Cowboy Bebop probably did not have FTL. It did have something called hyperspace gates with which they traveled from planet to planet, but only inside the Solar system.
Oh, I’m certainly not saying it can’t be a big part of the story - hell, I grew up on Heinlein and Clarke, I loves me some hard SF. Just saying that when you put it next to, say, Start Trek, the percentage of the plot held up by nonexistant particles and weird-ass-space-shit will drop. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, the fact that you can’t just invent a new particle every time a problem comes up is what shifts the problem-solving to the characters - this is just good writing. It does make good, hard SF less common, though, especially in a TV setting where wrapping things up by the end of the episode is common (though growing less so) and time pressures are so much stronger than in written SF.
Was there FTL in Red Dwarf?
They did discover a FTL drive in a derelict but they forgot to fasten it to the ship when they activated it and it flew away. There might be the odd episode where they teleport using worm/black holes or travel in time but they don’t have a FTL drive. For long distances they use cryostasis.
I always got the impression that the Narn just put up with zero-G because they had to. I’m not sure what the status of the Centauri was, though: I think they officially did not have gravity control, and the scene of Londo standing and looking out the window was a continuity goof.
Don’t forget the improbablility drive that Holly invented. They hopped to an alternate universe, though.
Either that or he was wearing magnetic shoes.
Joseph Haldeman’s The Forever War is remarkable in taking account of the time-dilation effect of space travel at relativistic speeds – William Mandella finds Earth’s society completely changed every time he goes back. ( It does feature FTL in the form of quasars as natural jump-gates, but the characters still spend a lot of time traveling at sublight relativistic speeds.) I wonder if we’ll ever see anything like that on the big or little screen?
I’ll second Dan Simmons Hyperion series for having a very interesting solution to the problem. Truly a great series and full of other terrific ideas too.
I think Haldeman’s Forever War did probably the best job of capturing the disorientation as relativistic travel increasingly distanced the soldiers from the society they were serving.
Which led to one of Londo and Sinclair’s best moments.
Londo: “I’ll explain as soon as the room stops spinning.”
Sinclair: “Babylon 5 uses rotation to produce gravity. This room never stops spinning.”
Londo: “You see where the problem lies.”
Lightray pre-empted me:
One of the best, if not the best, sci-fi movie ever and no FTL. Also, Alien and its sequels seemed to be slower than light, although not sure about that.
Sphere also didn’t have FTL. From memory, they came close to light speed, though.
Not sure how the bad guys got around in The Astronaut’s Wife.
Does Blade Runner have FTL? Or were the replicants and colonists carted around in deep freeze?
Firefly/Serenity didn’t have FTL.
Silent Running didn’t have FTL.
Neither. The only colonies mentioned were in the solar system.
I always thought those were FTL. They also aren’t that old, and apparently require a gate at each end to work. Even if they can permit FTL travel between systems, there probably hasn’t been any time for a starship with a gate to be sent to another system. Assuming they CAN build a starship at all.
If you’re looking for movies, rather than TV, there have been plenty of them without FTL, many of them pretty good. A partial listing:
**2001
2010
Destination Moon
Operation Moonbase
Conquest of Space
Countdown
It! The Terror from Beyond Space
Fifty Million Miles to Earth
First Men in the Moon
First Spaceship on Venus
Robinson Crusoe on Mars** (at least the Earth Ship scenes. Camn’t speak for the alien ships)
The Lost Missile (probably)
There have also been plenty of lesser movies without FTL, mostly from the 50s and 60s f going to the moon, Mars, or other planets:
**Red Planet Mars
Angry Red Planet
Rocketship XM
Journey to the Seventh Planet
Catwomen on the Moon
Queen of Outer Space**
and so on.
Doesn’t Roy Batty’s soliloquy include a reference to being in a star cluster somewhere?
Ah, here we go:
Sounds vaguely extra-solar system.
His “species” is a military ideal as a standard issue shockk troop replicant. He is a termnator style mildroid, but more subtle with the newly finessed human emotemodule like a stormtrooper clone, as regards genre. It is well within reason that he had a collective or shared archetpical concsious implant with his model prototype. He had a 4 year lifespan… no baby, no teen, just adult issued.
It’s pretty hasrd to believe that the events of Bladerunner happen inside the solar system. Batty’s soliloquy is one data point. The very idea of “the offworld colonies” 9when no one ever refers to any sort of special gear or atmosphere, or gravity differences) reinforces that, and I seem to recall the book mentioning it.
But it’s all pretty much moot – nothing in the story has anything to do with space travel, aside from the Replicants having been elsewhere. Certainly you can write SF set in the future based on Earth with no space travel at all, but that’s not really germane to the thread, I think.
Blade runner in the sense that I am referring to Roy Batty and movie purpose, was plotwise and psychologically all about memory implants. It was a nextgen robot proven and gone off reservation, not unlike UFO’s.
Re: Blade Runner
But what about the ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion?