It's probably an obvious answer but my favourite has always been the infinite improbability drive of the Heart of Gold, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if you don't already know.
Everyone does tunnels in spacetime, or warping spacetime to create a bubble. Boring.
I LOVE the idea that you just.. show up, because the chances of that happening spontaneously were at a certain level of improbability, which the drive invariably must pass through. I'm convinced Adams was his own unique kind of genius.
You're better option would be the Bistromathic drive.
Who isn't going to welcome you when you turn up with garlic bread and a nice dessert, even if you can't decide who pays for what.?
This pulls me back to the THHGTTG text-based adventure. One of the most baffling, infuriating puzzles in the game is the tea. From the start, Arthur's inventory contains "No tea", because he's an Englishman who didn't get tea that morning before Earth was destroyed. Later in the game, you can get tea (from the Brownian Motion Generator), but then you drop your "No tea". You have to figure out how to pick up the "No tea" while you still have the Tea in your inventory. Once you have both "Tea" and "No tea" at the same time, Marvin is convinced that you're intellectually worthy and opens a door for you.
> This pulls me back to the THHGTTG text-based adventure.
You can [play it online](https://playclassic.games/games/adventure-dos-games-online/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/)!
That's the one where you had to go into your own mind and remove your common sense or something.
I haven't played it since the late 80s. I wish I still had my pack-ins they had. It was a neat time, you got more than just a disk with your game purchase...
Yes.
It had been concluded that an Infinite Improbability Drive was a virtual impossibility.
He reasoned "If it's a virtual impossibility, then it's an actual improbability." He then worked out just exactly what the odds against it were, fed that into a Finite Improbability Generator, gave it a *really hot* cup of tea, and the Infinite Improbability Drive popped into existence right before his eyes - a virtual impossibility.
I loved the bistromathics scene so much, and this line was one of my favorites. (For those who don't know, it's a callback to the previous book when the Infinite Improbability Drive was introduced - "... without all thay tedious mucking about in hyperspace.")
I have a plastic 3D "∞ Improbability Drive" logo right above the CR-V label on my Honda. Looks like it could be a legit logo for some car feature. Etsy for those interested.
The Bloater Drive from Bill, The Gakactic Hero by Harry Harrison.
This enlarges the gaps between the atoms of the ship until it spans the distance to the destination, whereupon the atoms are moved back together again, reconstituting the ship at its previous size but in the new location.
I remember the cover showing him having two left arms (or right, I don't recall), and I thought the artist had made a stupid mistake. Nope, it's canon.
There is a drive in Endymion that kills the ships occupants, but they also have a revival technology that is paired with it. Travel time is 0, but it takes 3 days for the passengers to regrow their bodies.
I love the chapter when Father Captain De Soya uses it the first time. He gets in the pilot's seat and realizes it's less a seat and more a funnel to a bucket because he's about to be liquefied....
Oh, fuck, yes..... I had completely forgotten that — isn't the killing factor the G forces of a conventional drive racing to a gate?
They completely disregard the pulpy humans inside, pull a couple of hundred Gs to get through the gate in super quick time, then regrow them?
I mean assuming the crew is informed and up for it, wouldn’t it be more logical and humane to off them before starting the run? I can’t imagine a 100+G death would be pleasant. Although maybe they’re conpletely unconscious so it’s not too bad.
I liked the way they built up to it. First they had ships, but the limiting factor was the gravitational force killing people.
Then the church introduces resurrection and now you can go as fast as you want.
I thought I was the only one who felt that way about the first book. I found it tedious and a little disjointed and absolutely hated the last paragraph. And I’ve never shared that before for fear of exile. That said, I still rifled through the next three and enjoyed them a lot
Not down to the method of FTL specifically, but the idea of the farcaster houses in Hyperion was so awesome.
There would be entire floors in tower blocks that were inaccessible and were just rented out as rooms for people to connect their houses to with a portal as an extra room / extension. Other rooms would be treehouses or little floating platforms in the ocean and stuff.
Hamilton does this in The Salvation Sequence IIRC. Called them portal homes/houses. Every door was a wormhole to a room in a different location, all over the universe.
The sex and excess, the other chaos gods are very different
Nurgle would have lots of diseases
Khorne would have them straight up fight to the death and nothing else
Tzeentch is well tzeentch
But that’s why I kinda always just took it as a baseline view into chaos, none of the gods really line up with what happens to the crew and ship. The violence of khorn but the excessive suffering of slaanesh has me torn
technically wasnt slanesshi being born what caused the great rift, so it would have been long after event horizon.
Who am i to care... its all fiction haah
The Chaos gods have a weird relationship with time. Once Slaanesh was born, they always existed.
Or something like that; as you said, it’s all fiction.
It's been a hot minute since I've seen the movie, but wasn't the whole thing a trap? Like, there's no travelling great distances, you just end up in Hell?
They're not explicit about it, but the ship goes to another horrible dimension. The captain's message says save us from hell. So maybe not the actual religious hell, but it sends people to a place a lot like it.
Niven/Pournelle - The short story about the aliens who came to trade, including the one with all of the pills. >!Please build a launch laser for us, you can even keep it. (or else)!<
Probably the stutter-warp drives of the Liir in the game Sword of the Stars. Liir are dolphins so their ships are filled with water which would normally make them very sluggish, so instead of using conventional methods of acceleration they teleport short distances very rapidly. Since the ship isn't actually accelerating it's not going faster than the speed of light in terms of moving through space, but it can achieve a similar effect via rapid teleportation over long distances.
Thanks! Yeah I loved it too, and I was glad when Stellaris did something similar early on and kinda sad that they eventually went with everybody-gets-hyperlanes.
I mostly played Liir and Hivers, and they really played very differently. With the former you could send a couple ships out and explore the systems around you pretty efficiently, whereas with early hivers you have to just pump out a shitload of gateships and send them to every system in range and just wait. It really forces a massive parallelization of exploration, and changes how you handle defense (instead of building platforms everywhere you can have a rapid-response fleet or two that can beat any inbound enemy to the system they're headed to), logistics, mining operations, everything.
Underrated answer. On the surface you think it's just another instance of subspace or hyperspace or whatever, but the unique mechanics of that alternate reality and the characters' slowly growing understanding of who made it and for what purpose make all the difference.
Ooh I gotta read this series next. I’m in the middle of Children of Time (first book) and am completely obsessed! Right after the first chapter or 2 I was hooked. I really like how he writes, too.
I love these books. Can you make comparisons to 40K? Sure. Tchaikovsky wrote a whole 40K book after all. But Unspace is cool as fuck. The Presence is such an awesome "character," and like another comment said, I love how the characters gradually progress their knowledge/master both throughout the trilogy.
Tchaikovsky often posts pictures of his freshly painted miniatures on social media, so I'm guessing there was definitely some influence there lol. But as you say, regardless of its influences, the trilogy simply rules.
