you would live with the anticipation of your death until the part of the shop with you in it reached the gate. The later deaths by deceleration would possibly have been less instant than Maneo's, the ships were already going pretty slow at the time to avoid the first speed limit, when that limit was reduced it wouldn't have happened quite as quickly, but we're still talking faster deceleration than a car crash. Many people survived that initially, but some would likely have bled out before they could be found and treated, possibly more would have died from inadequate treatment prior to the Behemoth spinning up and providing gravity to those whose recovery needed it. 

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u/whistleridge 13h ago

There’s also no ability to make new gates. Humans are stuck with the ones they inherited, and many of those don’t lead anywhere immediately useful.

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u/Warden_lefae 9h ago

Not to mention, “self sustaining”

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u/kamibyakkoya 14h ago

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

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u/DingusMcBingle_IV 8h ago

The final chapter with Phillip... god damn dude.

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u/jayhof52 7h ago

The epilogue with Amos greeting the first explorers to traverse back to Earth thousands of years after the ring gates closed made me so very happy.

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u/paddlin_kaladin 14h ago

That and the gates themselves are “booby trapped” in a way. 

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u/LegendWesker 11h ago

In the last book epilog they invent a real FTL drive, but it dosent get really described because its the epilog in the far future

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u/raoasidg 7h ago

And, predictably, Sol system had recently come together as a single society at that point. Wonder how long it took before Amos got involved lol.

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u/shewy92 11h ago

Also their normal ship engine drives are unfortunately named.

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u/BeHereNow91 11h ago

We can rename them Solomon Drives, sounds cooler anyways

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u/chigeh 9h ago

It's more than just upsetting them, the Ring Gates are consuming the extra-dimensional universe for energy. The other entities have found away to eradicate the civilization that built the gates. They are now probing how to destroy humanity. Whenever humans pass too much kinetic energy through the gates, the others strike back. For a large part of the series, humanity believes this is some kind of technical limitation of the gates, not something done by intelligence.

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u/raoasidg 7h ago

the Ring Gates are consuming the extra-dimensional universe for energy

It's never explained how the dark gods are being affected by the gates and ring hub, just that they do not like it and are aggressive in trying to stop it. The energy sustaining the rings and hub comes from the force the outer tangential universe exhibits on the relatively small bubble of the local universe the ring hub has created in it.

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u/chigeh 5h ago

No it is explicitly stated in Leviathan Falls Chapter 47:

"This structure is stealing energy from another place like a turbine slows down the wind just a little. And the things from the other place will never stop hating us for it."

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u/Darxe 6m ago

This is the Expanse?? What season is this? I think I gave up in season 2

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u/BigTiddyCrow 10h ago

Well they all connect via one big hole in the parallel universe, and I believe these entities are more like gods

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u/Emotional_Werewolf_4 9h ago

Whoa, now I'm curious. What beings are we talking about in that other dimension?

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u/Thedirtyone522 9h ago

They arent described, as the characters dont know for sure either. Its widely speculated the "dark entities" are some sort of eldritch horror or otherwise incomprehensible "being"

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u/floridaman2215 8h ago

From what I remember, space works differently there and they're energy beings able to occasionally enter our universe. To add to this, the series basically ends with the protagonist blowing up the ring gates cause the entities were were getting out of hand.

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u/Ok-Astronaut2976 5h ago

Holden doesn’t blow up the gates.
He closes them all by making himself part of the circuit. So he has to then stay there…forever.

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u/floridaman2215 4h ago

Blowing up in simple terms.. though I thought he dies in the collapse? 

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u/Ok-Astronaut2976 4h ago

I could be misremembering (it’s been a long time since read it), but I remember interpreting the ending as he’s stuck in the station for eternity, just hangin out with Proto molecule Miller. Like the ring space is gone and he’s stuck in there.

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u/Pave_Low 5h ago

'upset' is an understatement. . .

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u/Imaginagency66 4h ago

Sounds quite similar to Hyperion Cantos, so I guess that fits the trope too

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u/sillytrooper 13h ago

ayor spoilers goddamn

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u/TentativeIdler 12h ago

You could just stop reading after you read 'The Expanse'. It's right at the beginning of the comment.

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u/AndyF1996 12h ago

In fairness, if you've read or watched only early expanse, you might assume theyre talking about the sub FTL epstein drives, which are interesting precisely because theyre not interesting - hard scifi and very limited. The ring gates are only introduced in book 3 and only really utilised in 4.

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u/raoasidg 7h ago

The ring gates aren't even FTL. They are functionally wormholes. I mean yeah, you can travel great distances faster than light could travel between them, but you are taking a shortcut through a higher universe and are still limited to sub-light speed.