This can be anything from Hyperspace in Star Wars, Warp Drive in Star Trek, travel through the Warp in Warhammer 40k or anything else.
I’ve always liked “slow” FTL travel, where going a few light-years still takes a few days or so. I also really like travel through an alternate dimension like in 40k, Event Horizon, Witchspace in Elite Dangerous.
I wanna know your favorite versions, or do you prefer stories that obey the laws of known physics, like the Expanse or Rimworld?
I love the idea that navigators in Dune ripped a line of space cocaine to forsee the best path through folded space for travelling.
Space cocaine is the best take on spice I’ve ever seen.
Challenge accepted
I read all of that in Peter Capaldi’s voice. You made my day
His secretary drinks cat piss??
That’s how the latent poison works in David Lynchs dune
Is this character there in the books?
Thufir Hawat.
In the books he has been poisoned by Harkonnen and needs a regular antidote to survive. The Harkonnen slip it into hid food secretly so if he escapes he will die before he can tell any secrets.
In the Lynch movie he needs to milk a cat rat combo thing daily for the antidote.
🤣 Thufir Hawat milking a cat rat for the antidote sounds hilarious, thank you
Yeah they have some crazy complicated formula they use to fold space, but no one knows why it works. They made computers illegal so had to use drugs to make humans capable of doing the calculations. Over time the navigators mutated into worm-like creatures that live in tanks of spice.
I like Dune’s FTL the best of any since it’s not just beep boop… ship goes fast. They can go anywhere in the Universe, but there’s a huge cost to it and shit gets weird.
Infinite Improbably Drive in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I find that highly unlikely.
I do love how the side effects (leaking improbability) were critical to the story making any plausible sense.
Throw in bistro-mathematics as an alternative star drive.
It’s such a genius idea because it’s not only a super original way to do FTL, but it also gives you a perfect way out for any plot holes lol
Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engines I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.
Cubert: That’s impossible. You can’t go faster than the speed of light.
Farnsworth: Of course not. That’s why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.
Doesn’t Cubert later figure out that the engines don’t move the ship, instead they move the universe while the ship remains stationary?
Correct!
I thought the Expanse did this really well. For starters, most travel is restricted as we currently know it. They have the Epstein drive, but something like that is feasible. In any case, humans are still meat bags that can only accelerate so much.
But then the FTL component requires some otherworldly technology with gating. That leaves the physics mystery to having been built by some smarter species and I think that is perfect for suspension of disbelief.
Most unfortunate name since ISIS in Archer
i see the stargate in expanse, lol.
So I really like the Stargates. They’re a lot more limited/less flexible in where you can travel, but with that limitation comes unique challenges and intriguing stories. The biggest pro about them? It’s the fastest form of FTL there is. You can travel literally instaneously to any other gate. And there are innumerable gates to travel to.
But there are a lot of cons too.
Convenience… gates must already be where you’d like to go. The gates are relatively small, unable to fit even a car through, and the gate has a time limit on holding it open so there is limited ability to send large quantitaties of goods through and absolutely no large objects.
Risk… connections are blind, so you don’t know what’s on the other side until you or a probe goes through and relay back details. And it’s a single point of entry, and only one way, so it’s easy to be trapped or ambushed on the other side without escape. The gate can also be damaged or have its dialing device missing, disabled or destroyed, making it functionally useless from that end. If your gate is dialed into, the only way to stop anyone from traveling through is with a barrier so close to the wormhole event horizon to make molecules unable to materialize. But even then, they can hold your gate open from their end for the time limit of the wormhole, and then immediately redial and prevent you from using it indefinitely.
Unknowns… Certain anomalies like black holes affecting the destination gate can also pose a cataclysmic danger to planet of the gate of origin. Random happenstance with solar flares can cause the wormhole to travel through time as well as space. Gates may be too far to travel without extra power, and there may not be power available on the other side to get back. Gates can be dialed at random or you may have a list of addresses, but without someone who’s been to these gates before, you have no idea who or what you’ll find on the other side until you dial it.