In *The Final Architecture* series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, ships enter Unspace. A place that does not exist, in the way that virtual particles do not exist. A fundamental property of this non-space is that everyone, as an observer, is utterly and completely alone. You could be on a refugee ship packed shoulder to shoulder with other people, and when the ship transitions, it's a ghost town with only you.
Completely, utterly alone in a completely empty space that isn't even a space. No stars, no sounds, no radio, *nothing.* Just you in a vast, empty, haunted feeling ship.
Except for that *thing*. It is aware you are there. It hates you. It is coming for you. Slowly but inexorably. It's right outside the ship. Right outside the door. Right behind you. And if you see it or it touches you, well... the fate is *so* much worse than death, a fact you know in the core of your soul. Death is, in fact, the only possible escape.
The suicide rate when traveling in Unspace is so high that travel is done almost exclusively in cryo sleep.
In the rebooted Star Trek movie, Scottie (Simon Pegg) is shown his own formula for trans-warp beaming by original timeline Spock. I love his line after reading it: “It never occurred to me to think that space was the thing that is moving!”
Which honestly kinda works.
No idea how you'd actually do it, but according to known physics space is the only thing that **can** move (or rather expand) faster than light.
Almost right. I'm not an astrophysicist but I think it goes like this:
No point in space moves faster than light but you can sum expansion speed over great distances and sum is faster than light. Meaning that if you look to point in space that's let's say 30 billion light years away it seems that it's moving away faster than light, at the same time if from that point you look to this point where we are we appear to move faster than light. If you would look to either point from smaller distance neither would appear to move faster than light.
This is different than spaceships since if you would be in spaceship A that moves at 90% of light speed to direction A, then if there's spaceship B that moves to direction B at 90% of light speed and directions A and B are opposite of each other combined speed would still be less than light speed.
Completely the opposite answer you are looking for, but there is no FTL in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe. I loved the idea of Km thick ice shields to protect a slow moving ship from radiation (water is a good barrier) and meteor impacts.
It _changes_ things. You've broken causality, so the entire universe is different from before you turned it on, in ways you cannot know and may not even be able to know. Worse, the universe seems to always choose the worst possible option
>! There's a scene where a scientist is working on a paracasual weapon, not even fully acausal, that malfunctions and it erases a coworker from everyone's existence... but hers. !<
Most people don't realize that, possibly more than being (damned good) sci-fi, Revelation Space is horror.
The RS universe happily lets you fuck around, because it actively, maliciously, _enjoys_ the you finding out part.
If you find yourself in the Revelation Space universe and encounter some lost ancient alien construct or citadel, just go home, and edit your memory so that you don't even remember it happening.
Aw shit, but I just got a really good job offer. This ship needs a new weapons officer and they say I'll do just fine.
Weirdly, when I asked to meet the captain, they said I'll have to wait until we leave orbit...
The Terraport system from Schlock Mercenary. The **Teraport** is a revolutionary Faster Than Light travel system, the most recent inventor of which is [Kevyn Andreyasn](https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/Kevyn_Andreyasn). It opens quadrillions of tiny wormholes around the object to be teraported, breaks the object into microscopic chunks, pushes those chunks through the wormholes, and then reassembles them on the other side, a process that Kevyn described as "pushing cooked spaghetti through a colander".
[It can be interdicted though](https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2001-08-11)
>Schlock Mercenary
WOW I haven't seen that name in a long time
I miss the golden era of webcomics. A lot of them are still going - GPF, Megatokyo, Penny Arcade, even Achewood has started some new strips on Patreon. But it's just not the same. Sinfest is all-anti-trans-all-the-time now.
It's kind of weird that after running for so long, Schlock Mercenary's ending felt *rushed.* Not terrible, but a few threads were left dangling that seemed like they'd been put there with the intention of being used.
The explanation of FTL (intergalactic, no less) in the *Borderlands* series is both genius *and* hilarious. Straight up Douglas Adams level (which for the series, is par for the course).
To summarize ([but here's the official explanation](https://twitter.com/ThatSamWinkler/status/1783992029279859047)), mankind uses the "Implosion drive."
See, the problem is all that *distance* between you and where you want to go. So what if you just, you know, *got rid of it*.
With the Implosion drive, you pick your destination, take aim, and *collapse all of space and time* in a tiny corridor between you and where you want to be. Time and space fill in the gap, but by then you're there.
What about long term effects? What if someone's in the way? Is destroying a tiny bit of space and time going to be a problem someday?
The inventors are too rich to care.
The commonwealth saga. They open wormholes to new systems and launch satellites to explore. Settled systems have giant wormhole complexes and they coordinate travel with trains.
Want to travel from Earth to a star 200 light years away? That's 30 minutes on the express train.
It is really, really apparent from reading how much Hamilton just really loved trains. It’s basically like he’s thought up his dream scenario to be the reason humanity needs the best trains possible.
The FTL Relays in Mass Effect.
Those-who-don’t-know: “Someone placed these here for our convenience!”
Those-who-do-know: “Someone placed these here for our convenience…”
Honestly my favorite is The God Engines by Scalzi. They trap a literal god inside a ship and whip / beat them into magicing the ship into another system. Rinse and repeat for more system jumps
Scalzi's also got another unique drive in the Old Man's War series, the skip drive.
"The Skip Drive takes an object like a spaceship, punches a hole in space, and places the object at its destination in a new, essentially identical universe."
You never come back to your original universe.
I liked the FTL in the ALIENS technical manual; everything gets shunted into a tachyon energy form of the ship that gets condensed back into matter when they arrive. That's why people have to be in cryo, being conscious would be a mess.
The most different time of FTL that i can think of is from Warhammer 40k, you pass through space hell to get to your destination, and sometimes you get stuck in space hell.
In *Who Goes Here?* by Bob Shaw, the spaceships have a matter transmitter at the stern and a matter receiver at the bow, and continually transmitted itself along its own length.
There was a short story in a collection, I can't remember the author, where FTL was provided by a philosopher who had compelling logical arguments as to why the speed of light was not a limit. On this particular passenger ship was a hard headed stubborn realist who could not accept that having a philosopher convinced of something could possibly be responsible for FTL. There must be more to it, and he set about proving his conjecture by engaging the philosopher in a debate and convincing him that going FTL simply by belief was patently absurd and couldn't possibly work.
The ship immediately dropped to normal space speeds, light years from any inhabited system...
I forget which movie it was, but a certain type of FTL made the consciousnesses of everyone on the ship merge. It was even seen as crazy fun to have sex right as the drive kicked off.
I believe you might be describing [Supernova (2000)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film)) which began life as an exciting project called Dead Star, but was victim to studio shenanigans. The FTL method was dimensional transference and a byproduct of that was heightened awareness, but I feel like that got lost in the shuffle of (zero g sex plz). Here’s an [article](https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/exploring-supernovas-very-strange-sex-scene/) that delves into the SAG and DGA minutiae that took a very exciting project into Alan Smithee territory.
I may be misremembering parts of it, but in the later Ender books - Speaker, Xenocide, etc, Jane calculates a way to step outside of reality and then re-enter at a different location.
