Depictions of FTL travel in Sci-Fi

Cafe Society
21

I’ve read Who Goes There many times and I don’t recall there being a teleportation device in it; there was a levitation device.

I recall a (I think)Larry Niven story about a teleportation device linked to a linear magnetic accelerator; a spaceship was repeatedly accelerated along the track, transported back to the start to continue accelerating - this was done as part of a rescue mission for a colony ship was originally designed with no rescue contingency, but overshot its target and public opinion demanded a rescue.

22

Then there was Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. FTL transit through wormholes between collapsars, high-%c STL travel between them. But this had the opposite problem to the “Aliens” set-up - journey times were short enough from the passengers’ point of view, but years to generations to centuries long for the folks back on Earth. This made conducting a war hellishly difficult, but unfortunately not impossible.

23

Warren and the other new recruits are marched into a long, low building and told to sit down. He becomes bored and wanders about and eventually starts trying to open the door. Initially his colleagues think he’s just fooling about but rush to drag him away from it when they realise he’s serious and hadn’t a clue that they were already well on their way to another planet… They then explain to him about the 100 foot teleporting technique for space travel!

That’s how I remember the scene, anyway.

24

I think you guys are talking about two differing ‘Who Goes There’ stories.

The one that was the basis for ‘The Thing’ featured a levitation device towards the end.

I haven’t read the other that featured FTL.

25

Bah! As it happens I’m not even talking about Who Goes There.
I’m talking about a book called Who Goes Here.
Sorry.

26

Babylon 5 is the only sci-fi series I’ve seen that actually represented hyperspace as an actual space.

You went into hyperspace by either a jump drive (which, with a few exceptions, only large ships had,) or through a jump gate, which is basically just a jump drive with it’s own power source floating at a certain spot in space. Any ship with it’s own propuilsion can move about inside hyperspace, but again, to get out, you need a jump drive or you need to be near where a jump gate is in normal space and hoe that you can activate it somehow (most get activated by just sending a signal, but some are guarded at space stations and usually you need authorization to activate one of those.)

It takes a large amount of power to actually jump, so if you recently came out of/went into hyperspace, you won’t be able to get back in/out again for several minutes. Which is why it’s always a good idea to travel with at least two ships with jump drives, because every ship can, in theory, use the one jump point you opened up. So one ship opens a jump point, you all come out and attack, then another opens another one, and you all exit before they can retaliate. However, due to the inefficiency of everyone going through one point, usually a large attack force will open many points so they can get as many ships through as possible.

And once you are in hyperspace, it’s basically just flying blind. You have to rely on the jump gates transmitting a signal to you to find your way. If you get lost in hyperspace, you’re almost always screwed. If you’re lucky enough to have a jump drive, you can at least go to normal space and hope to God you can see where you are, and at the very leasdt, you can always send a message for help, but odds are, they won’t be able to find you in hyperspace if you’re “off the path” so to speak.

One thing I was never able to figure outm, though, is this:
When someone goes into hyperspace, the jump point appears yellow. When someone comes out of hyperspace, the jump point is blue. But while you are actually in hyperspace, it looks red all around you. :confused:

Like in Star Wars, hyperspace has just always “been there.” It seems every race learned how to make drives/gates from an older race it met in the galaxy. Humans learned from Centauri, who learned from Minbari (I think…) who might have learend from the Vorlons, etc…

Eventually, we come to find the original races of the universe, who were travesring the stars when our planet was still cooling off, put the system into place for us younger ones to use. In fact, these older races almost acted as gods to some of the other races, going so far as to influece our DNA and evolution so that we could me make to their specifications.

27

There’s also a cool David Brin short story that has hyperspace as a place with a high amibent temperature, allowing humans to survive but not cyborgs/androids who need supercooling for their superconducting brains to work. There’s no place for them to radiate excess heat into.

28

My understanding of Star Wars FTL is that hyperspace travel is so fast that the main limiting factor in travel times is finding a safe route so that the ship doesn’t collide with a star etc. . It’s often faster to travel from one edge of the galaxy to the other than a short distance within its core because ships can simply travel through the empty space outside of the galaxy.

The Phaseworld RPG setting has a very simple way of travelling faster than light: Relativity only applies to matter when within a gravity field (even the weakest micro-gravity field); anti-gravity generators completely neutralize the effect of gravity on a vessel, allowing it to travel FTL in real space without the restrictions of relativity.

In Futurama, it’s impossible to travel faster than light, so they increased the speed of light.

I recall reading somewhere (no cite; sorry) that some physicists have estimated that creating even a small Star Trek-style warp field would require more energy than exists in the known universe.

29

I don’t get it. The current ambient temperature of our universer is 3.2 degrees Kelvin, yet we routinely produce temperatures lower than that; it’s called “refrigeration”. Or do you mean that in the story, absolute zero (the least thermal energy anything in that universe could have) was around human body temperature?

30

heh nice. :smiley:

31

The incredibly tongue-in-cheek RPG ‘H.O.L.’ has ‘Slug Drive’. The energy required for FTL travel is created by the overpowering lust two giant ‘jumpslugs’ feel for each other. You have to leave them completely alone in a room with some red wine and Barry White music. Any and all attempts to see what actually goes on between the two slugs makes the reaction not occur.