The typical use for the gates is cool, but the really interesting stuff is when things go wrong, or when people get really creative with the mechanics. Things going wrong like heading home to Earth but being gated unexpectedly to an icy cave with no exit and no dial device to be found and everyone having to figure out where you went even though none of it seems to make sense. And creative things like overcoming the gates’ distance limitations/extra power needs to cross between galaxies by daisy chaining hundreds of them in the void between the galaxies and setting up a macro to pass the matter buffer from one to the next without rematerializing the objects and people within in between.
Of course, traditional FTL ships exist in Stargate, but they are much slower than the instantaneous stargates, and have other dangers associated with them, like other armed ftl ships, pirates, replicators… Most ftl ships in stargate use hyperspace travel, but I believe that the Ancient’s inter-galactic stargate seeding ship, Destiny, uses a classic warp drive.
I do love me some Stargate. And Destiny is SUCH A COOL SHIP, I’m still mad about it…
Yeah, I get why it didn’t do a well. It was very tonally different from SG1 and Atlantis. But it was a solid sci fi drama/thriller and had a lot of potential that’ll never come to be. And I love Robert Carlyle in everything. It’s a major bummer.
apparently the nakai ships in sgu has a different one than destinys, or a normal hyperdrive too. it seems more like catapult like system.
You can definitely fit a car through. In the novels they even transport helicopters and earth moving vehicles to set up military/mining facilities. Think about it, four people can comfortably walk into a Stargate side by side.
You’re right. The stargate is 6 Daniels wide as someone else pointed out. So probably not fitting an F250 through there, but a mid sized suv could pass through assuming there is enough clearance
the ori solve this issue with a supergate. although they have to use black hole to power such a large gate. offscreen atlantis used thier wormhole drive.
thats why sg1,sga, sgu had the foresight of using probes, so they wouldnt be ambushed, they rarely are. the biggest limitation for a gate is how long it can stay open, unless you have unlimted power sorce, like black hole or zpms, or anubis gate destroying device.
ori solves this issue by using a supergate powered by a small blackhole, can be a natural one too. asgard solely use thier very fast intergalatic hyperdrives, so they dont need stagates all the time. aside from the zpm power atlantis, they can fly across the galaxy in a matter of minutes or seconds. while even the deadalus takes some time because its a weaker powered ship.
What annoys me about the SG universe is how inconsistent the gate addresses are.
They talk about how every gate address in the Milky Way is made up of five coordinates and the sixth glyph is the point of origin.
I am sorry but that sounds smart but is actually dumb.
I love SG1/SGA, but once you start thinking about it, it get annoying.
Ok, so the it is established that the last glyph in the address is the point of origin.
This makes me wonder why the address system is needed at all.
Think about it, if every planet has a different glyph as a point of origin, why not just use that glyph as the entire address?
In Children of the Gods, Til’q asks SG1 where they come from and Daniel draws the Å symbol, which Til’q recognizes, meaning that the Å symbol is only connected to earth.
So ever since then, it was established that a single glyph can be understood as a single planet. So why not use it as the actual address for a specific planet,
the other 6 points are coordinates to basically zero in to the planet your dialing, i think its explained more in the first few season, gotta rewatch the first few seasons where carter explains why they use 6 other costellation, and the "planet your own unique symbol is probably the constellation unique to that part of the space. the pegasus is this way too, but the SGU ones is based on a different system
Definitely Warhammer 40k.
I was initially thinking Star Trek but I was also only thinking of how the FTL itself works; it’s based in actual theory which is cool.
But the “travel through hell and risk being haunted by ghosts and demons” thing in WH4k is dope af.
I was thinking of Event Horizon. That’s pretty much the same as you’ve described.
Fun fact: According to the writer, Event Horizon was written as being in the WH4k universe, at the earliest point man was known to cross into the warp. But without the actual licensing to call it Warhammer.
Cool! I have always loved them film. Never knew that fact. I haven’t done Warhammer since a kid but now you say it the gothic style ship interior does remind me of the chaos space marines.
Its heresy that i needed to scroll this long to see 40k!
