It seems a common theme in sf to postulate a FTL drive of some sort, either a tunnel (Mote in God’s Eye), an bubble (Reality Disfunction), or going-really-fast (startrek), etc that only can be used sufficiently far away from planets.
It’s a good idea, because it explains why you have sub-light manouvering in your fiction. It also seems to have a certain inevitability, though I can’t explain why?
My question is, does anyone know who invented the idea first?
I’m not sure… I suspect that you’d have to go very far back in SF (pre-WW2) to find the first instance of this genre meme.
Myself I think it was probably inspired by einstein’s theorems. The space-time continuum is curved by the intensity of gravity. If you want to break out of the STC and thus circumvent the speed of light, it makes some intuitive sense that you would need to go to a place where this curvature is either at a minimum or a maximum.
There are some instances of faster-than-light travel in science fiction that can only work at loci of high gravitation as well… wormhole drives that only operate in the vicinity of a black hole, for instance. 
It’s probably got something to do with pseudo-physics. So I have no answer. I just wanted to add that in the Star Wars novels, the remnant that’s left of the Empire has capital ships called Interdictors, that carry some sort of gravity well projectors on them, that pull ships in hyperdrive back into regular space-time.
Actually, the drive in Mote in God’s Eye is more restrictive – it works between specific points located near stars (effectively a wormhole link).
They commented a bit on their worldbuilding in an essay “Building the Mote in God’s Eye”, noting that if you have a stardrive that just lets a ship pop up right next to a planet, you aren’t going to have an interstellar empire, because belonging to an empire won’t protect you. Limitations such as jump points, inability to use hyperdrive too deep in a gravity well, and the like provide a limitation that avoids that problem.
From a dramatic standpoint, it probably was done so that you don’t have an alian warship popping out of hyperspace directly over the capitol city of a planet, at which point the war is pretty much over.
Instead, they appear out past Pluto, and come the rest of the way conventionally, which allows the hero to observe the inbound, notify the President, and build a counterweapon overnight.
D’oh. Not Mote. Ringworld.
Ooh, I must read “Building the Mote in God’s Eye” now. It’s always been very prominent in very well thought out and just plain good scifi.
Ringworld doesn’t even have tunnels… in fact,
the latest ringworld book ‘ringworld’s children’ says that if you have quantum 2 hyperdrive and a clever pilot, you can go through hyperspace in a gravitational ‘singularity’ and survive. The fact that it was considered impossible was that early hyperspace experimenters, working only with quantum 1 hyperdrive and inside a singularity, would get eaten by some kind of hyperbeings that live inside the gravitational singularities of hyperspace.
the mote tunnels actually sound like something I thought of for a sci-fi series of my own, where you could hyperspace-transit only along ‘conduits’ that connect particular stars… each star has a range of influence defined according to its energy output, and if two stars are each within the sphere of influence of the other, there will be a viable conduit connecting them. Thus, giant stars are crossroads of hyperspacial travel because they allow quick travel to other giant stars far away.
Incidentally, did a bit of quick searching on the origin of hyperspace and other FTL ideas in early science fiction, but most web sources are a little shy on the details. John Campbell’s “the mightiest machine” seems like a contender - he’s generally considered to have founded the term hyperspace, so it’d be interesting to find out what the limitations he laid out for it were.
IIRC, it can be found in the collection A Step Further Out (OOP, I think, but can probably be scrounged up in a used book store.)
The Campbell story is “Islands of Space,” from the Spring 1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly. It’s been reprinted only once that I can confirm, in the John W. Campbell Anthology: Three Novels, Doubleday, 1973.
Whatever the origin, I’m positive that BrotherCadfael has its use exactly right. Dramatic handwaving and nothing more.
Flying through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy.
In Star Trek, if you go FTL around a sun, doesn’t that throw you back in time?
Also printed as a separate novel, which I own. I can check the publication date when I get home if anyone is interested.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes. Or if you sneeze near a black hole, if Voyager’s any indication.
Also, for what it’s worth, Trek ships dont “go really fast” per se, they shunt into subspace, another dimension, and use the different laws of physics there to their advantage or somesuch. It would be the equivalent of swimming in the ocean but diving under the surface to the undertow and navigating it.
That’s myquasi-expert (read: fanboy) explanation based on my viewing of episodes and reading various books and magazines, at least.
Or you can find it in N-Space. 