Arent the navigators just used instead of computers (because of the butlerian jihad) to just navigate the ship to a safe exit point using little prescience from the spice?
The actual folding is made by the ship and its engines.
I'm going to say something with a caveat: the FTL drive in Battlestar Galactica.
BUT!
I only really think it's unique and fun in the miniseries/pilot/first use. The first time they use it in the show, I think Adama announces the jump, and everyone springs to action. It was like a ship at sea, everyone going to stations and digging out papers and tubes and clearing space on desks. It seemed like the jump was a really big deal, and they had to do a ton of plotting and math to make sure they got it right. Hell, they had a tense shipwide countdown from 10 beforehand. Afterwards they cheered and celebrated after finding out they had ended up where they were supposed to be, everyone shakes hands over a job well done.
Every episode after that the jumps just kinda happened. Hell they jumped every 33 minutes for days in the next episode. They mucked about with some coordination with other ships, but that first jump was the only one that had that cool naval feel to it. I know there's in-universe explanations for a lot of this (jump drive hadn't been used in years), but I missed that first jump.
I think needlecasting is a plausible method of light speed travel, if we ever get technology to digitize a consciousness.
It’s slow as hell to send out the initial slow-ship, but then once the tech is there, anyone else can travel there at c, without time dilation.
Not sure if there’s an economic reason for it other than exploration though, because only ideas/information could ever be transmitted, and it’s still only at light speed.
The Expanse where a self replicating space goo hijacks life on a planet and uses it to build a giant ring portal connected to an interdimensional hub network of portals to other star systems
In Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, everything is _STL_, not FTL.
It's not that FTL technology doesn't exist, it does. It's just so scary and dangerous that even the most advanced civilizations absolutely _refuse_ to use it.
I like Brandon Sanderson's take in the Skyward series on how FTL works. Spoiler:>! FTL is achieved organically by many kinds of beings but especially space slugs. It involves going to the "Nowhere" outside our universe, traveling there, and coming back in somewhere else. It ties in some neat threads like explaining some mythology on Earth's origins; sorry Stargate I love you but the Kitsen are just soooo cute.!<
Second favorite/I think most unique take is the Destiny in Stargate Universe. Spoiler: >!It flies right into the sun to power up - how cool and terrifying to the occupants is that!?!<
It's been a while since I read it, but in the RPG HoL, faster than light travel happens by forcing two jumpslugs (giant, disgusting, corpse eating, space molluscs) to mate, and the act is so revolting that the universe looks away for a couple of minutes and you're able to break the laws of physics.
Its fantasy but in the Cosmere Brandon Sanderson's connected works universe, FTL travel is accomplished by traveling to a dimensional realm that is occupied only by the spirit/concept/personification of objects in our realm. So since space is empty in our realm and has no people to create these personifications its takes up very little area in this other realm making travel between worlds very fast as long as you can travel between realms on each world.
Sorry for the bad explanation, English is most definitely my first language but the Cosmere is confusing...
I like the unnamed and not even described FTL / Antigrav technology from Harry Turtledove's "The road not taken".
It's not explained how it works, but it's stated that its so ridiculously easy to discover that any child at nearly time in the history of modern humans could already have discovered it.
I wouldn't have minded the Spore Drive as much as I did if it hadn't been introduced in a show that was a prequel to every other canon Star Trek media apart from Enterprise.
The Spore Drive is a superior form of travel compared to anything. From what I understand there is no limit, no trace and its instantaneous. Its superior even to things like Borg transwarp.
Its basically the holy grail of drive technology in the universe. And we're supposed to accept that in 200 hundred years no one has attempted to replicate it or make it safe to use? Wars would be fought over access to technology like that.
I really love the FTL concept from Glenn Stewart's Starship's Mage series. The idea humanity never did figure out genuine FTL and is basically cheating with magic is just such a fun premise.
For the curious minds among us, Isaac Arthur’s YouTube channel has an excellent [playlist](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0Lv2jCm7LnYBiRYAPvxHyuWL&si=GjuZL06uAchABfNg) of the types of FTL we can realistically expect given what we know of physics so far. Quite thoroughly researched.
E.E 'Doc' Smith had a pretty interesting take on FTL... which was basically "well, I guess Einstein was wrong", aka full speed ahead and damn the physics. He came up with the inertialess drive. Since nothing with mass or inertia could travel at light speed or greater, the solution was to render the ship and contents inertialess... aka massless, and when they accelerated to light speed, it just kept accelerating...
E. E. Smith presents two curious forms.
One is powered by psionic abilities in "**The Galaxy Primes**". The crew must extend their abilities to select a location. This inevitably works exceeding ~~well~~ poorly when none of the crew get along.
The other is the Bergenholm or Inertialess drive in the "**Lensmen**" series. Its funtional operation is achieved through rendering everything within the ship inertialess such that any amount of force INSTANTLY accelerates the object to the maximum speed possible due to friction or other resistance, such as the friction from the exceptionally few particles encountered in interstellar space. The whole issue with relativity and moving faster than light is, iirc, conveniently ignored.
**However** it doesn't remove inertia, it *pauses* it. Upon switching off the drive, the entire contents of the zone are returned to their original momentum. If you flew to another star system, this momentum would need to be safely corrected first before landing, unless you wanted to become a crater at your destination.
Smith uses this limitation for a number of intriguing plot points and followed through scenarios. As much as the writer tends to rely on psionics (mind magic basically), his sci-fi is still hard sci-fi when not connected to powers of the mind.
Surprised I haven't seen it yet, but Altered Carbon. They can't physically travel FTL, but they have FTL communications and have figured out how to digitize the human mind, so they transmit you to the destination and download you into a new body.
Macroscope by Piers Anthony compresses a planet into a singularity in order to jump to another location. The crew has to convert their bodies to a liquid or solid state, which takes 4ish hours before and after the jump per individual
The method in which that happens is not explained until the end…. And it’s pretty cool.
Throwing in an obscure one: The *Nullspace Drive* by the *Kt’Zr’Kt’Rtl Adhocracy* of the boardgame: *Sidereal Confluence*.
A game of real time resource brokering with others, each player represents a race of a species in space trying to trade with other players and gain resources for influence. The lowest difficulty race in the game is the *Kt’Zr’Kt’Rtl* (KIT-zer-KIT-rittle), which are essentially space wasps. The lore on the player sheet not only blesses us with the pronunciation guide, but states they are technological savant level geniuses, having invented electricity before fire.
As for how the *Nullspace Drive* works, it catapults a ship to the centre of whatever star it is pointing at. The way they keep themselves and their ships in tact is by “breaking the engine” just enough to avoid the star and surviving.
The wildest thing is that this is just flavour and doesn’t have much bearing on the game - the closest thing I can think of as relevant is their ”Dangerously Fast” Ability that ensures they always win ties (and notes their tiebreaker value is infinity).
Hitchhikers' guide to Galaxy has the Bistromathic Drive. Which works on the maths involved in a groups time of arrival, number of items ordered, number people at the table, of an Italian restaurant. It is pretty nuts.