The Infinite Probability Drive from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
It’s the Infinite Improbability Drive though, not Probability, that makes no sense :)
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.
Chevron 7 locked.
I was just watching that, it’s still one of my favorite shows.
They had hyperdrives too but they were pretty boring in comparison.
Admittedly the “don’t know what’s on the other side” bit is a little iffy. Sure, they’ve got that little wheeled robot they use a couple of times, but after a while you’d think they’d do something as simple as “stick a camera on a pole through the gate first.”
This is covered in the technobabble of the show. The gate is one way to anything bigger than radio waves, so the camera would see nothing until enough of it had dematerialized for the rest to be sucked through.
The camera wouldn’t emerge through the other side until the whole pole is through though, the Stargates only pass matter to the other end once the full object has entered.
As others have explained, this is covered, the Stargate creates a minuscule wormhole, all matter is disintegrated transported and then reintegrated. But the Stargate acts in continuous chuncks of matter, so the camera won’t rematerializes until the entire stick crosses the event horizon, so you would need to attach the camera to a remotely controlled car, and you’re back to the robot.
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.
Cowboy Bebop 👩🚀🤠
My favourite is definitely BSG (
Big Sexy GiantBattlestar Galactica) where the big ships just go ‘poof’ in a flash of light and suddenly they’re somewhere else. Pure kino. :3The rescue where they jump the Galactica into the atmosphere of New Caprica, scramble Vipers, and then jump out again is maybe the coolest scene in TV sci-fi.
The setup is just perfect too. “All hands - brace for turbulence.”
And you’re thinking, No. No way he’s going to do that.
AND THEN HE DOES.
I also loved that, as soon as they did that, the Galactica started falling
Here here! I second that!
Also, my favorite line in that clip “Well, this oughta be different…”
I think it worked so well because they’d spent two or three seasons not doing that.
I just rewatched BSG a month ago or so, and yeah, that scene was so insanely cool!
it is kinda wierd the showrunners of the reimagined series tried to avoid building a lore around or the scifi-babble around it. they wanted people to focus on the “christian themed, end of times arc of the series” thats why they avoid the previous series of bsg tech. there isnt much info how they developed it in bsg.
I’ve never seen the original series but I really enjoyed how they downplayed technology in general. I could have done without so much of the god shit, but really the show was so damn good that I can deal with that part
from what ive heard, the criticism is about the showrunner, who is allegedly a mormon, so he wants a GOD-ANGEL-christian ending, similar to supernatural show, god-christian angel, ending. except with all the magic/ and advanced technology of the older series of bsg. thats why it deviated from the og show so mmuch, no lasers, no advanced 3rd race in teh universe.
also he dint like the “pewpew” scifi-tech of TREK-CLONE thats why. the original series had way more material to be honest, instead of the stuck in a ship, Voyager-esque show.
like how the older basestars are more harder to destroy than the new ones, yea they give an explanation its easier to build/grow. another plothole i dint like 40 years, and the 7 dint figure out how resurrection tech works, so they werntly left crippled if the hub was destroyed.
I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT ABOUT THAT.
That literally made my day, thanks lolol. THE KINO IS ABSOLUTE
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.
What story was this?
I think it’s called Shobie Story. It’s part of Fisherman on an Inland Sea.
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.
That book was a fun read.
What I like about FTL is how it works with the story.
My favourite examples are Elite Dangerous and Dune.
Elite Dangerous’s FTL tech is based on alien tech and that allows the developers to do cool stuff that you wouldn’t expect in an mmo (this is usually a loading screen so when this first started happening people were terrified).
And Dune’s idea of having the entirety of interstellar civilisation dependent on one substance that can only be made on one planet, which also has other uses extremely important to different groups, sets the stage perfectly for what happens in the books.
Wish they didn’t bail on consoles.
Going plaid in Spaceballs is pretty dope.
Ludacris speed, go!
Ludicrous speed.
Ludacris is the rapper, but I like your enthusiasm. :)
I just felt he should be included!
Looking forward to round 2 (upcoming Spaceballs movie)
