Faster-Than-Light Travel: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

 

 

In either case, explaining how people may travel from Earth to the edge of the Galaxy in less than an hour will generally involve equipping a [[Cool Starship]] with [[Applied Phlebotinum|some kind of "exotic" propulsion system]], which, approximately, holds the normal laws of physics in abatement. This is the Faster Than Light Drive. The exact mechanism varies, but more detailed works may explain [[Loophole Abuse|how the system avoids the lightspeed limitation]]. There are three broad favorites:

** Technobabble: These work by bending the laws of physics in a limited bubble around the ship, where the space is warped in some strange way so the Einstein limit doesn't apply. Distinguished by the ship still traveling in normal space just like a conventional drive, with all the hazards that may entail. Only to an outside observer it would appear the ship is moving impossibly fast. Most notably used in ''[[Star Trek]]'' where the [[wikipedia:Warp drive (Star Trek)|warp drive]] actually compresses space in front of the ship while stretching it out behind it.

** Technobabble; exploiting the curvature of spacetime in some way to instantly move a ship from one location to another. Functionally, a ship using one does not travel faster than light; instead, they alter the distance that has to be traveled, generally to about zero. Sometimes called "fold drives" (from the analogy of folding a piece of paper to make two distant points adjacent). As the range is rarely unlimited the ship typically moves in a series of "jumps", needing some time to recharge or recalibrate its engine between jumps, but the jump itself is generally instant making this technically the fastest method. Oddly enough this rarely uses [[Teleportation Tropes]] excepting perhaps [[Tele Frag]] as those are personal tropes. See also [[Our Wormholes Are Different]] for a variant.

** Technobabble; Since the ship can't travel faster than light, it enters [[Another Dimension]] instead. Maybe the laws of physics are different so you ''can'' go faster than light there. Or perhaps hyperspace has [[Alien Geometries|weird topography]] so that by traveling for a day there you can reenter the real universe thousands of light-years from where you started. Because travel still takes time it may take a trip in hyperspace can take exactly [[Traveling At the Speed of Plot|as long as it needs to]] but is still not instant. [[Hyperspace Is a Scary Place|Has decent odds of being a scary place]] with its own hazards to manage. Most notable example can be found in [[Star Wars]], though the picture above is actually only of entering hyperspace.

 

 

From a Troper's perspective, the story-telling implications of the method of travel used are usually more important than the [[Techno Babble]] behind it. With Jump or Hyperdrives for example it provides a very easy (but often dramatic) escape option from antagonists because its generally hard for anyone to track someone that just disappears. Often, the exact mechanism is only important insofar as it supports various kinds of [[Phlebotinum Breakdown]]. In some series, the mechanism is simply ignored; we just assume that it works and that [[MST3K Mantra|we shouldn't worry about relativity]]. If it's directly referenced, it may include some form of [[Unobtainium]] to circumvent Einstein's laws. For works on the [[Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness|harder]] end of sci-fi, the science behind it may be more important.

 

 

 

Exotic FTL drives also give us an "out" against inertia: Since the laws of physics are being held in abeyance, we can safely assume that if the drive breaks, the laws of physics reassert themselves, so it is impossible to "coast" at superluminal velocities (see [[Space Friction]]). Thus, we can effectively ensure that [[Space Is an Ocean]].

 

 

 

 

 

In FTL settings, an [[Everything Sensor]] will usually operate operate in some FTL manner to allow the ship to detect plot-related events happening light-minutes or light-years away in real time. [[Distress Call]]s are a function of the aforementioned ansible, but when the ship can casually detect "enemy" ships from light-years away, just as casually mosey on over and ask what they're doing in their territory, yet must enter a given star system to study it for plot-related reasons, a great deal of hand-waving is in order.

 

 

Even though going faster than light is already extreme in itself, some actually take it [[Up to Eleven]] with [[Ludicrous Speed]], where traveling at such speeds results in usually unpleasant side effects.

 

 

{{examples}}

== Anime and Manga ==

* In ''[[Outlaw Star]]'', as a clever nod to science fiction's past, the "sub-ether" drive is powered by a "Munchausen reactor". This is a type of hyperdrive.

* The whole plot of the anime short subject ''[[Hoshi no Koe]]'' (''Voices from a Distant Star'') stems from the fact that the first United Nations space armada (where the protagonist serves) has faster-than-light drives but ''NO MEANS'' of faster-than-light communication.

*** [[My Friends and Zoidberg|Flaming awesomeness AND]] [[Camp Gay|LEERON!]]

* In the ''[[Tenchi Muyo!]]'' OVAverse {{spoiler|when fighting Z, Tenchi travels from Earth to Saturn within a fraction of a second. This is [[Justified Trope]] in that he is the ''being that made the three Goddesses that made the universe''.}}

* In ''[[Legend of Galactic Heroes]]'', faster-than-light travel is achieved via "warp drives", which actually function more like "jump" drives in the trope description.

 

* ''[[Spaceballs]]'' spoofs the aforementioned ''[[Star Wars]]'' with the [[Ludicrous Speed]] drive, which instead of the star trail line effect, creates a plaid effect around the ship and is often seen to overshoot its destination.

** The speed indicator lights showed another speed, "Ridiculous Speed", nestled in between Light Speed and Ludicrous Speed. One is given to wonder what would have become of our heroes in the Winnebago had Dark Helmet opted to chase them at ''only'' Ridiculous Speed.

