Every Type of FTL in Science Fiction

Spacedock delves into Science Fiction's many flavors of Faster than Light travel.

Spacedock: A series where we look at the specifications, history and lore of fictional spacecraft from science fiction. Any Spacecraft, any Sci-Fi.

THE SOJOURN - AN ORIGINAL SCI-FI AUDIO DRAMA:

BECOME A CHANNEL MEMBER:

SUPPORT SPACEDOCK:

MERCHANDISE:

Do not contact regarding network proposals.

Battlezone II Music by Carey Chico

Spacedock does not hold ownership of the copyrighted materiel (Footage, Stills etc) taken from the various works of fiction covered in this series, and uses them within the boundaries of Fair Use for the purpose of Analysis, Discussion and Review. Produced by Daniel Orrett. Owner/Executive Producer at Spacedock.

[xeromynd]

"But most importantly, it spins" - now there's a man who knows his history, bravo

[enoughothis]

Warhammer 40k warp drives actually punch a hole through to an alternate parallel dimension that could be called hell by the unimaginative. The denizens of this nightmare plane are kept at bay by an ancient barely understood device called a Gellar field generator that projects a small bubble of reality to both shield and cloak the ship, which is navigated by a three-eyed mutant who sees his way by using lighthouse on Earth powered by dying souls.

[Sausagesaucey]

I'd love to see a part 2 discussing not missed FTL types- you covered the basics pretty well I think- but rather the narrative implications of the various types of FTL and how a setting can be built around them. Might be instructive for sci-fi writers, and entertaining for fans of the genre.

[AsbestosMuffins]

the infinite improbability drive is always my favorite, it doesn't go faster than light, it just makes it so that infinitesimally small chance to instantly jump to another point in the universe is improbably probable

[ShasLaMontyr]

I am amazed that you didn't mention "the Warp" in the hyperspace bits, like Hyperspace travel where "Hell" is the other-space. Event Horizon I guess does sort of count.

[daveevanbeatty]

Be really fun if Spacedock did a crossover trope talk with Overly Sarcastic Productions about scifi drives as a narrative device.

[nickpalmer]

The ships in Robotech can execute a spacefold maneuver, that functions as a teleport. The first we see this is the SDF-1 performs a spacefold that takes a huge chunk of the city it was near out in space.

[STNuevo]

Bistromathics is the most powerful computational force known to parascience. A major step up from the Infinite Improbability Drive, Bistromathics is a way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement through space, so it was realised that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.

[UltraHelios]

"But most importantly, the gate spins".
Teal'c voice: "Indeed".

[philcolbert]

I seem to remember Larry Niven writing a drive in which the ship (and contents) contacted our universe only at discrete points along the trajectory, like a stone skipping across a pond. Contact occurred thousands of times per second, so it seemed continuous to the passengers. During each brief contact, the ship's motion remained well below the speed of light. But the contact points themselves were spaced so far apart that light could not keep up.
A curious side effect: two ships in battle could not hit each other unless they had the same skip frequency and phase.

[deusexaethera]

Regarding the Q from Star Trek: They are essentially Boltzmann Brains, hyperintelligent bits of the universe that randomly occurred during the Big Bang. That's why, as JdL's Q character once said, "The Q have _always_ existed."

[alandell]

Isaac Asimov's hyperdrive concept was pretty trippy in the I, Robot story "Escape!" in which Powell and Donovan get zipped across the universe as part of the robot's practical joke. Except, the hyperspace part involves erasing the ship from existence, effectively killing the characters, having them travel through hell, then come back to life on the other side. And that was in 1945!

[DragonxFlutter]

Honestly surprised that there was no mention of the Star Wars Hyperdrive. It’s a perfect example of a combined “one direction” and “total navigation” FTL method.

[stevenscott]

Scalzi's "Old Man's War" has the skip drive, which jumps to an identical parallel universe. The explanation for the change in location is "Moving an entire ship into another universe is the incredibly unlikely part. From the universe's point of view, where in that new universe it appears is really very trivial." 😆

[xwingxgt]

Elite Dangerous' Frame Shift Drive is my favorite type of FTL travel because it gives you near-instantaneous travel from one star system to another, while also providing a supercruise that allows you to travel to where you want as if you're still controlling your ship in real space. The restrictions are that your minimum speed is 30 KM/S, maximum speed is 2001 times the speed of light, and that your drive is affected by the mass of the celestial bodies in the system. With all of that being said, it's actually the game that prevents you from travelling from one system to another in supercruise, just like how ships in Star Trek would travel. Each star system in the game is its own instance, or sandbox, forcing you to use Hyperspace to travel between systems, no matter how close they can be to each other.

[Logatronyc]

I never thought I would ever in a video hear Star Trek, Farscape, Stargate, Babylon 5, Halo and Interstellar mentioned all in one.

[FRODOGOOFBALL]

I thought these were also rather creative:
- Futurama also has a universe modification drive that moves the entire universe while the ship stays where it is, because the universe isn't limited to lightspeed like non-FTL ships. Essentially it's a very localized universe modification system in reverse.
- Eve Online has at least 4 types: regular FTL, artificial jumpgates (usually better for most ships when available), wormholes, and Titans, huge, regular-FTL-capable ships that can (among other things) act as mobile start-point jumpgates, and the ships using them do not need a second jumpgate to leave FTL.
- The Orion's Arm setting has mass-produced artificial wormholes whose ends can be moved and change size, but only at sublight speeds. Normally, the wormhole ends are collapsed down to microscopic size before shipment to a destination.

[Arlae_Nova]

I would like to add Dune's Holtzman drives which folded space to the distance modification category. It's one of the more interesting FTL drives in my opinion, because it shapes a lot of the story and politics of the whole galaxy around it.

[TonksMoriarty]

Farscape's starburst is fixed point to point, but the exit point is always along a random vector in space. As it's a survival mechanism rather than a travel mechanism this makes some sense, although it is unknown if its natural or artificial in nature.

Farscape also flat out states that with its universe that things like relativity are just flat out wrong as the Hetch drive, the more conventional continuous realspace ftl in the universe, proves. The gap in knowledge prevents humans reverse engineering the tech in season 4.

[DrakeAurum]

One highly unusual one from Harry Harrison's novel series Bill The Galactic Hero is the Bloat Drive. This causes your ship to expand to galaxy-spanning size, and then contract back down around a different point within its volume, which then becomes its destination as it reconstitutes to normal size. I don't think that fits any of the established categories.