Star Trek, Star Wars, and virtually every other interstellar travel film, be it space fantasy or serious drama, have FTL travel. So why wouldn’t Blade Runner?
Yes, 30 years in the future is a short time for inventing FTL, building ships and establishing colonies, but it’s also too short for establishing in-system space travel and functioning colonies where there are no other habitable planets. But it’s not the first movie or show to get that wrong. (like Star Trek)
Also synths. Don’t forget the synths (on the list of implausibly advanced technologies built into the narrative).
Indeed. Flying cars are easier to believe, and where are they today?
He says “off the shoulder of Orion,” which pretty heavily implies that he’s talking about the constellation, not the nebula. And, most likely, the constellation as viewed from somewhere within our solar system, because our solar system is pretty much the only place in the galaxy where those stars form that specific pattern.
Roy’s an android at his end-of-life date. He’s spent the last four years doing something, right? And he knows that he’s only four years old, because knowing he’s at his EoL date is what drives all his actions. So, if he has memories of stuff that happened before those four years, he knows those are fake memories.
In the scene in question, Roy is having his final moments of life on the roof with Dekkard, and wants to make a point about being a human - that he’s a unique individual, and that when he dies, something irreplaceable will be lost. Which sets of memories does he pick to make his point? The memories that he accumulated in the last four years, which he knows are genuinely his and his alone? Or the memories from more than four years ago, which he knows are fake, and probably shared by a bunch of different androids of his make and model?
They’re slaves, dude. Like, worse-than-American-chattel-slavery slaves. You motivate them by shooting anyone who shows the slightest signs of rebellion, torturing anyone who slacks off, and the four year life span doesn’t really matter when you’re working them in jobs with a 100% mortality rate over three years.
Also, either they have FTL travel in Blade Runner, in which case the distance to Orion is moot - or they don’t have FTL travel, and they implanted a memory in Roy where he fights a whole war in a distant part of the galaxy that no human has ever actually visited. It would be like downloading Star Wars into his brain and making him think it was his personal memory.
The stars in Orion are, roughly, a thousand lightyears away. Go, say, 50 lightyears away from Earth, and the shape will be a bit distorted, but it’ll still be recognizable as Orion. And there are a lot of other stars within 50 lightyears.
That’s a different PKD story. 
That’s a different PKD story.
Do Androids Dream of R2’s Beeps?
Get you ass to Mars!
A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies - a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!
Tyrell even tells Roy that he’s led a remarkable life, “burning twice as bright.” Clearly Roy has experienced some shit.
It’s not uncommon for sci-fi movies to have conflicting technologies. Every movie world has it’s own set of rules. Just because BR had synths and flying cars doesn’t mean they had FTL travel. The argument can be made that synths and flying cars do not violate the laws of physics.
The fact is, if you want to tell a normal story with interstellar travel, you need FTL. It just is a fact. You gonna stomp your feet and yell “it violates the laws of physics!” then you’re gonna miss a lot of good movies.
But, synthetic humans that can’t be distinguished from normal humans without a complicated empathy test, but can stick their hands in boiling water with no damage, is a contradiction. Synthetic snakes that have manufacturer’s serial number on every individual scale, but replicants, which are much more important to distinguish, don’t, violates basic common sense.
Did the movie need offworld colonies, and hence FTL travel? Nope, but it didn’t need flying cars, either. Or CSI “enhance” software that can see around corners in pictures.
Earth is supposed to have a largely reduced population, only the dregs remain. Sebastian comments that there is “no housing shortage here”, but when Deckard chases Zhora, the streets are so packed they can barely move. Taffy’s place seems to be doing fine, with an upscale clientele, yet punk kids try to steal parts off an occupied police car, implying extreme lawlessness.
On the OP, I’ll never buy Deckard as anything but human; to me it is the whole point of the film. But I do find the idea that Deckard was made an hour before the film started to be quite fascinating. I always thought the “Deckard is a replicant” school assumed he’d been a replicant “forever”, that is, his entire time as a blade runner. (Some posts above do seem to agree with that). But the fact that Deckard was made specifically for this job, (because the best blade runner got taken out by a Nexus 6, and clearly they need someone, or something, better) now that’s intriguing.
And whose memories did he get? Holden’s!*
*the first time I watched the movie, back in the 80s, with the smoky, poorly lit ambiance, I thought that was Harrison Ford interviewing Leon. It all fits!
Philip K. Dick would do that, just casually drop a reference to off-world colonies or an alien visit or whatever, even if it had nothing to do with the story. He was basically bursting with ideas and they would leak into his stories even if they weren’t needed.
I’ve never understood why Holden didn’t already have Leon’s picture - no need to run a VK test. The identities of the escaped replicants were already known; Capt. Bryant showed Deckard all of their names and images.
For that matter, why wouldn’t Tyrell put some kind of taggant in replicant blood so they could be detected by a simple blood test?
Because he wanted them to be indistinguishable. “More human than human”.
I assumed seeing something “off the shoulder of Orion” meant watching a ship on fire with the constellation of Orion as a backdrop.
Come to think of it, you can’t travel “to” a constellation. It’s made up of stars quite distant from each other. Orion looks like Orion from our solar system, but if you traveled a few light-years, it might be random stars that look like Nimrod instead…
Oh, and Roy’s being poetic. That ship might have only had a minor fire, and C-beams might not glitter much…
.
Doesn’t sound so bad right now. Sign me up!
Well, he did anticipate he would have doubters…
I see and enjoy many a good movies that violate natural laws. I can easily suspend disbelief for FTL travel, vampires, etc.
No one of jumping a yelling. But nowhere in the story do they state that FTL travel is a thing in this world. You’ve thrown it in to support your version of what happens in this story.
And that’s cool, but the fact is, as been repeatedly pointed out, some parts of this story are ambiguous.
They do state that there are offworld colonies, though, that are in better shape than Earth. There’s nowhere in the Solar System where that could be the case, ergo they have interstellar travel of some sort. And there’s also mention of something called the “Tannhäuser Gate”, which certainly sounds consistent with some forms of FTL commonly seen in science fiction.