* ''[[Event Horizon]]'' is about a spaceship whose main system of FTL apparently can't decide whether it wants to be a jump drive or a warp drive in terms of [[Techno Babble]], but in practice, it turns out to be a hyperdrive that {{spoiler|took its crew into a [[Hyperspace Is a Scary Place|Cosmic Horror dimension]] that killed them all, and then came back...[[Eldritch Location|changed by]] [[Cosmic Horror|the experience]].}}

* In ''[[Contact (film)|Contact]]'', the alien plans create a device that allows Jodie Foster to travel to their world via a self-generated wormhole. James Woods' character goes to great pains to try to disprove her claims of travel because on Earth {{spoiler|her elapsed time was immeasurable}}, but {{spoiler|the elapsed time on her recording device was several hours}}.

** The Improbability Drive isn't quite as ludicrous as it sounds. If you actually COULD manipulate probabilities in the implied manner, you could make macroscopic objects make a position jump of arbitrary size (since there is a small but non-zero probability that all the particles that make it up really ARE over there where you want them to be after all). Whether this kind of macroscopic quantum-tunneling can make an object reappear at a distant locale faster than a beam of light could get there is a question modern physicists are still wrestling with, although experiments with quantum entamglement seem to imply that it cannot.

** There's also the principle that nothing in the universe travels faster than ''bad news''. Someone built a starship powered by bad news, but they were so unwelcome anywhere they went that there wasn't any real point in being there.

* [[Isaac Asimov]]'s ''Robots''-''Empire''-''[[Foundation]]'' universe used "hyper-atomic" jump drives which, though one could theoretically use them to cross the galaxy instantaneously, could not be targeted accurately without first determining your exact position in space and then carefully calculating the relative trajectory of your destination from astronomical observations and manuals. As sophisticated computers did not exist in the Asimov universe until the later Foundation novels, this often had to be done by hand and plotting a single jump could take more than a day depending on how many gravity wells were around your locale. Long trips required several jumps, and to travel from one end of the galaxy to another required dozens of jumps and over two months time, in order to guarantee safe passage. "Blind jumps", where ships jump without a set course or a vaguely defined one, are known to occur in desperate circumstances, but one runs the risk of jumping too close to a star or planet, or merely jumping and being stuck in [[Subspace or Hyperspace|hyperspace]] forever.

** It should be noted that Asimov's hyperspace is one of the stranger examples is mainstream sci-fi. It's not so much a dimension as a "state" of existence. All speed and distance is nil in hyperspace, and the whole galaxy itself is nothing but a dimensionless point (hence the idea that one could cross it easily). Transit takes less than a second, and is described as a momentary, blink-and-you'll-miss-it feeling of weightlessness. Hyperspace accidents are repeatedly denounced as "unheard of", and everything becomes very [[Casual Interstellar Travel|casual]] after some proper computers are put in charge.

** The first time a ''proper'' navigational computer is used to jump a ship to a destination, it plots a course involving some 29 jumps in a few seconds (something that a human would have taken days to do) with zero errors. The captain, Golan Trevize, is distrustful of the machine and orders it to make only the first jump, then takes a whole day to verify their co-ordinates (making calculation errors of his own in the process). When he orders the next jumps to be made, the effect as seen on the viewscreen is something akin to a quick slideshow of starscapes, each frame corresponding to a pause between jumps. In the end, only 28 jumps are made (in 30 minutes, as opposed to a few months), since the computer had optimized their course after jump 15. Everyone is rightly impressed with this.

* ''[[Animorphs]]'' had a hyper drive that utilized something called zero-space, or Z-space. In one prequel book, the Yeerks, spying on humans, discover footage from Star Trek showing FTL travel in the physical world ''without'' Z-space and are stunned until they realize that it's fiction.

* [[Stephen Baxter]]'s ''Xeelee'' series [[Deconstructed Trope|deconstructs this trope's implications in physics]]: here, Faster Than Light travel also results in paradox-free [[Time Travel]] (a main character in the novel ''Exultant'' accidentally travels back to meet himself from "two years ago"), which both sides in humanity's war with the Xeelee regularly exploit.

** As did [[Robert A. Heinlein]] [[Older Than They Think|some years earlier]] in ''[[Time Enough for Love]]''.

* [[Lois McMaster Bujold]]'s [[Vorkosigan Saga]] takes the [[Our Wormholes Are Different]] route, with a series of wormholes depicted as lines between various worlds. Jumps ships can "jump" the wormholes if a pilot with cybernetic implants guides the ship through the five-dimensional space inside. A few seconds passes for the crew, but the pilot experiences hours during the jump. Given the odd nature of the pilots' experiences, though (one pilot hallucinated that he was the color red) this time stretch may be artificial. There can be many different wormholes along a single route, and they may be spaced several days of travel apart. Bujold has said that she [[Hand Wave|hand waved]] the wormholes intentionally, preferring to get on with the plot.

* In the ''[[Ender's Game]]'' series, humans have a [[Subspace Ansible]], but not FTL ships. This is a point revealed and exploited in the early books.