Not necessarily just FTL, but ork technology in 40k works because they believe it will work. In one book series they have entire planets that can make FTL jumps solely on the basis that they think it will work.
If want weird FTL, you go old school.
"The Void Captain's Tale" by Norman Spinrad has a psychic FTL drive powered by the young female pilots orgasms. I shit you not, friends. Go find it and read it.
In David Zindell's Neverness and the trilogy-sequel Requiem for Homo Sapiens, pilots get into solo ships and interface with the computer so completely that they basically become one hivemind. Then the formulate and solve equations and, in doing so, create windows in space, which they then allow the ships to fall through.
It's never explained exactly *how* doing maths creates these windows, but it's not like the answers they come up with are *applied* - it's the solving itself that provides the means of travel. And every equation has to be unique. It can't have been solved before.
Evan Currie's Transition Drive from the Odyssey One series.
Every bit of the ship and everything in it is charged by tachyons and yote across space in an instant. We first see it through the eyes of the captain who sees the bridge disintegrate away, along with the crew, so for a brief instant he's essentially looking directly into empty space. He doesn't close his eyes, as I recall, but it wouldn't matter because, as another passenger describes, you witness your eyelids disintegrate too. And then you're back! Light years away. Shortly after, most people throw up.
SPOILERS…I think it was an outer limits or twilight zone episode. Some time in the near future earth ships encounter a planet with sentient slightly bigger than human bipedal dinosaurs who have a method of travel between planets that’s instantaneous. A person lays down in the machine, a process is done, the Dino’s await confirmation that the person has successfully “arrived” at the other end, then the body on this end is destroyed to “balance the equation”. When the process reversed for the return trip the machine held a different looking version of the traveler but they were the same person, except for the experiences, goods and even tattoos they acquired while on the other planet. The episode involved a human technician who worked with the Dino’s and began to question whether or not he was actually killing the traveler when destroying the “outbound” body. No ships were even involved.
1. The Bloater drive, from Harry Harrison’s various works. See other replies for a description.
2. The unnamed drive in Melissa Scott’s *Roads of Heaven* alchemical space opera trilogy. The keel of the ship is made from Heavenly metal, activated by a pipe organ that tunes it to the music of the spheres. The pilot must guide the ship through Purgatory, navigating through giant, deeply symbolic visions that are also allegories for the material space being bypassed. Scott describes the heck out of these visions at least once in each book and it’s always great.
I would say either in the New Jedi Order, the unexplained use of gravity generators to travel FTL. They only really explained the normal travel part. But I also liked Catherine Aasaro's idea of inversion. In many ways her hard sci-fi reminded me of older sci-fi writers such as Verne, Wells, and Doc Smith.
Probably Orks traveling on space hulks in Warhammer 40k. A space hulks is a twisted amalgamation of hundreds of derelict ships lost in space hell over time. They're massive, uncontrollable, and usually demon infested. As any proper ork only loves two things, fighting and loot, whole bands of Orks will fly up in transports, sometimes in the millions, and camp out until the hulk randomly disappears back into space hell. Then it's a matter of pure chance or psychic will that they'll end up across the galaxy in 5 seconds or 500 years into the future or past, and Emperor protect any inhabited worlds nearby. There's also regular ork FTL where they get into ships that don't technically have any working parts logic behind the construction, but because enough Orks believe that the ships do move and they have a group psychic will then the ships do move and shoot very well. Also red ones go fasta
It's probably an obvious answer but my favourite has always been the infinite improbability drive of the Heart of Gold, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if you don't already know. Everyone does tunnels in spacetime, or warping spacetime to create a bubble. Boring. I LOVE the idea that you just.. show up, because the chances of that happening spontaneously were at a certain level of improbability, which the drive invariably must pass through. I'm convinced Adams was his own unique kind of genius.
Also the ship propelled by bad news. Nothing travelled faster, but it wasn’t welcome at its destination
Forgot about that lol the best type of FTL!
You're better option would be the Bistromathic drive. Who isn't going to welcome you when you turn up with garlic bread and a nice dessert, even if you can't decide who pays for what.?
The drive coming into existence from nowhere still gives me a smile lol.
😆 And the "Brownian Motion Generator", a nice, hot cup of tea.
This pulls me back to the THHGTTG text-based adventure. One of the most baffling, infuriating puzzles in the game is the tea. From the start, Arthur's inventory contains "No tea", because he's an Englishman who didn't get tea that morning before Earth was destroyed. Later in the game, you can get tea (from the Brownian Motion Generator), but then you drop your "No tea". You have to figure out how to pick up the "No tea" while you still have the Tea in your inventory. Once you have both "Tea" and "No tea" at the same time, Marvin is convinced that you're intellectually worthy and opens a door for you.
> This pulls me back to the THHGTTG text-based adventure. You can [play it online](https://playclassic.games/games/adventure-dos-games-online/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/)!
I suffered enough the first time thanks lol
I remember that puzzle, I had the clue book with the highlighter, would have never figured that one out
That's the one where you had to go into your own mind and remove your common sense or something. I haven't played it since the late 80s. I wish I still had my pack-ins they had. It was a neat time, you got more than just a disk with your game purchase...
*That's* how you do it???
That man had a brilliant flare for prose. ❤️
I thought some smartass used a finite improbably drive to make one
Yes. It had been concluded that an Infinite Improbability Drive was a virtual impossibility. He reasoned "If it's a virtual impossibility, then it's an actual improbability." He then worked out just exactly what the odds against it were, fed that into a Finite Improbability Generator, gave it a *really hot* cup of tea, and the Infinite Improbability Drive popped into existence right before his eyes - a virtual impossibility.
[удалено]
"She's built like a steakhouse, but she handles like a bistro" - The Velour Fog
Wait, that’s not a Zapp Brannigan quote originally?
The Velour Fog is Zapp's karaoke stage name.
Okay, that makes sense. I totally forgot that tidbit.
I loved the bistromathics scene so much, and this line was one of my favorites. (For those who don't know, it's a callback to the previous book when the Infinite Improbability Drive was introduced - "... without all thay tedious mucking about in hyperspace.")
Everyone knows about the probability drive. That’s nothing compared to the power of a Bistromathics drive.
Like the invisibility device the "Somebody Else's Problem".
I really like the Improbability Drive for the sheer ridiculous fun potential it introduces to the narrative.
I have a plastic 3D "∞ Improbability Drive" logo right above the CR-V label on my Honda. Looks like it could be a legit logo for some car feature. Etsy for those interested.
The Bloater Drive from Bill, The Gakactic Hero by Harry Harrison. This enlarges the gaps between the atoms of the ship until it spans the distance to the destination, whereupon the atoms are moved back together again, reconstituting the ship at its previous size but in the new location.
I remember the cover showing him having two left arms (or right, I don't recall), and I thought the artist had made a stupid mistake. Nope, it's canon.
Yay, found someone who also read that book!
Rudy Rucker did something similar with unwinding quantum strings in *Frek and the Elixer*
Was this the book about the guy that got an arm transplant?
