Depictions of FTL travel in Sci-Fi

Cafe Society
1

Inspired by the “Have we been visited by aliens?” thread in IMHO

I was wondering how different methods of FTL (Faster Than Light) travel have been depicted in various sci-fi stories. Some of them are extremely clever and interesting while others are just bizarre.

eg:

Aliens: While not specifically described in the film the ‘Tachyon-Shunt’ FTL drive used by the Colonial Marines had some interesting side-effects. Due to reverse time-dilation it takes longer to reach your destination through hyperspace than the equivalent journey through normal space at almost light speed, but for an observer in normal space the FTL ship appears to make the journey extremely quickly. Hence the need for sleep-pods and android crew-members (other time related artefacts of FTL travel tend to mess with human perception). If your sleep pod malfunctioned you could easily die of old age before your ship arrives at its destination.

I think that the Sulaco could travel at 12 light-years per day at FTL.

I always found this an extremely plausible description of FTL travel.

Wing Commander: The Jump Drive seemed to work almost instaneously to travel from A to B but it was fairly dangerous. If you don’t enter a jump point at exactly the right angle and exactly the right speed, you won’t come out. Even sometimes when you DO enter exactly correctly, you won’t come out.

The Alderson Drive from Niven and Pournelle’s “Mote in God’s Eye” is also rather hazardous, seeing as how the Alderson jump points are typically located dangerously near, if not directly inside, a friggin star. Granted, the Langston Field will protect the ship from being incinerated, but it can only absorb so much energy before it overloads, at which point all of the Field’s contained energy bleeds directly into the reactor, causing the whole ship to go up like a Roman Candle.

In other words, if your engines stall after a jump, you’re screwed.

Any other interesting examples?

2

The Alderson Drive isn’t that hazardous. IIRC, the only jump point that is inside a star is the one in the Motie’s system. The rest are somewhere else in a system, depending on the local stellar dynamics. The jump points for Haven, Sparta, etc. are all well outside the corona of the system’s star.

3

The system used in the Hyperion/Endymion saga was pretty straight forward. Unfortunately, because there’s no internal dampening field like in Star Trek, you go squish now.

Thankfully(?), the Cruciform brings you back to life in a couple of days.

4

Er, no. The Alderson point in the Mote system was located inside the red supergiant binary companion of the Motie sun. This is a highly atypical situation (red supergiants are big enough to swallow the orbits of Jupiter or Saturn if one were put in place of our sun).

IIRC, the FTL drive in Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League / Terran Empire universe worked by making lots of little jumps at a high frequency – two ships at FTL could interact if, and only if, they got their drives in phase so that they were jumping in parallel.

5

My favorite remains the Bloater Drive from Bill the Galactic Hero. The ship basically grows until it’s the size of the distance it wanted to travel (all the molecules get farther and farther apart, and normal-density matter eventually just passes right through it). Once the ship is light-years long, it reverses the process, only it shrinks down into the solar system it wants to end up in rather than the one it started in.

6

OK forgot the last example, thats how I had it described to me by someone else and I was struggling for interesting examples so thats why I used it.

Mea culpa :smiley:

7

That’ll be “forget the last example”

I really did pick the wrong week to quit sniffin’ glue…

8

How about travel via teleportation in Think Like a Dinosaur? You hop into the booth, the machine does a complete scan of you, transmits the information via FTL means to another planet, and builds a new you at your destination. The downside? The original you is still there where you started so you have to be put to death.

9

There’s the teleportation in Stephen King’s “The Jaunt.” But you have to be asleep when you undergo the process … or else.

10

IIRC, that was in the Endymion books, not Hyperion. In the Hyperion books they had “spinships”, which I think were basically warp drive.

The ones that killed the passengers, “Archangels” IIRC, were just invented at the beginning of Endymion. And, I think they were actually instaneous, not just FTL.

I really liked all these books.

11

Midshipman’s Hope by David Feintuch had an interesting set-up. Although the book is a total Mary Sue, (or Gary Stu, rather) the details he includes about everything make it really interesting. His other books in the series are kind of meh, IMO.

Basically, the ship has a Fusion Drive which generates an N-wave, which the ship then rides. A neat little detail is that it is “inherently inaccurate by up to six percent of the distance traveled in Fusion.” So they basically aim for a point at least six percent of the journey from their target system, then Defuse, take sights to verify their location and then Fuse again. There is not a lot of information given on what an N-wave actually is, just that it traverses the galaxy faster than any known form of communication.

As for taking sights: it’s done by plotting their position relative to three known stars, and then consulting star charts in the ships computer. There was also another way of doing a kind of dead reckoning by calculating energy variations during Fusion, presumably of the N-wave, but I don’t really understand it enough to explain it.