*** In the last book of the ''Shadow'' parallel series it was stated that {{spoiler|[[Artificial Gravity]] was used for rapid acceleration/deceleration.}}

** In the later books, the properties of the [[Subspace Ansible]] are utilized by a [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien|sufficiently powerful]] [[Instant AI, Just Add Water|computer mind]] to move ships in the [[Transporters and Teleporters|same way as information]], allowing for truly instantaneous FTL travel. To their credit, the characters exploit this for all it's worth in fending off a planetary invasion force, up to and including [[Teleport Spam]], and later {{spoiler|offer it to humanity at large in return for leaving the [[Artificial Intelligence|AI]] alone}}.

* In [[Gordon R. Dickson]]'s ''[[Childe Cycle]]'' books, which includes ''Dorsai!'', space travel is achieved through a series of jumps, where the ship is annihilated at one spot and reconstituted in another. The jumps not only have to be extensively calculated (the ship must be located absolutely in the universe, and its destination point must also be exactly calculated, to the same degree), the jump itself has a psychological effect on the crew and passengers, so the more often the jump, the greater the psychic shock and the closer the people onboard get to insanity. Tranquilizers are made available to help lessen the experience, but cannot nullify it. This is a subplot point in ''Dorsai!'', where the effect is shown during a raid on a planet - something nobody thinks possible.

* Joe Haldeman's ''[[The Forever War]]'' averts this trope with 'collapsars' which allow interstellar travel without breaking the light speed barrier. The ships utilize collapsars to accelerate to huge percentages of light speed, where time dilation noticeably kicks in such that that occupants experience only a split second of travel time whereas the trip still takes many years as everyone else sees it.

* In ''[[Dune]]'', the Spacing Guild holds a monopoly on space travel for most of the series. Using "Holtzman engines" to fold space (type 2 instantaneous or near instantaneous travel), ships are piloted by [[Psychic Powers|psychic]] Guild Navigators who can see into the future, enabling safe transport through the universe. The downside? Activating their precognitive power requires the Navigators to breathe [[Super Serum|Spice gas]], which [[The Corruption|mutates]] them - eventually to the extent that they can't live without it.

** But in the sequels their abilities were mimicked by technology... as was EVERYTHING, as the proscriptions from the Butlerian Jihad and the general distaste for genetic engineering were holding back the advances of technology - as long as they had the spice, nobody was interested in figuring out better ways to get around. One of Leto II's goals was to break this stasis and allow humanity to go forward.

** One of the implied problems of using the Holtman drive is the possibility that you might jump into another ship with the drive that's already where you want to arrive. The idea of the Guild Navigators is that they use the limited precognition the Spice gives them to see the risk and avoid it. Unfortunately, later refinement of the idea of precognition includes the idea that anyone with precognition cannot use it to see anyone else with precognition, creating a possible problem with the whole scheme.

* [[C. J. Cherryh]]'s [[Alliance Union]] series has a [[Hyperspace]] drive which acts like (and uses the terminology of) a jump drive, since steering is impossible once inside of hyperspace, and all of the conditions needed to end up at the right destination need to be set up before entering hyperspace. Entering hyperspace requires acceleration to near-light speeds (and deceleration from). Also there's a bit of [[Time Dilation]] in that crews experience three days to a week (though most members of oxygen breathing races are unconscious during jump) while a couple of months pass outside.

* FTL travel in ''[[Honor Harrington]]'' is accomplished by "translating" into hyperspace, in which normal local-space movement is amplified severalfold. Hyperspace is organized into bands named after the letters of the Greek alphabet; a starship first translates into the alpha band, and from there can translate into the beta band, then the gamma band, etc.. The higher the hyper band your starship is in, the greater the multiplication factor when determining your "apparent velocity" through normal space; a ship traveling at 0.5''c'' in the delta band is traveling through normal space at 912''c'', for example. In keeping with the [[Space Is an Ocean|nautical theme]] of the series, hyperspace is criss-crossed by "grav waves" which will tear your ship apart unless it projects "Warshawski sails", and these sails allow the ship to "ride" the grav wave at even greater speeds.

** There are also naturally occurring points that act as instant-travel wormholes to distant locations.

** Local-space travel, both in and out of hyper, uses a gravity-manipulating drive that has the extra bonus of allowing its users to behave as if [[Space Is an Ocean|they were really seagoing vessels]] - this is a bonus because, for Honor Harrington, read "[[Horatio Hornblower]]".

* The ''[[BattleTech]]'' universe features JumpShips capable of somehow creating and magnifying a 'rip' in the fabric of space-time and thereby jumping distances up to thirty light years in an instant...but which are otherwise generally (there are exceptions) only equipped with station-keeping drives that allow them to hold their position at the jump point while recharging, a process that generally takes a week or more. (Occasionally an enterprising military leader will arrange for faster travel by setting up a 'command circuit' with passengers and cargo transferring to a new and fully charged JumpShip immediately upon arrival, possibly several times in succession.)

* [[David Weber]]'s ''[[Empire From the Ashes]]'' trilogy features both warp drives ''and'' jump drives, though they're so ridiculously large that most ships the size of a ''planetoid'' only have enough space to mount one or the other. It's explained that each type has its own advantages; jump drives are faster, but the destination cannot be changed mid-jump, while warp drives are slower, but allow for more flexibility.

** Hyper is something of a cross between the "jump" and "warp" versions of FTL travel. Travel is not instantaneous, and the ship is moving through an [[Another Dimension|alternate dimension]] (warp), but once you're in hyper, you're stuck until you get to your destination (jump). Enchanach is pretty much the classic warp drive.