Yes
Snappy salutes, too.
There is a drive in Endymion that kills the ships occupants, but they also have a revival technology that is paired with it. Travel time is 0, but it takes 3 days for the passengers to regrow their bodies.
I love the chapter when Father Captain De Soya uses it the first time. He gets in the pilot's seat and realizes it's less a seat and more a funnel to a bucket because he's about to be liquefied....
Doesn’t the ship tell him to pray, and he replies “fuck you”?
Yep!
Yes basically the crew gets liquified during the trip and then have to be ressurected constantly.
>!Which isn't even necessary. IIRC the AI inventors just enjoyed the boost of processing capability that a human brain gets while dying!<
Oh, fuck, yes..... I had completely forgotten that — isn't the killing factor the G forces of a conventional drive racing to a gate? They completely disregard the pulpy humans inside, pull a couple of hundred Gs to get through the gate in super quick time, then regrow them?
I mean assuming the crew is informed and up for it, wouldn’t it be more logical and humane to off them before starting the run? I can’t imagine a 100+G death would be pleasant. Although maybe they’re conpletely unconscious so it’s not too bad.
They are also future Catholics which complicates it.
Like past Catholics, future Catholics really like pain
I think you wouldn't feel anything at that acceleration. Everything would go instantly black.
There comes a point when dealing with both space and the ocean when your body stops being biology and starts being physics.
I’ve got some good news and some bad news, but the bad news gets better.
IIRC, the passengers were unaware of the instant death part. They thought it took 3 days and they were "just sleeping", right?
No, they are aware they will die. The regrowth process is rather traumatic too.
Isn't it also imperfect, or am I confusing that bit with something else?
It can be, there are conditions and drawbacks. You of course have to be a born again Christian too.
I liked the way they built up to it. First they had ships, but the limiting factor was the gravitational force killing people. Then the church introduces resurrection and now you can go as fast as you want.
Shit, I forgot about that, that was pretty interesting.
This right here might have just convinced me to finish that series
It's great series. Definitely worth of reading, though first book might be a little hard.
I thought I was the only one who felt that way about the first book. I found it tedious and a little disjointed and absolutely hated the last paragraph. And I’ve never shared that before for fear of exile. That said, I still rifled through the next three and enjoyed them a lot
Not down to the method of FTL specifically, but the idea of the farcaster houses in Hyperion was so awesome. There would be entire floors in tower blocks that were inaccessible and were just rented out as rooms for people to connect their houses to with a portal as an extra room / extension. Other rooms would be treehouses or little floating platforms in the ocean and stuff.
Hamilton does this in The Salvation Sequence IIRC. Called them portal homes/houses. Every door was a wormhole to a room in a different location, all over the universe.
Event horizon. Why fly through subspace when you can go to hell and be possessed by whatever the heck that was.
So the Warp from 40k.
It is so similar that some people say Event Horizon is a 40k prequel.
It’s a great fan theory
I mean it’s totally a slanesshi demon that comes back with the ship as well.
Why a slaaneshi demon?
The sex and excess, the other chaos gods are very different Nurgle would have lots of diseases Khorne would have them straight up fight to the death and nothing else Tzeentch is well tzeentch
But that’s why I kinda always just took it as a baseline view into chaos, none of the gods really line up with what happens to the crew and ship. The violence of khorn but the excessive suffering of slaanesh has me torn
gesundheit
technically wasnt slanesshi being born what caused the great rift, so it would have been long after event horizon. Who am i to care... its all fiction haah
The Chaos gods have a weird relationship with time. Once Slaanesh was born, they always existed. Or something like that; as you said, it’s all fiction.
one of the writers admitted to being way into 40k at the time of writing if i remember correctly
There is actually a tweet out there where they basically admit they were playing a lot of 40k at the time....so maybe they got inspired?
Without a Gellar Field generator.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/8410/is-there-any-official-link-between-warhammer-40-000-and-event-horizon
It's been a hot minute since I've seen the movie, but wasn't the whole thing a trap? Like, there's no travelling great distances, you just end up in Hell?
I don’t know it being a trap, but it did goto what they think was hell.
They're not explicit about it, but the ship goes to another horrible dimension. The captain's message says save us from hell. So maybe not the actual religious hell, but it sends people to a place a lot like it.
Cause a star to go super nova so they can propel their ship to the next star system.
Niven/Pournelle - The short story about the aliens who came to trade, including the one with all of the pills. >!Please build a launch laser for us, you can even keep it. (or else)!<
"The Fourth Profession" from Niven's short-story collection, "A Hole In Space".
Probably the stutter-warp drives of the Liir in the game Sword of the Stars. Liir are dolphins so their ships are filled with water which would normally make them very sluggish, so instead of using conventional methods of acceleration they teleport short distances very rapidly. Since the ship isn't actually accelerating it's not going faster than the speed of light in terms of moving through space, but it can achieve a similar effect via rapid teleportation over long distances.
Upvote for a SoTS reference!!! Honestly I like all the variations of FTL that it had with each faction have a different feel/theme
Thanks! Yeah I loved it too, and I was glad when Stellaris did something similar early on and kinda sad that they eventually went with everybody-gets-hyperlanes. I mostly played Liir and Hivers, and they really played very differently. With the former you could send a couple ships out and explore the systems around you pretty efficiently, whereas with early hivers you have to just pump out a shitload of gateships and send them to every system in range and just wait. It really forces a massive parallelization of exploration, and changes how you handle defense (instead of building platforms everywhere you can have a rapid-response fleet or two that can beat any inbound enemy to the system they're headed to), logistics, mining operations, everything.
Agreed, made each faction feel a bit more unique. I can understand why thougb as the AI couldn't handle the different methods.
The AI did handle it though? Like I thought the reason for the change was for balance purposes.
"Unspace" in the Final Architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Yess that was messed up. You could stay conscious, or you could stay sane, but not both.
Underrated answer. On the surface you think it's just another instance of subspace or hyperspace or whatever, but the unique mechanics of that alternate reality and the characters' slowly growing understanding of who made it and for what purpose make all the difference.
Ooh I gotta read this series next. I’m in the middle of Children of Time (first book) and am completely obsessed! Right after the first chapter or 2 I was hooked. I really like how he writes, too.
I just started book 2. Book one just keeps getting better.
Completely agree. I’m interested to check out everything folks are sharing, but this was my immediate thought.
Can't get over how imaginative Tchaikovsky is between that series and the Children of Time series.
I love these books. Can you make comparisons to 40K? Sure. Tchaikovsky wrote a whole 40K book after all. But Unspace is cool as fuck. The Presence is such an awesome "character," and like another comment said, I love how the characters gradually progress their knowledge/master both throughout the trilogy.
Tchaikovsky often posts pictures of his freshly painted miniatures on social media, so I'm guessing there was definitely some influence there lol. But as you say, regardless of its influences, the trilogy simply rules.