32

What I think me means is say this:

The hyperspace temp is, let’s just guess, 120 degrees F. A human can survive in that, just not comfortably. Now, for these androids to work, they have to have their brains supercooled, but the heat that is removed from their head has to be put somewhere, in this case the hyperspace it’s floating in. But, since the hyperspace is 120 degrees, it’s much harder for their brain coolers to do this. Just as a refridgerator in 120 degree heat will not be able to cool down the inside as well, either.

33

I read this story too, at the time on earth the number of androids and cyborgs outweighed the number of humans. Because of this, it was standard on space stations, ships, colonies etc for the standard temp to be lower than Earth temp. That was instead of needed coolant systems, they just had heat exhaust that leaked out into the enviroment due to thermodynamics. On ships, all excess heat floated out into space on that principle. Now, in hyperspace the outside of the ship became hotter than the inside of the ship, so with the coolant systems took in heat rather than expelling it. This overheated the already hot androids/cyborgs on any ship entering hyperspace, killing them.


the human they sent on the hyperspace ship (whom no one expected to survive) was wearing a suit to keep him at normal earth temp at all time. The ship they used was still equiped with the coolant system, so while it did get hot, the human was able to survive. So the androids/cyborgs either had to rethink their ship designs, or let humans do all the hyperspace exploring.

34

Niven again, in a nearly-but-not-quite-Known-Space short called “One Face”, had a FLT drive that worked by shifting the ship into an “overspace” where the speed of light was infinite, and so the ship could go as fast as needed without actually going over lightspeed. This worked fine except when damage to the ship’s Jumper dropped it into a different overspace where the speed of light was zero. The ship then travelled zero distance in billions of years, and only came out of the overspace because of a “braking spine” that projected into normal space, ordinarily with the intent of keeping the speed of the ship finite. The rest of the story entailed finding a place to live in a dying universe, which turned out to be the Earth itself. Everyone bar Strac Astrophysics thought it would turn out to be uninhabitable, but fortunately it didn’t.

D’you see what I did there? Do you?

35

In Asimov’s Foundation (ahem) Trilogy, the craft use some sort of “jump” mechanism. The calculations for jumps are very hard, and are harder to do the further you’re trying to go, and the closer you are to planets, stars etc.

For this reason, ships had to make their way some distance out of orbit before they could do their first jump, and then they’d plot a series of jumps to get to their destination. After each jump, they would have to observe nearby stars to make sure that they were where they thought they would be, and if not, correct the calculations for the next jump.

In earlier books, the calculations took so long that it could be days between each jump. Later stories had better computers in them that could pretty much merge all the jumps into one, correcting as it went.

36

I don’t know if the MMORPG EVE Online really counts as sci-fi, but I’ve been digging the fiction they have on their website. EVE uses two modes of FTL. The one, which allows ships to travel between solar systems, uses a lot of pseudo-science I wasn’t able to follow, but it appears to be the standard use-a-jumpgate-to-open-a-wormhole-to-a-second-jumpgate take.

The second method, which allows quick travel between planets in-system, uses an on-board jump drive to drain the space around the ship of all particles of matter, resulting in what’s referred to as depleted vacuum. This bubble of depleted vacuum is so extremely frictionless that it actually slides through space at FTL speeds, which can be up to something like 6 AU/second.

37

Just want to say that I’ve read Bob Shaw’s Who Goes Here? myself, and Meurglys is spot on with the description of the “transceiver” drive …

38

The fun aspect to Gap sickness was how it manifested itself. Some people did just go bonkers on resuming 'tard, but others seemed perfectly normal until some set of circumstances triggered their psychoses, and everyone’s circumstances were different. One could be susceptible to Gap sickness and not know it for years until those circumstances arose.

39

Re Futurama

IIRC They lowered the speed of light in order to make FTL travel possible. We never learn how starship engines work. But, when Hubert’s clone is hit on the head he says ‘I get it now. The engine doesn’t move the ship. The ship stays still and the rest of the universe moves’

Open Space

FTL is impossible in this universe. But, one company creates the Smoots drive.In a vacuum, or near vacuum, the Smoots drive can teleport things by the width of one atom. Repeated jumps are effectively FTL. As a bonus, since the ship is standing still, disappearing and reappearing at another point where it stands still, there is no problem with inertia

Dalgoda

Earth has been communicating with Canida for decades. The first contact was by radio, but the Canidans taught us how to send signals through subspace. In the first issue, one of the humans figures out that the Canidans have known for at least several years how to send ships through subspace and not shared that information. The subspace drive does have some problems

Lengthy exposure to subspace causes hallucinations. These hallucinations affect all senses are accompanied by delusions. Bob Example might see and feel scorpions all over his body. He will view other people’s insistence that there are no scorpions as a sign that everybody else is crazy. He will not stop to think that there are no scorpions onboard the ship. He will not consider that many other people are talking about things that he cannot see. The effect isn’t cumulative. Spending two weeks in subspace will drive you crazy. But returning to normal space for rest and then spending three days in subspace is safe.

40

Wikipedia lists three typical fictional methods of traveling FTL:
Star Wars style “hyperdrives” to go rapidly from one point to another through some kind of alternate dimension “hyperspace”. There are no relativistic effects and time traveled in hyperspace = time observed from real space. Ships in hyperspace can’t communicate or battle each other

Star Trek style “Warp” drives where the space itself is bent or warped making the trip shorter

“Jump” drives where a ship instantly moves from one point to another
There’s also the Infinite Improbability Drive in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Improbability_Drive