* In the ''[[Humanx Commonwealth]]'' series by [[Alan Dean Foster]], ships use the posigravity, or Kurita-Kinoshita drive (Named for the scientists who invented it). Ships are said to look like a balloon stuck on the end of a plunger. The suction cup looking part of the ship generates a gravity field that pulls the ship along. Changing the shape of the gravity field changes how matter behaves and allows the ship to exceed the speed of light, taking it into ?space-plus?. KK-drives are very dangerous and sophisticated computers are needed to keep everything working properly. Due to dangers imposed by the drives there are restrictions in where they can be used.

** Dangers like gouging significant chunks out of a planet's surface, setting off hurricanes, earthquakes, you name it - [[No Endor Holocaust]] dramatically inverted. Flinx's ship is unique because the Ulru-Ujurrians figured out how to circumvent the problem.

** ''Metagrav'': The modern standard, it has much the same feel as the linear model above, but the ship actually enters hyperspace proper encapsuled in a so-called 'Grigoroff field'. It allows for higher performance and can be used for both intra- and intergalactic travel, which previously generally called for two distinct drive systems on the same ship. One possible problem with it, though one rarely encountered except for plot purposes, is that suitably catastrophic failures of the Grigoroff field can strand the ship in another universe altogether from where its prospects of returning are uncertain at best.

* Parodied, like most SF tropes, in ''[[Bill the Galactic Hero]]'' by [[Harry Harrison]], with the Bloater Drive which expands the ship to larger than galaxy sized, then shrinks it slightly off-center so that you coalesce a few lightyears from your starting point.

* Used in [[H. Beam Piper]]'s ''Terro-Human Future History'' novels. Hyperspace is very, very boring and a full interstellar jump takes weeks, meaning that pretty much everyone has a hobby to pass the time (such as music, landscape painting, or history). One line in ''Little Fuzzy'' implies that there is a bit of time dilation, although no actual time travel.

* Drives in [[The Sirantha Jax Series]] provide jumps through [[Subspace or Hyperspace|Grimspace]], which is a plane of psychedelia and flame which only the navigator (called a jumper) can chart courses through. An interesting facet of Grimspace is that a number of "buoys" were placed there to mark points where ships could jump back to normal space, but none know who put them there.

* In the [[Posleen War Series]] there appear to be three types of FTL drive kicking around. One allows for travel to any point you care to name but is slower and consumes horrendous amounts of energy. The second uses a similar drive but you can take the highway between gravity wells to speed up and consume less energy at the cost of being similar to a portal network. The third is a mass based worm hole generator, it lets you jump from one surface of a planet to another.

* In the ''[[Into the Looking Glass]]'' there are a few ways to travel. The eponymous looking glasses function as instantaneous travel worm holes. A warp drive is also available based on some abandoned precurse technology. There appears to be another hyperspace lane that is accessible but isn't as used in the stories being late comers to the plot.

* The FTL travel in the ''[[Nights Dawn Trilogy]]'' is of the "jump" variety, which author Peter Hamilton goes into great detail describing. Adamist starships must be spherical, and everything must be retracted when they jump. If any sensors, antennae, or heat dumps are extended during a jump, the spherical event horizon collapses them down to neutron star density. Furthermore, Adamist FTL makes use of orbital mechanics; when jumping near a planet, the ship must be in an orbit lining up with their destination, and need to be sufficiently out of the planet's gravity well (though it is possible to jump from a Langrangian point. However, it's not advised). Edenist voidhawks and blackhawks, on the other hand, utilize [[Techno Babble|"swallows"]] and [[Techno Babble|"distortion fields"]] that mean they can jump pretty much to and from anywhere, under any conditions. {{spoiler|One once jumped ''inside'' an orbiting space colony. Although it's mentioned that this is only possible - or at least feasible - because the space colony doesn't have "true" gravity, but merely rotates to simulate gravity on its inner surface. This implies that the Eden hawks do at least need to take local gravity into account when jumping, although it isn't specified whether the presence of a gravity well would prevent a jump or simply make it more difficult/dangerous.}}

** {{spoiler|The Kiint, on the other hand, have personal, universe-spanning jump drives apparently built into their genetics. It's never specified what actually causes it, but seeing as Haile (a newborn Kiint) can designate normal humans for inclusion in their emergency exodus from Tranquility; and that the Kiint "human" observers also have this ability, it makes sense for it to be inherent to genetic code. After all, surely the highly-effective scanners the humans employ at every possible occasion would detect any embedded technology?}}

** This is emphasized in the prequel, ''[[Zones of Thought|A Deepness in The Sky]]'', which is an interesting aversion of this trope. The book takes place entirely in the "Slow Zone," the region of the Galaxy where FTL is impossible. There is plenty of interstellar travel in the book, and all of it slower-than-light, with different human civilizations building "[[ramscoop]]" starships capable of reaching relativistic speeds. Medical science has dramatically increased the human lifespan and [[Human Popsicle|suspended animation]] has been perfected, allowing a single human lifetime to include many interstellar journeys. The people interstellar voyagers leave behind grow old compared to them, but often still survive long enough for more meetings.