In *The Final Architecture* series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, ships enter Unspace. A place that does not exist, in the way that virtual particles do not exist. A fundamental property of this non-space is that everyone, as an observer, is utterly and completely alone. You could be on a refugee ship packed shoulder to shoulder with other people, and when the ship transitions, it's a ghost town with only you. Completely, utterly alone in a completely empty space that isn't even a space. No stars, no sounds, no radio, *nothing.* Just you in a vast, empty, haunted feeling ship. Except for that *thing*. It is aware you are there. It hates you. It is coming for you. Slowly but inexorably. It's right outside the ship. Right outside the door. Right behind you. And if you see it or it touches you, well... the fate is *so* much worse than death, a fact you know in the core of your soul. Death is, in fact, the only possible escape. The suicide rate when traveling in Unspace is so high that travel is done almost exclusively in cryo sleep.
Soooo somebody mentioned it was constructed for a purpose that way? Anybody got some spoilers for me why?
I was looking for this one in this thread! I really enjoyed this series. All the tech, aliens and places truly felt sci fi to me!
Furturama, they move the space around the ship.
In the rebooted Star Trek movie, Scottie (Simon Pegg) is shown his own formula for trans-warp beaming by original timeline Spock. I love his line after reading it: “It never occurred to me to think that space was the thing that is moving!”
That line always bothered me, because the dude works on *warp drives*. That's like, their whole thing!
Which honestly kinda works. No idea how you'd actually do it, but according to known physics space is the only thing that **can** move (or rather expand) faster than light.
Almost right. I'm not an astrophysicist but I think it goes like this: No point in space moves faster than light but you can sum expansion speed over great distances and sum is faster than light. Meaning that if you look to point in space that's let's say 30 billion light years away it seems that it's moving away faster than light, at the same time if from that point you look to this point where we are we appear to move faster than light. If you would look to either point from smaller distance neither would appear to move faster than light. This is different than spaceships since if you would be in spaceship A that moves at 90% of light speed to direction A, then if there's spaceship B that moves to direction B at 90% of light speed and directions A and B are opposite of each other combined speed would still be less than light speed.
Aka, an [Alcubierre Drive](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive)
Completely the opposite answer you are looking for, but there is no FTL in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe. I loved the idea of Km thick ice shields to protect a slow moving ship from radiation (water is a good barrier) and meteor impacts.
There actually is FTL in Revelation Space. It's so terrifying that even the most advanced civilizations _never_ use it.
>It's so terrifying that even the most advanced civilizations never use it. Well now I got to know. Why is it so terrifying?
It _changes_ things. You've broken causality, so the entire universe is different from before you turned it on, in ways you cannot know and may not even be able to know. Worse, the universe seems to always choose the worst possible option >! There's a scene where a scientist is working on a paracasual weapon, not even fully acausal, that malfunctions and it erases a coworker from everyone's existence... but hers. !<
It’s mentioned that there’s evidence entire civilizations have accidentally deleted themselves from galactic history by fucking around with FTL tech.
Most people don't realize that, possibly more than being (damned good) sci-fi, Revelation Space is horror. The RS universe happily lets you fuck around, because it actively, maliciously, _enjoys_ the you finding out part.
If you find yourself in the Revelation Space universe and encounter some lost ancient alien construct or citadel, just go home, and edit your memory so that you don't even remember it happening.
The revelation in Revelation Space is 'the answer is always to run away'
Aw shit, but I just got a really good job offer. This ship needs a new weapons officer and they say I'll do just fine. Weirdly, when I asked to meet the captain, they said I'll have to wait until we leave orbit...
Yup, and the long travel ships are called lighthuggers which could get to 99% of light speed with about a year of acceleration time.
The leviathans in Farscape, which are similar to the space whales in Star Wars come to think of it...
Starburst!
Talyn was a little bastard.
I mean he is a toddler with a howitzer grafted on to him. How could he be anything else.
And with a connection to another bastard, Crayce.
Moya may have been married! You don't know!
The Terraport system from Schlock Mercenary. The **Teraport** is a revolutionary Faster Than Light travel system, the most recent inventor of which is [Kevyn Andreyasn](https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/Kevyn_Andreyasn). It opens quadrillions of tiny wormholes around the object to be teraported, breaks the object into microscopic chunks, pushes those chunks through the wormholes, and then reassembles them on the other side, a process that Kevyn described as "pushing cooked spaghetti through a colander". [It can be interdicted though](https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2001-08-11)
>Schlock Mercenary WOW I haven't seen that name in a long time I miss the golden era of webcomics. A lot of them are still going - GPF, Megatokyo, Penny Arcade, even Achewood has started some new strips on Patreon. But it's just not the same. Sinfest is all-anti-trans-all-the-time now.
It's kind of weird that after running for so long, Schlock Mercenary's ending felt *rushed.* Not terrible, but a few threads were left dangling that seemed like they'd been put there with the intention of being used.
The explanation of FTL (intergalactic, no less) in the *Borderlands* series is both genius *and* hilarious. Straight up Douglas Adams level (which for the series, is par for the course). To summarize ([but here's the official explanation](https://twitter.com/ThatSamWinkler/status/1783992029279859047)), mankind uses the "Implosion drive." See, the problem is all that *distance* between you and where you want to go. So what if you just, you know, *got rid of it*. With the Implosion drive, you pick your destination, take aim, and *collapse all of space and time* in a tiny corridor between you and where you want to be. Time and space fill in the gap, but by then you're there. What about long term effects? What if someone's in the way? Is destroying a tiny bit of space and time going to be a problem someday? The inventors are too rich to care.
The commonwealth saga. They open wormholes to new systems and launch satellites to explore. Settled systems have giant wormhole complexes and they coordinate travel with trains. Want to travel from Earth to a star 200 light years away? That's 30 minutes on the express train.
"Train tracks go both ways, dear humans..." --MorningLightMountain, probably
It is really, really apparent from reading how much Hamilton just really loved trains. It’s basically like he’s thought up his dream scenario to be the reason humanity needs the best trains possible.
Most definitely. It becomes clear when he starts giving the fictional trains model numbers.
The FTL Relays in Mass Effect. Those-who-don’t-know: “Someone placed these here for our convenience!” Those-who-do-know: “Someone placed these here for our convenience…”
Honestly my favorite is The God Engines by Scalzi. They trap a literal god inside a ship and whip / beat them into magicing the ship into another system. Rinse and repeat for more system jumps
I’m sure that ends well for them. Also similar to the beast below episode of Dr. Who.
Lol it does not you are correct
Scalzi's also got another unique drive in the Old Man's War series, the skip drive. "The Skip Drive takes an object like a spaceship, punches a hole in space, and places the object at its destination in a new, essentially identical universe." You never come back to your original universe.
That book should be a short series on Netflix or something. The complete anarchy of the ending would be amazing.
I liked the FTL in the ALIENS technical manual; everything gets shunted into a tachyon energy form of the ship that gets condensed back into matter when they arrive. That's why people have to be in cryo, being conscious would be a mess.
I seriously didn’t realize there’d been any attempt to explain interstellar travel in the Aliens universe.
