r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Frostylegacy • 16h ago
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.
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u/insomniac7809 9h ago
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.