* Averted in the short story ''FTA'' in which a scientist trying to develop a hyperdrive applies for a research grant to the bureau responsible for establishing practical interstellar travel. They turn him down, and he appeals, pointing out that in hyperspace, where the laws of physics are different, the speed of light is not necessarily the same as in our universe; therefore spacecraft could reach the stars in a short time without violating Einstein's theories. They turn him down again, because {{spoiler|they developed a working hyperdrive years earlier, but it's useless for interstellar travel because in hyperspace the speed of light is ''slower'' than in our universe.}}

* The ''[[Antares]]'' series uses a naturally-occuring [[Portal Network]] of "foldpoints", which provide instantaneous transportation between star systems. However, each foldpoint only connects to one other foldpoint, foldpoints are usually found on opposite sides of the star, and crossing a system can take ''weeks''.

* In [[Andrei Livadny]]'s ''[[The History of the Galaxy]]'' series, all FTL travel is achieved via [[Subspace or Hyperspace|hypersphere]], an anomalous dimension existing alongside ours. In terms of topology, it more-or-less resembles an actual sphere with multiple arbitrary "layers". Every sufficiently large stellar body creates an energy imprint in hypersphere. Each star has "tension" lines stretching to nearby stars known as "horizontals" (they're, basically, chords, if you remember your geometry). There are also "verticals", stretching from stars deep into the center of the anomaly. The humans first discovered FTL travel during the historical launch of the first extrasolar colony ship, the ''Alpha'', possibly the largest human ship ever built. It featured three massive fusion engines that could accelerate it to half the speed of light. The drives were activated, and the ship vanished. It was only later discovered that the sheer power of the engines tore a hole in space-time into hypersphere. The first FTL drives were, essentially, particle accelerators meant to punch holes in space-time, so ships can "ride" along the horizontals to their destination. Later designs substituted it for a more better combination of two generators: a low-frequency hyperfield generator to "submerge" a ship into hypersphere and a high-frequency generator to "surface" it. This only scratches the surface of hypersphere, and there are several novels in the series that explore its nature deeper (both figuratively and literally).

** Interestingly, only one other race besides humanity has managed to develop a hyperdrive. Everyone else used static [[Portal Network|hypergates]] that first had to be moved into place by sublight.

* Subverted masterfully in the Discworld. Due to the intense magic field required to keep something like a world on the back of a giant turtle existing, light actually travels at a speed similar to sound on the Disc meaning that "Faster than light" broomsticks have appeared in the series where due to a massive magical boost, they exceed Mach I and this also the speed of light. Shown most prominently in Equal Rites, where Granny Weatherwax and Esk outrun the rising sun's light and "catch up with the night."

 

 

== Live-Action TV ==

** It is worth noting that while this explanation is backed up by supporting materials, no explanation this technical is ever given on-screen, though a ship propelled by a drive system which ''is'' described in very similar terms (in "New Ground") is emphatically ''not'' a warp drive.

** It has also been explained in later series that older designs of warp drives are capable of damaging subspace at higher speeds. The [[Star Trek: Voyager|Intrepid Class]] was one of the first ship classes designed to avoid causing this problem, along with subsequent ships, although it is implied that older ships were eventually refit to mitigate this.

** One fun fact: in the pilot episode it was referred to as 'Time Warp' suggesting that the drive had some sort of time distorting effect rather than anything to do with subspace. This was dropped by the time they made the second pilot episode.

** Season 9 introduced supergates (really big stargate, needs a planet-mass black hole to power it) that were used to send ships from one galaxy to another quickly.

** ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'' had introduced the wormhole drive in the series finale. Apparently the Ancients have mounted an experimental drive system onto Atlantis that can generate a wormhole and cross intergalactic distances in ''seconds''. The downsides are that it uses insane amounts of energy and doing even a slight miscalculation will completely vaporize the ship.

** The starship ''Destiny'' from ''[[Stargate Universe]]'' seems to use a different method of travel that is slower/faster than normal hyperspace travel as the plot demands. The characters don't know much about it, so they just call it FTL.

* In ''[[Red Dwarf]]'', the ship explicitly breaks the light barrier at least once, and implicitly does so many times (as they are seen travelling between star systems in very short periods of time), but no attempt is ever made to explain how this is done.

** In fact, the ship computer explicitly explains how this isn't possible, and how it's now "[[Bring Me My Brown Pants|brown trousers time]]" because of it. The episode "Future Echoes" explains exactly why it's not advised.

** A fact which has been [[Lampshaded]] by the Doctor himself on more than one occasion.

** The TARDISes are literally aeons ahead of any other ship type anywhere, ''ever''. To put this in perspective, they're [[Living Ship|alive]], sentient (with personalities; the Doctor's is as mischievous as he is), and span ''the whole of time and space''. One of them exploding amounts to the Multiverse retroactively cancelling its own existence.

** Oddly the True Ancients warn against using wormholes in part because they can cause a relativistic paradox even though this isn't an issue with any other kind of FTL travel.

* Varies in ''[[Power Rangers]]'' depending on the season. They use Jump travel when not using a ship ([[Mighty Morphin Power Rangers]], [[Power Rangers Zeo]], [[Power Rangers Turbo]]), and Warp travel ''with'' a ship ([[Power Rangers in Space]], [[Power Rangers Lost Galaxy]]). Occasionally they use slower than light craft and wormholes.