In Asimov’s stories, ships had to be a day’s travel or so away from any planets or moons in order to engage their hyperdrive, because plotting the jump required precise mathematics involving the ship’s exact location, and a nearby gravity field could throw off those equations and result in the ship jumping into the middle of a star.
Yeah… I remember a short crime sci-fi tale of his… can’t remember the name offhand… old man and young guy team up, planning to steal something incredibly valuable and escape, hitting the hyperdrive as soon as they had reached orbit, before the local police could catch them. The old guy had worked out this incredible computer program that could analyze stellar patterns, their relative brightness and so on, and pinpoint their location anywhere in the galaxy, so they could afford to take a blind jump. The chances of actually landing in a star would be nearly a billion to one after all.
But the young guy kills the old guy, leaves the knife next to his body before takeoff, intending to claim all the money for himself. The computer program just sits there, chugging away for hours without finding a match. Guy suddenly realized that he’s landed within clear sight of an active nova that hadn’t gone off when that section of space was surveyed. It’ll never find a match… and the young guy doesn’t know how to plot a course without the computer’s assistance, or the ship is so wired in that he can’t disconnect the autopilot. He’s gonna die when the ship runs out of air.
“Man, I shoulda kept that knife.”
Does anybody know exactly when this stuff was first established by asimov?? I know there were some hints of it in the first foundation stories, which were pretty early. In the first one with the mule he describes a lot of calculations when toran and his group are running across the galaxy, trying to get to Trantor.
As one further asimovian point… Was it ever explained just how the foundation was ‘cut off from the rest of the galaxy’ in the time of Salvor Hardin?? There wasn’t any particular difficulty in entering or leaving the four-kingdoms area before or afterward… but that was a low-technology ebb for the region. Were those four prefects (and terminus) on the other side of some sprawling nebula or something else that was a hazard to navigation, if you weren’t highly educated enough in mathematical techniques to plot a course through it??
Or, alternatively, was it not that the four kingdoms were isolated, but that they were specifically isolating the foundation… that each of them was still hoping to invade, and under the balance of power situation they were naturally disinclined to allow terminus to contact any further kingdoms, less they invite another player to the table?? Since the four kingdoms (mostly anacreon and smyrno) hemmed terminus in against the void beyond the galaxy, they could probably do that if they tried.
Okay, end ramble mode now.
I think the implication was simpler than that – the Imperial Galactic economy was breaking down, and ships just didn’t come out to the Rim boondocks anymore.
I dunno… there are a number of references that make it seem like more than that. If the implication was just that the empire was no longer a presence, that could have been said. (Though I realize isaac was quite young when he wrote those first foundation stories, comparatively, but anyway…)
“For thirty years now, since the breakup of communications here at the edge of the Galaxy, the whole universe of Terminus had consisted of itself and the four surrounding kingdoms.”
There are a number of other references in that story (“bridle and saddle”) to the four kingdoms being a somewhat isolated enclave IIRC, but that quote carries the point. To say that they represented the entire universe from POV foundation is pretty strong language.
So, the empire ships don’t come any more – that doesn’t mean total isolation. The four kingdoms have spaceships, and presumably their neighbors still do. There would be trade, and exchange of rumors between nations at the borders… or battle and war. In some way those further neighbors should have showed up on Hardin’s radar, probably as vague and distant entities since they were not nearly as close as ‘the four’ – and yet there was nothing at all.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it… I accept that possibility
Admiral Ozzel: Lord Vader, the fleet has moved out of lightspeed and we’re preparing to… [begins to choke, clutching at his throat]
Darth Vader: You have failed me for the last time, Admiral. Captain Piett?
Captain Piett: Yes, my lord?
Darth Vader: Make ready to land our troops beyond their energy field, and deploy the fleet, so that nothing gets off the system.
[Admiral Ozzel utters one last strangled gasp, and falls over dead]
Darth Vader: You are in command now, Admiral Piett.
Admiral Piett: Thank you, Lord Vader.
It ain’t just gravity you have to worry about.
Sounds like David Weber’s concept of hyperspace plus junctions in the Honor Harrington “Honorverse.”
Ships navigate through “hyperpace” to move FTL to other stars, but some stars have a direct connection to another location, which could be many, many light years away. Some stars have junctions to more than one location.
Weber’s Honorverse also assumes that ship can’t get into hyperspace within the gravity limit of a planets and stars. This requires shipps to transit out of hyperspace well away from the target planet, resulting in dozens of pages of ship-to-ship combat action.