Ask Lemmy

Cowboy Bebop 👩‍🚀🤠

Visually it's gotta be Leviathans' Starburst from Farscape.

That sequence never got old when I was a kid even though they reused it

Warp Drive in Star Trek. Largely because there is modern day physics that points to the possibility of it being an actual possibility.

From a story telling, fits into the narrative version, the FTL in the newer Battlestar Galactica series. Look no further than the Battle of New Caprica. That was fracking awesome.

For visuals, Mass effect is great. Giant space guns that shoot spaceships across.

I like gate type things and prefer them in space like babylon 5 and buck rogers.

I think it was the Old Man's War series that had a really creative form of FTL travel that played off of the infinite multiverse theory.

Instead of traveling through space, they would jump into a parallel universe were everything was the exact same, except that their desired destination was closer to them and the same group of travelers were also jumping to a different verse at the same time.

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.

The Mirrors in Book of the New Sun. Basic idea is to surround yourselves with mirrors until you create an infinity room and then, through 'exactly aligned' lights, the light waves don't cancel out but instead 'push' objects out of the universe, returning at the destination when the light slows down to universal speeds.

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. It deals heavily with causality and "light cones." There's some super advanced entity in the universe that enforces a ban on causality-breaking FTL, so it's not possible for anything to mess with the entity's development, iirc.

Stross's Neptune Brood also has some interesting stuff about FTL economics. It's somewhat of a satire on cryptocurrency, NFTs, and marketization in general.

One thing I'll say is that I prefer gates or portals to "Teleporters" for the obvious "it actually kills you" thing

I like the system in Asimov's Escape (from the I, Robot series). Spoilers ahead:

Two field engineers experience bizarre, dreamlike disorientation during the jump; afterward Susan Calvin explains the Brain discovered that hyperspace causes a momentary cessation of existence (i.e., you’re effectively disassembled and reassembled), which would panic a robot under the First Law—so the Brain (ship's AI) masked it with funny/benign hallucinations and only reveals it after they return.

I'd imagine that a lot of future experiences led by true AI would be philosophically challenging like this.

Halo's Slipspace has always been my favorite. It's another dimension where instead of being able to move in four directions, things can move in eleven. This results in travel being faster there than in normal space.

The fun part is that the UNSC and the main antagonists- the Covenant- use the exact same method of FTL travel. The Covenant are just dramatically better at it, to the point of UNSC ships that attempt to run away from the Covenant via slipspace sometimes having the Covenant fleet they were fleeing already there and waiting on them.

The Hyperspace Gates in Cowboy Bebop always seemed to be pretty plausible. They didn't explain all the science behind them, but there was enough to show that the was science behind it, and it had been commercialized enough that people had a basic understanding of them.

There's a theory about Even Horizon that it was basically the Warp from Warhammer 40k.

I like the Stargate-lite system in the game Terminus (2000). Unlike Stargate, each gate connects 1 to 1 with another, so there’s no “dialling up” a new destination. In fact, these gates don’t go anywhere unexplored. They only go where we’ve already been (around the solar system).

See, in Terminus the space ships can only fly at realistic speeds (similar to real life rockets) and maneuvering is difficult (with pretty decent Newtonian physics). If you want to travel to other places in the solar system it takes an extremely long time, so the gates make it actually feasible to get around.

This all had the effect of making space feel like the age of railroading. You can get around but you’re limited to where the rails can take you. I don’t know why, but there’s something so romantic about that.

For practicality: Whatever it is that The Nox do in the Stargate TV show. It's not well explained because, well, no other race is advanced enough to understand it. Something about briefly causing two distant points in space to touch. Instantaneous travel to anywhere.

For impracticality: #1 The ring network in one of Stephen Baxter's novels. Kind of like the eponymous rings in the better known Stargate franchise, but the ring source and destination are fixed and transport time between rings is light speed, so you arrive years after you enter. And IIRC, you come out as an approximation of what you were when you went in. A very good approximation, but still an approximation. The advantage is that the journey seems instantaneous to the traveller.

#2 Whichever story has it that travel in hyperspace / subspace turns out to be slower than travel in real space. This may have been a throwaway Internet joke, but it still amuses me.

#3 Stephen King's Jaunt.

The one where humans discover a way to "skip" through space in jumps – which shouldn't be possible and puts a strain on the traveler – until they discover the real deal from aliens.

Aside from that, the more common type with beacons or gates.

As long as it's got "dat woosh", I'll love it.

Elite Dangerous, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Battletech are my favorites, though.

FRIENDSHIP DRIVE CHARGING BABY!

"Warning! Hyperspace conduit unstable!"

Uh oh.

Hyperspace in Babylon 5 is pretty cool.

Also in Star Trek TNG when the Traveller uses his mind to go crazy fast.

Hyperdrives, sg1,sga,sgu. wormholes, and interdimensional teleportation, bsg is one such one. Warp is basically just "manipulating the space around it, using subspace(an alternate dimension for both sg1 and star trek). apparently its the slowest form of ftl. compartively to the likes of borg. even caretaker has a very advanced intergalactic ftl( interdimensional rift) later in sg1,sga, they have access to intergalatic hyperdrives which are superior to interstellar ones. with hyperdrives they arnt restricted to the limit of travelling faster than light speed in the normal universe. they explained hyperspace does not have such a limit, and isnt subjected to time dilation effects of approaching close or faster than light speed.

it seems ftl that requires traveling through a medium like warp hyperspace have limitation of power requirements and engine designs. Teleportation seems dont have that limit, aside from power requirements.

trek also have other form of quirky ftl, like the vortex drive of the xindi, coaxial and the rift generation. most other shows use teleportation, or interdimensional portals.

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.

Whatever it is, I'm inclined to like the versions where FTL is a teensy bit dangerous. Not necessarily 40k's "FTL is actual hell and frequently fails in terrible ways", but more... it's risky. It's a mundane risk, maybe. But still, there's that little bit of risk in the background and it needs to be approached carefully...

Like, Babylon 5's hyperspace is an actual place you make trips into, but it's also highly nonlinear, and so it is entirely possible to get lost or stuck if your ship malfunctions. Also, there are living things in there which may not be friendly.

Even Star Wars' Hyperdrives can be dangerous. It doesn't get played up in the stories much, but a malfunctioning or improperly programmed hyperdrive can strand you in deep space, subject you to severe time dilation, or just splat you against a realspace object.