* ''[[Space: 1999]]'' was entirely due to [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]]: The MOON gets blasted out of not only Earth orbit, but the Solar System due to a frickin' EXPLOSION (somehow without being blasted apart by it), and is left [[Travelling At the Speed of Plot]], such that it hangs around in the vicinity of an interesting planet just long enough for the crew to fix whatever is wrong with it and fail to settle there, and STILL get to the next star system by next week's episode.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

** It's no surprise that other races have found alternatives to this form of travel. The [[Space Elves|Eldar]] have the Webway, a [[Portal Network]] that links points in realspace by tunnels through a dimension somewhere between the Warp and reality; however, this network is ancient and decaying, making some passages unusable or dangerous, while the Eldar's [[Evil Counterpart|evil counterparts]] have built an entire civilization within it. [[The Greys|The Tau]], who lack a real psychic presence and therefore cannot fully enter the Warp, use special drives to briefly "dip" into it to boost themselves forward, which though much slower than proper Warp travel is much safer. [[Horde of Alien Locusts|The Tyranid hive fleets]] use a special bio-ship capable of slingshotting the fleet through space by harnessing a planet's gravity well, and the swarm typically goes into hibernation during the trip between systems. [[Skele-Bot 9000|The Necrons]] use inertialess drives and large-scale teleportation technology eons more advanced than other races' FTL. And [[Our Orcs Are Different|the Orks]]... use the Warp anyway, because either the metal teeth they've riveted to their ships' hulls [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe|will scare the daemons off]], or they'll have a [[Blood Knight|pretty entertaining fight]] on the way to their next conquest.

* The role-playing game ''[[Traveller]]'' equipped its starships with the Jump Drive. In terms of this trope, Jump Drive was really a warp drive, moving ships through "jump-space" or "hyper-space." The catch? No jump could cover a distance of less than one parsec, so Jump Drives were useless for in-system travel. Also, the time spent in jump-space was independent of the distance travelled. Each jump lasted about one week (subjective and objective times were the same), no matter how far one jumped.

* The Void Engineers of ''[[Mage: The Ascension]]'' had jump drive technology that was ''incredibly'' finicky to use. Odds were that a ship using it would leave pieces behind just as often as it came through intact.

* ''[[GURPS]]: Spaceships'' telescopes all FTL into two groups. First the Stardrive system which can be Jump or Warp and secondly the Jump Gate system which creates whatever the local equivalent of wormholes is and is a portal drive.

** Subspace interferes with Shivan shield technology, preventing it from working at all while in subspace. Given that the Shivans are ridiculously old with technology to match, as well as an evolved ''sensitivity'' to subspace itself, the fact that they've been unable to circumvent this is rather telling.

** Finally, the usual detail of gravity being a factor is played with; subspace travel works ''because'' of gravity, inter-system nodes go where they go because of the specific relationship of gravity between the two stars in question and subspace itself. In-system jumps, meanwhile, are only possible so long as the entry and exit points are both close enough to the same star's gravity well. It's actually the ''absence'' of gravity that causes a problem; subspace travel won't work in deep space.

** The first method players encounter is ''warp drive'' for intra-system travel, which is measured in AUs/second (and considering that one AU is roughly equivalent to eight light-minutes, going at one AU a second is still FTL). Issues include the fact that warp drive is fairly slow, it can be jammed by all sorts of methods (including natural phenomena in Deadspace complexes), and the fact that it can take some time to align for the warp, during which you are vulnerable.

*** ''Acceleration gates'' are used to "slingshot" ships at warp speeds inside Deadspace complexes.

** The newest addition, naturally-occurring ''wormholes'' are the fastest and longest-range method of FTL in the game (in the backstory, one allowed travel between the Milky Way and New Eden galaxies), but they are also the most unstable and most unpredictable method in the game. In addition, they have a nasty habit of collapsing as you go through them, leaving you stranded in some unknown system unless you have a probe launcher fitted to find a new wormhole. Even then, there's a chance that the new wormhole will take you "deeper into the rabbit hole" instead of back to the New Eden cluster.

* [[Descent]] 2 uses a prototype warp drive that allows you to jump large distances. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQCLZjyg07M Take a look]

* ''[[Supreme Commander]]'' makes use of [[Portal Network|Quantum Gate networks]], it is implied that they still must travel at sub-luminal speeds to new systems but once they deploy a quantum gate they can use it to teleport from several miles starships into orbit to the eponymous commanders to planetary surfaces.

* ''Haegemonia: Legions of Iron'' uses naturally-occurring wormholes for interstellar travel. However, it is possible to develop wormhole probes that allow any ship to jump to the probe from any system by creating an instant wormhole.

* The [[Escape Velocity]] games use "hyperspace jumps". It's never explained directly how they work, but for gameplay purposes it takes between 1 and 3 days to get to the next star system depending on how massive your ship is.

** The "relatively fast" here means about 5 years. Granted, much faster than sublight travel, but nowhere near instantaneous.

** Unfortunately, after humanity develops the hyperdrive, some idealistic idiot broadcasts the plans to every other race in the galaxy. So instead of humans spreading out into space virtually unopposed, they have to contend with other races (who have long ago mapped out all stars using sublight probes) also seeking to expand their empires.

* Ships in ''[[Space Empires]]'' have no FTL travel. Instead, there's a [[Portal Network]] of naturally occurring warp points. Going further up the tech tree, however, lets you create artificial ones. You can then put a component that both opens and closes warp points into your ships, essentially equipping them with portal drives.

* Used in ''[[Star Raiders]]''; hyperspace is the only way to travel from one galactic sector to another.

* ''[[Vega Strike]]'' has two variants: Jump Drive for using [[Portal Network|Jump Points]] between star systems and SPEC-drive (Spatial Partitioned Expansion-Contraction) for fast insystem travel. As to limitations, both need to shut down [[Deflector Shields|shields]] and SPEC is gradually locked by mass and Jump Points' presence.

* ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]'' and ''[[Portal 2]]'' contain FTL travel by implication; the Handheld Portal Device can create a instantaneous spacetime link between two surfaces at arbitrary distance from one another. While the scale of events in ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]'' doesn't allow for this to be examined, the second game contains two minor references: first, [[Posthumous Character|recorded messages]] from the [[Cloudcuckoolander]] founder of Aperture Science discuss the possibility of encountering a [[Time Travel|violation of temporal causality]] while using the Portal Gun; second, the final sequence of the game involves an ''extremely'' long-range portal and employs the speed of light delay involved in its creation (but not transit) as a visual storytelling element.

* Ah, what fools we have been. All this time searching for a way to achieve, when ''[[Big Rigs Over the Road Racing]]'' reveals that all you need is to shift into reverse and never let off the gas peddle.

* ''[[Ascendancy]]'' has only one method of travel: using "starlanes", although only ships equipped with starlane drives may use them. The nodes for entering starlanes are normally blue, but there are also so-called "red links" which are usually longer but take are also much slower. The rule of thumb is, the more starlane drives your ship has, the faster it moves. There is a one-shot device for sending any ship in a given starlane to its destination instantaneously, but there is nothing stopping you from [[Loophole Abuse|building a dedicated ship with a number of these devices onboard]] that it uses to create an insterstellar highway of sorts and a dry-dock in the system to refit it when it runs out. This can be a bit of a [[Game Breaker]], though.

** Some ships have abilities that temporarily block a gravity well to all incoming or outgoing traffic. All sides can build stationary inhibitors in orbit of colonies that increases the phase drive charge time for all enemy outgoing ships (except scout frigates) by a factor of 7, turning all escaping ships into sitting ducks. Starbases have a limited version of this ability, additionally damaging all escaping ships.

* Ships in the ''[[X (video game)|X]]-Universe'' games can mount Jump Drives, to teleport universe. However, the Jump Drive is only capable of jumping to the [[Portal Network|Jump Gates]].

 

* Originally, the starslip drive in ''[[Starslip]]'' worked as a jump drive that shifted the ship into a nearly-identical [[Alternate Universe]] where it was ''already'' at the desired location. Eventually {{spoiler|it was discovered that one can, with sufficient slips, wind up in a substantially different timeline; this was the ''[[Starslip Crisis]]'' that gave the comic its original name.}}

** After narrowly escaping the destruction of the universe, the crew of the Fuseli end up in another one where the starslip drive has just been outlawed and replaced by the stellar superlinear propulsion ([[Fun with Acronyms|STARSLIP]] for short)) drive, which exploits the fact that there's no shorter distance between two places than a straight line, by finding an even ''straighter'' line. This functions as a Warp Drive, rather than a Jump Drive.

* [[MSF High]]: Biowarp engines provide this.

* The ''[[Freefall]]'' universe has FTL travel, although the author admits to being uncomfortable about including it in an otherwise fairly [[Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness|hard]] series. According to [http://home.comcast.net/~ccdesan/Freefall/Freefall_Backstory.html the manual], "The starships in Freefall make pockets of lower space time density, increasing the rate at which they go through time." Thus, they move very fast in real time but at a normal rate in subjective time, necessitating [[Human Popsicle|cold sleep]] for the passengers and most of the crew. When live cargo and/or timeliness are not at stake, they simply accelerate a cargo vessel to a decent fraction of light speed and fling it at the target system.

* ''[[Spacetrawler]]'' offers one of the most ridiculous [[Techno Babble]] explanations for FTL travel ever. Spaceships travel at [http://spacetrawler.com/2011/06/21/spacetrawler-148/ Greased Light Speed], "which is attained when you slip between light particles and go much faster than them". Friction between light particles cancels out time dilation. Also, the Mirrhgoots are on the verge of perfecting Greased Dark Light Speed, which promises to be even faster. It works on the principle of riding the darkness inside the light particles (since light particles are about 97% darkness).

* In ''[[Westward (webcomic)|Westward]]'', the [[Vehicle Title|eponymous]] [[Cool Starship]] travels through Escherspace (named after [[M. C. Escher|Maurits Cornelius Escher]]), which functions as a variety of Jump Drive. It is a [[Black Box]] technology that no-one quite understands, except for the mysterious alien Phobos. As a result, some characters [[Clarke's Third Law|prefer to think of it as a kind of magic]].

** During a jump, everyone aboard must take shelter in special "normalization booths"; the author has stated that this "creates a good separation between travel that's normal — adhering to the laws of physics — and travel that's abnormal, unnatural, and dangerous."

 

== Web Original ==

* The Jump Drive and Jump Gates enable this in [[Nexus Gate]].

* ''[[Tech Infantry]]'' gets around the speed-of-light limit via a hyperspace system inspired by those seen in [[Babylon 5]] and [[Honor Harrington]].

* The technology is present in the [[Registry of Time]] universe, although not as fast as some other examples. In one story it takes 20 years to reach a destination.

 

* In the ''[[Animaniacs]]'' finale "Star Warners", the Bicentennial Falcon flies past a sign that says LIGHT SPEED STRICTLY ENFORCED.