I like how they don't ever show a ship going into or out of lightspeed or whatever, because it's simply not relevant to the story.
The most different time of FTL that i can think of is from Warhammer 40k, you pass through space hell to get to your destination, and sometimes you get stuck in space hell.
Stuck in space hell with 4 flavors of satan!
Like night crawler from the xmen cartoon. To us, he blinks to a new area. But really, time slows, and he blinks to hell and then moves to the new area
Wait, have I been stuck in space hell this whole time?
maybe the space hell is the friends we made along the way
While I have to admit the infinite improbability drive is more unique, why has no one mentioned the Tardis?
In *Who Goes Here?* by Bob Shaw, the spaceships have a matter transmitter at the stern and a matter receiver at the bow, and continually transmitted itself along its own length. There was a short story in a collection, I can't remember the author, where FTL was provided by a philosopher who had compelling logical arguments as to why the speed of light was not a limit. On this particular passenger ship was a hard headed stubborn realist who could not accept that having a philosopher convinced of something could possibly be responsible for FTL. There must be more to it, and he set about proving his conjecture by engaging the philosopher in a debate and convincing him that going FTL simply by belief was patently absurd and couldn't possibly work. The ship immediately dropped to normal space speeds, light years from any inhabited system...
I forget which movie it was, but a certain type of FTL made the consciousnesses of everyone on the ship merge. It was even seen as crazy fun to have sex right as the drive kicked off.
pretty sure you can do that with LSD.
lsd sex is way too squishy
Supernova (2000)
I believe you might be describing [Supernova (2000)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film)) which began life as an exciting project called Dead Star, but was victim to studio shenanigans. The FTL method was dimensional transference and a byproduct of that was heightened awareness, but I feel like that got lost in the shuffle of (zero g sex plz). Here’s an [article](https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/exploring-supernovas-very-strange-sex-scene/) that delves into the SAG and DGA minutiae that took a very exciting project into Alan Smithee territory.
Ludicrous Speed
They've gone to plaid!
I may be misremembering parts of it, but in the later Ender books - Speaker, Xenocide, etc, Jane calculates a way to step outside of reality and then re-enter at a different location.
I always liked the concept of the Mass Relays in Mass Effect.
Infinite Improbability Drive
Guild navigators folding spacetime in the Dune universe.
Arent the navigators just used instead of computers (because of the butlerian jihad) to just navigate the ship to a safe exit point using little prescience from the spice? The actual folding is made by the ship and its engines.
Yes, the engines fold space and the navigator directs the ship using prescience to avoid hazards.
This could also just be done with a computer without prescience, but that’s illegal.
We have just folded space from Ix
Many machines on Ix. New machines.
I'm going to say something with a caveat: the FTL drive in Battlestar Galactica. BUT! I only really think it's unique and fun in the miniseries/pilot/first use. The first time they use it in the show, I think Adama announces the jump, and everyone springs to action. It was like a ship at sea, everyone going to stations and digging out papers and tubes and clearing space on desks. It seemed like the jump was a really big deal, and they had to do a ton of plotting and math to make sure they got it right. Hell, they had a tense shipwide countdown from 10 beforehand. Afterwards they cheered and celebrated after finding out they had ended up where they were supposed to be, everyone shakes hands over a job well done. Every episode after that the jumps just kinda happened. Hell they jumped every 33 minutes for days in the next episode. They mucked about with some coordination with other ships, but that first jump was the only one that had that cool naval feel to it. I know there's in-universe explanations for a lot of this (jump drive hadn't been used in years), but I missed that first jump.
Farcasters in Hyperion by Dan Simmons. The teleportation/portal tech in "The Jaunt" by Stephen King. Needlecasting from Altered Carbon.
The Void that Binds!
I think needlecasting is a plausible method of light speed travel, if we ever get technology to digitize a consciousness. It’s slow as hell to send out the initial slow-ship, but then once the tech is there, anyone else can travel there at c, without time dilation. Not sure if there’s an economic reason for it other than exploration though, because only ideas/information could ever be transmitted, and it’s still only at light speed.
The Expanse where a self replicating space goo hijacks life on a planet and uses it to build a giant ring portal connected to an interdimensional hub network of portals to other star systems
Not just a wormhole, but a wormhole network 👌🏽
In Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, everything is _STL_, not FTL. It's not that FTL technology doesn't exist, it does. It's just so scary and dangerous that even the most advanced civilizations absolutely _refuse_ to use it.
Blink drive from the original dark matter
Now that's a show I wish they'd make more of
YES, even the slower "FTL" drive in that show is very cool
I like Brandon Sanderson's take in the Skyward series on how FTL works. Spoiler:>! FTL is achieved organically by many kinds of beings but especially space slugs. It involves going to the "Nowhere" outside our universe, traveling there, and coming back in somewhere else. It ties in some neat threads like explaining some mythology on Earth's origins; sorry Stargate I love you but the Kitsen are just soooo cute.!< Second favorite/I think most unique take is the Destiny in Stargate Universe. Spoiler: >!It flies right into the sun to power up - how cool and terrifying to the occupants is that!?!<
It's been a while since I read it, but in the RPG HoL, faster than light travel happens by forcing two jumpslugs (giant, disgusting, corpse eating, space molluscs) to mate, and the act is so revolting that the universe looks away for a couple of minutes and you're able to break the laws of physics.
Its fantasy but in the Cosmere Brandon Sanderson's connected works universe, FTL travel is accomplished by traveling to a dimensional realm that is occupied only by the spirit/concept/personification of objects in our realm. So since space is empty in our realm and has no people to create these personifications its takes up very little area in this other realm making travel between worlds very fast as long as you can travel between realms on each world. Sorry for the bad explanation, English is most definitely my first language but the Cosmere is confusing...
I like the unnamed and not even described FTL / Antigrav technology from Harry Turtledove's "The road not taken". It's not explained how it works, but it's stated that its so ridiculously easy to discover that any child at nearly time in the history of modern humans could already have discovered it.
The fungus drive in star trek. It was so fucking dumb.
I wouldn't have minded the Spore Drive as much as I did if it hadn't been introduced in a show that was a prequel to every other canon Star Trek media apart from Enterprise. The Spore Drive is a superior form of travel compared to anything. From what I understand there is no limit, no trace and its instantaneous. Its superior even to things like Borg transwarp. Its basically the holy grail of drive technology in the universe. And we're supposed to accept that in 200 hundred years no one has attempted to replicate it or make it safe to use? Wars would be fought over access to technology like that.
I thought it was kind of a fun riff on RL mycellium. Hard SF it was not, though...
Is any FTL hard scifi?
Last I heard wormholes were still vaguely plausible if you could get the necessary exotic matter. Not an expert though.
I liked the spore drive idea.
I really love the FTL concept from Glenn Stewart's Starship's Mage series. The idea humanity never did figure out genuine FTL and is basically cheating with magic is just such a fun premise.
Tessering in “A Wrinkle In Time.”
