Ask Lemmy

One of the more interesting (and creepy, and appalling!) FTL systems I remember is from Scalzi's The God Engines. Way back in the day The Lord subjugated all other gods, and these gods are now prisoners of human ships, and responsible for moving them through the stars.

I'm fuzzy on the details, but I remember engineering was replaced by a priest caste, and their prayers kept most ship systems running (this Lord is a very active deity!) I also remember that the ship-gods can be very recalcitrant - I think the book opens with the captian having to whip the ship's god into compliance.

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

Stargate is pretty good. Rotary phone 😀. It's an elegant way to minimize CGI costs for the show. Not only that, the concept that you don't know what's on the other side is also interesting.

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.

Allister Reynolds: Revelation Space universe. Its not FTL its near light speed with time dilation as an actual plot device. The only hand waving part is the power/device to get up to speed, but everything else is in the realm of physics.

In the Battletech universe, the Kearny-Fuschida drive jumps a ship instantly up to 30 light years, but then the jumpship needs to deploy a huge solar sail and wait two weeks to charge the capacitors. They also can't jump (safely) except to the low-gravity Lagrange points, and then dropships need to detach and make their way to the planet or whatever.

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

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

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.

I enjoyed reading Ursula Le Guin's stories about instantaneous travel.

The process of instantaneous travel is so bizarre and unexplainable that every crew member experiences it differently. Some people think they haven't gone anywhere, some people think they're on the other side of the universe, and some people think the ship has disintegrated around them.

The only way for the process to succeed is for the entire crew to agree on a shared reality. It has the effect of making FTL travel a dangerous thing that requires training and planning. You can't hop on a ship with random people and expect to survive. Everyone has to train together to really trust each other's perception and experiences.

My favourite is definitely BSG (~~Big Sexy Giant~~ Battlestar Galactica) where the big ships just go 'poof' in a flash of light and suddenly they're somewhere else. Pure kino. :3

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.

Hyperspace in Babylon 5 is pretty cool.

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

I like the A Fire Upon The Deep version where Earth is in the "slow zone" but the speed limit gets faster in other regions of space. It makes enough sense that you could easily imagine a universe working that way, at least if you don't know too much about physics.

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.

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.

Ender's sagas adresses not only near light speed travel, but also the relativity on communications between the traveling veasels and "stationary" posts via the ansible

The FTL in the game FTL.

It's not really explained or important in the game, but Christ almighty have I put hundreds of hours into that infuriatingly addictive thing; so it must be my favorite FTL.

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.

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

I like the version from BSG.

Andromeda was weird. Able to travel from galaxy to galaxy otherwise they travel at sub-light.