* Starfire in ''[[Teen Titans (animation)|Teen Titans]]'' is apparently capable of achieving faster-than-light speeds ''by herself'', if her planet-hopping in "Transformation" is anything to go by. Of course, in the first episode aired (third in production order), she and Robin are just finishing a conversation on this subject as they enter the living room.

*** Then again, this is the [[DC Universe]], so that little tidbit isn't exactly very secret.

* In ''[[Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers]]'', two aliens give humanity access to a FTL device called the Hyperdrive in exchange for our help in vanquishing the series' [[Big Bad]], the Queen of the Crown.

== Real Life ==

* Quantum mechanics does allow for a "faster than light" connection between two particles in quantum entanglement. Unfortunately it is not actually possible to send information (let alone matter) FTL with this method, since it's impossible for an observer to determine whether an entangled particle state is due to the particle partner's involvement or by the simple act of observing the particle. It's a simple matter of probabilities.

** Also, at a quantum mechanical level, time is just another physical dimension: it is conceivable for a atomic or smaller scale object to travel in any direction along the temporal axis (as with "[http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/virtual_particles virtual particles]")and even spontaneously appear somehere, or some''when'' else.

* During the writing of his novel ''[[Contact (Literature)|Contact]]'', Carl Sagan reportedly asked a fellow scientist (none other than [[wikipedia:Kip Thorne|Kip Thorne]], a leading expert in relativistic astrophysics) if FTL travel would be possible without breaking the laws of physics, as he didn't want to do it in his novel. The scientist sat down and wrote a few equations which became the basics of the [[Portal Network|wormhole network]] seen in the book and film. Sagan himself was optimistic about this and thought that a [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien|sufficently advanced civilization]] could build and maintain a network of these wormholes.

* The Alcubierre drive is a semi-serious proposal for a system of FTL travel that involves propelling a bubble of warped space at FTL speeds. The ship itself remains stationary in the center of the bubble. ''Star Trek'''s Warp Drive is based on this idea. Of course, actually building such a drive system is well beyond the realm of present-day science, if it is possible at all. The fact that it would take several orders of magnitude more energy than exists in the mass-energy equivalent of the entire universe to move a small spaceship across the Milky Way galaxy doesn't help, either.

** The "warp drive" has been definitely ruled out as a "practical" FTL drive in 2009. A physicist named Stefano Finazzi and several colleagues published a paper showing that when particles in the interstellar medium intersect with the bubble of moving spacetime at FTL velocities, Hawking radiation will turn the temperature up to 10^32 Kelvin, which is hotter than the 2x10^12 K at which protons and neutrons break down into a quark-gluon plasma.

** That could be worked around, say, by deflecting said particles with another exotic spacetime geometry, shields or whatever. One of the variations on it, by van den Broek, requires the mass-energy equivalent of a few grams. However, the concept itself was proven to be impractical by Krasnikov when he demonstrated the surface of the warp bubble to be causally disconnected from its interior (effectively cutting the crew off from controlling, creating or even stopping the ship). Further theoretical exercises (Clark, Hiscock and Larson) have shown that there exists formation of event-horizon-like structures along the warp bubble - analogous to a Mach cone - and since, in 2+ 1 spacetimes, the vacuum stress-energy of a quantized massless field diverges on the horizon as it forms, it is strongly suggested that the same phenomenon would occur in 3+ 1. The Alcubierre drive, as a concept for potential technology, is ''long'' dead. Similarly-spirited alternatives may not be, however.

** Actually, both of the points made above were brought up years ago, along with another one. The initial bubble theorized by Alcubierre would produce no thrust on its own, and most thrusters would be hard pressed to get the ball rolling (pardon the pun), never mind getting it to stop. The ideal shape is that of a drop, but that presents its own problems.

** It's important to notice the fact that, of the few clear predictions that Heim theory DOES give (most of it is extremely obfuscated), like the mass of certain particles, most are wrong by several standard deviations. Make that planetoid a large moon.

* When the space shuttle Columbia tragically burned up during atmospheric re-entry, a caption at the bottom of one CNN report briefly read: "Shuttle traveling nearly 18 times speed of light." (It was a mistake, of course; the caption was meant to read "nearly 18 times speed of ''sound''.") Much gallows humor ensued, e.g., "No wonder the Shuttle broke apart, they had a warp core breach!"

** This may or may not be the first time this has happened. Similar results were recorded at Fermilab some years before, but because the neutrinos' speed was only a small fraction higher than light it was ultimately written off as being within the less advanced equipment of the day's margin of error.

** Critics of the results have suggested a plausible explanation which only serves to support the Theory of Relativity. The GPS satellites used to time the experiment were slightly off due to the fact that they orbit Earth pretty fast. The claim is that the CERN scientists failed to account for this difference when making their calculations, and that adding the difference shows the neutrinos were slower than light after all. However, the scientists at CERN claim that they did account for this, and insist that so far they've found no systematic error that could explain their results.

* Phase and group velocities for electromagnetic or quantum mechanical waves are ''sometimes'' higher than light speed. However, this still does not allow for the transmission of actual ''information'' faster than the speed of light.

** You can think of that as a shadow play right in front of a light focus: since the shape of the shadow is larger than the object casting the shadow, if it's moving fast enough, a point in the shadow will appear to be moving faster. That's independent of the time it takes the shadow to react to the object moving.

* Ultimately, one can only hope that [[Science Marches On]].

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Faster Than Light Index]]

[[Category:Truth in Television]]