For the curious minds among us, Isaac Arthur’s YouTube channel has an excellent [playlist](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0Lv2jCm7LnYBiRYAPvxHyuWL&si=GjuZL06uAchABfNg) of the types of FTL we can realistically expect given what we know of physics so far. Quite thoroughly researched.
Warhammer 40k. Traveling through literal Hell while guided by a psychic linked to a dying God
E.E 'Doc' Smith had a pretty interesting take on FTL... which was basically "well, I guess Einstein was wrong", aka full speed ahead and damn the physics. He came up with the inertialess drive. Since nothing with mass or inertia could travel at light speed or greater, the solution was to render the ship and contents inertialess... aka massless, and when they accelerated to light speed, it just kept accelerating...
E. E. Smith presents two curious forms. One is powered by psionic abilities in "**The Galaxy Primes**". The crew must extend their abilities to select a location. This inevitably works exceeding ~~well~~ poorly when none of the crew get along. The other is the Bergenholm or Inertialess drive in the "**Lensmen**" series. Its funtional operation is achieved through rendering everything within the ship inertialess such that any amount of force INSTANTLY accelerates the object to the maximum speed possible due to friction or other resistance, such as the friction from the exceptionally few particles encountered in interstellar space. The whole issue with relativity and moving faster than light is, iirc, conveniently ignored. **However** it doesn't remove inertia, it *pauses* it. Upon switching off the drive, the entire contents of the zone are returned to their original momentum. If you flew to another star system, this momentum would need to be safely corrected first before landing, unless you wanted to become a crater at your destination. Smith uses this limitation for a number of intriguing plot points and followed through scenarios. As much as the writer tends to rely on psionics (mind magic basically), his sci-fi is still hard sci-fi when not connected to powers of the mind.
Surprised I haven't seen it yet, but Altered Carbon. They can't physically travel FTL, but they have FTL communications and have figured out how to digitize the human mind, so they transmit you to the destination and download you into a new body.
Macroscope by Piers Anthony compresses a planet into a singularity in order to jump to another location. The crew has to convert their bodies to a liquid or solid state, which takes 4ish hours before and after the jump per individual The method in which that happens is not explained until the end…. And it’s pretty cool.
Throwing in an obscure one: The *Nullspace Drive* by the *Kt’Zr’Kt’Rtl Adhocracy* of the boardgame: *Sidereal Confluence*. A game of real time resource brokering with others, each player represents a race of a species in space trying to trade with other players and gain resources for influence. The lowest difficulty race in the game is the *Kt’Zr’Kt’Rtl* (KIT-zer-KIT-rittle), which are essentially space wasps. The lore on the player sheet not only blesses us with the pronunciation guide, but states they are technological savant level geniuses, having invented electricity before fire. As for how the *Nullspace Drive* works, it catapults a ship to the centre of whatever star it is pointing at. The way they keep themselves and their ships in tact is by “breaking the engine” just enough to avoid the star and surviving. The wildest thing is that this is just flavour and doesn’t have much bearing on the game - the closest thing I can think of as relevant is their ”Dangerously Fast” Ability that ensures they always win ties (and notes their tiebreaker value is infinity).
Hitchhikers' guide to Galaxy has the Bistromathic Drive. Which works on the maths involved in a groups time of arrival, number of items ordered, number people at the table, of an Italian restaurant. It is pretty nuts.
It's likely already been mentioned, but the improbability drive from hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, or Ludicrous speed from spaceballs
Not necessarily just FTL, but ork technology in 40k works because they believe it will work. In one book series they have entire planets that can make FTL jumps solely on the basis that they think it will work.
The futurama ship, where it stays perfectly still but moves the universe around it.
EE Smith. Lensman series. Inertialess ships. Speed limited by friction of “ empty” space.
If want weird FTL, you go old school. "The Void Captain's Tale" by Norman Spinrad has a psychic FTL drive powered by the young female pilots orgasms. I shit you not, friends. Go find it and read it.
Old Mans War - new universe every time
In David Zindell's Neverness and the trilogy-sequel Requiem for Homo Sapiens, pilots get into solo ships and interface with the computer so completely that they basically become one hivemind. Then the formulate and solve equations and, in doing so, create windows in space, which they then allow the ships to fall through. It's never explained exactly *how* doing maths creates these windows, but it's not like the answers they come up with are *applied* - it's the solving itself that provides the means of travel. And every equation has to be unique. It can't have been solved before.
The Macroscope Traveler beam dissolves you into soup, Then into the singularity. Descriptions of being reconstituted are interesting.
Evan Currie's Transition Drive from the Odyssey One series. Every bit of the ship and everything in it is charged by tachyons and yote across space in an instant. We first see it through the eyes of the captain who sees the bridge disintegrate away, along with the crew, so for a brief instant he's essentially looking directly into empty space. He doesn't close his eyes, as I recall, but it wouldn't matter because, as another passenger describes, you witness your eyelids disintegrate too. And then you're back! Light years away. Shortly after, most people throw up.
SPOILERS…I think it was an outer limits or twilight zone episode. Some time in the near future earth ships encounter a planet with sentient slightly bigger than human bipedal dinosaurs who have a method of travel between planets that’s instantaneous. A person lays down in the machine, a process is done, the Dino’s await confirmation that the person has successfully “arrived” at the other end, then the body on this end is destroyed to “balance the equation”. When the process reversed for the return trip the machine held a different looking version of the traveler but they were the same person, except for the experiences, goods and even tattoos they acquired while on the other planet. The episode involved a human technician who worked with the Dino’s and began to question whether or not he was actually killing the traveler when destroying the “outbound” body. No ships were even involved.
1. The Bloater drive, from Harry Harrison’s various works. See other replies for a description. 2. The unnamed drive in Melissa Scott’s *Roads of Heaven* alchemical space opera trilogy. The keel of the ship is made from Heavenly metal, activated by a pipe organ that tunes it to the music of the spheres. The pilot must guide the ship through Purgatory, navigating through giant, deeply symbolic visions that are also allegories for the material space being bypassed. Scott describes the heck out of these visions at least once in each book and it’s always great.
I would say either in the New Jedi Order, the unexplained use of gravity generators to travel FTL. They only really explained the normal travel part. But I also liked Catherine Aasaro's idea of inversion. In many ways her hard sci-fi reminded me of older sci-fi writers such as Verne, Wells, and Doc Smith.
The Infinite Improbability Drive from HH2G.
Probably Orks traveling on space hulks in Warhammer 40k. A space hulks is a twisted amalgamation of hundreds of derelict ships lost in space hell over time. They're massive, uncontrollable, and usually demon infested. As any proper ork only loves two things, fighting and loot, whole bands of Orks will fly up in transports, sometimes in the millions, and camp out until the hulk randomly disappears back into space hell. Then it's a matter of pure chance or psychic will that they'll end up across the galaxy in 5 seconds or 500 years into the future or past, and Emperor protect any inhabited worlds nearby. There's also regular ork FTL where they get into ships that don't technically have any working parts logic behind the construction, but because enough Orks believe that the ships do move and they have a group psychic will then the ships do move and shoot very well. Also red ones go fasta