There are several dangers to this kind of travel. All the external instuments are blind while the Fusion Drive is engaged, and there is basically no steering that can be done. The book mentions that in the early days of the Drive, some ships were lost because they Fused into a sun. (Perhaps causing an explosion or something? He doesn’t say exactly.)

There is also the risk of the crew developing melanoma T, an insidious kind of cancer, from long exposure to N-waves. The risk is almost non-existant for humans within five years of puberty, so the lower ranks of officers are all teenagers. Regular crew serve on a short-term basis. Passengers are okay usually because it is repeated exposure that increases the risk. There is treatment available (on board the ship, even), but the cancer is rather aggressive and not easy to subdue.

The ship’s computer can also be dangerous. They are so advanced they might actually be sentient, and they each have their own personality. It is considered a very bad idea to piss off the computer. There could also be problems if they inadvertently caused the death of a crewman, because it would violate their most basic programming and cause them to go insane. Programming errors in the computers could cause serious problems, as well, since they’re relied on so heavily for information.

The info about the conventional engines, and how the crew is set up is also interesting, but I think this is long enough already.

12

I always thought Douglas Adams’ Infinite Improbability Drive had a certain flair to it that most FTL systems lack. The drive brings incredibly improbable events to actually happen, so the ship is unlikely to disappear from one spot, pass through all the possible points in the universe, and reappear in another, but the drive can make that happen… with certain side effects ;).

Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky mentioned FTL travel that was a little beyond the ordinary Warp/Hyperspace paradigm: certain parts of the universe actually have different laws of physics that allow FTL travel, and hyperintelligence amongst other things, Earth’s region of the universe doesn’t have those laws of physics, and so is outside the high-traffic lanes for aliens.

13

Teleportation? “Jaunt”? Ferchrissakes, has King ever come up with an original idea?

Back to the thread, Cordwainer Smith has a number of different types of FTL travel that he discusses in terms more poetic than scientific.

14

His other book in this universe, A Fire Upon the Deep described the FTL system in even more detail, and it’s one of my favorites from sci fi. FTL travel over distances is actually a series of several micro-jumps through wormholes created by the ship. Each jump would take you only a fraction of a light year, and your ship needed to get its bearings and re-calculate its next destination before you could jump again.

But the trick is, your location in the galaxy affects the processing power of computers onboard the ship. So near the rim of the galaxy, your ship may be doing dozens of jumps per second. Closer in, you’d only be capable of maybe a jump every second or two. When you get deep enough into the galaxy, FTL travel becomes impossible, because your computer isn’t powerful enough to do the necessary calculations.

On top of this, he has an incredible scene where he describes two ships traveling through FTL – basically leapfrogging across the galaxy – trying to engage in combat with each other.

15

In the Computer game, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, it’s said that Hyperspace travel in the Star Wars universe must be done through specific routes, which have been known for thousands of years and were scouted before the republic came into existance. Also, very few people actually scouts new hyperspace routes because there’s no way to predict where one would come out of Hyperspace. Also, there’s large parts of the Star Wars galaxies that

I don’t know if this is backed up by the "cannon’ stuff, but I found it to be rather interesting. But then again, it would be rather appropriate given the general lack of progress in SW technology over 4000 years.

16

Can’t remember all the ins and outs, but I quite liked Stephen Donaldson’s Gap Drive. Another one where you fire up the engines and appear at your destination, but there’s a limit to how far you can jump, so a long journey would take multiple jumps. The added disadvantage is that until you’ve been through your first (personal) jump, there’s no way to know if you’re going to come out the other end insane.

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[Barf] They’ve gone to plaid! [/Barf]

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I read a book by Peter F Hamilton called The Reality Disfunction, which was a weird conglomeration of genres, but included FTL travel. the ships were engineered biological/cybernetic machines that had ‘energy patterning nodes’ distributed through their structure; they could ‘swallow’ and perform a near-instantaneous jump through space. IIRC, they(the ships) didn’t know exactly how it worked - it was a sort of intuitive reflex thing.

19

Er, no. The Alderson point in the Mote system was in a nice safe place. But it led to (and was accessible by) only one other Alderson point, which was inside a red supergiant, albeit only its attenuated upper atmosphere. This is why, although the Moties had developed the Alderson drive, they thought it an expensive and useless novelty, because the ships they sent off to the Alderson point disappeared and were never heard of again, and they did not know why, and so they called it the “Crazy Eddy Drive”.

20

The one in Who Goes There? by Bob Shaw was pretty neat.

They had invented matter transmission but the range was only about 100 feet so they built a transmitter at one end of what looked like an airtight shed and a receiver at the other and transmitted the ship the 100 feet.
They did this repeatedly and extremely quickly so that the ‘ship’ achieved more than light speed as it was constantly re-transmitted across space in 100 foot jumps…

(it was a comedy, btw!)