Hyperspace Lanes: Difference between revisions

* The hyperdrive used by ships in the ''[[Vatta's War]]'' series of books allow them to travel to any nearby system they choose, but if they travel to systems marked on their charts as off limits, they run the risk of running into all sorts of unknown hazards. Less scrupulous starship captains occasionally use these off-limits star systems as meeting locations off the beaten path to conduct illegal business.

* The [[Star Wars]] [[Expanded Universe]] is a textbook hyperspace routes example. There are several major trade routes going from one end of the Galaxy to another, smaller but slower routes branching off them to individual systems and little-know routes that are faster than average but have the danger of coming too close to stars or black holes to compensate. When no known routes to a location exist, a series of mini-jumps is required to constantly double-check there are no stars or other dangerous objects in the way. Also, rarely used routes become unusable over time due to stars slowly moving around in space. To make matters more interesting, large portion of the galaxy is unaccessible to hyperdrive due to Hyperspace Disturbance and requires unconventional technology to get to. And yes, several stories point out how the fastest way to get from point A to point B lies anywhere but a direct route.

* [[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]] starts with earth getting demolished to make way for a new hyperspace express route. Of course, it was actually {{spoiler|a plot to destroy the supercomputer designed to come up with the ultimate question.}}

* David Weber's ''[[Honor Harrington]]'' novels slightly subvert this trope by having Casual Interstellar Travel of the vanilla variety (by hyperspace) for everyone, but featuring a wormhole network that allows for instantaneous travel between its termini, thus radically cutting on a delivery times. Naturally, the heroes' homeworld has the biggest bunch of those holes. Wormholes in the Honorverse don't really form a network, though. Various wormhole termini are usually too far apart for anyone to get from one to another, without hyperdrives that also allow FTL travel. They just supply a few very convenient shortcuts between some places.

** Even in the Vanilla Hyperspace, there are also [[Negative Space Wedgie|Grav Waves]], for lack of a better term, "wrinkles" in hyperspace, that ships can use special energy sails to ride on to cut their travel time down considerably. These waves end up becoming ''de facto'' hyperspace lanes in their own right.

* The [[Trope Codifier]] for genre SF was the Alderson Drive used for interstellar travel in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1975 novel [[The Mote in God's Eye]] (sporadic earlier examples existed, but this was the really influential one). It only works at specific "Alderson Points" in a star system, each of which leads to another specific system. Activating the drive anywhere else just burns up a lot of fuel for nothing. The story is a deconstruction: the Moties only escaped discovery and overrunning the universe because the only point into or out of their system leads within a supergiant star that would destroy unshielded ships on arrival. And this was the only reason the Moties never used their own version of the FTL device; they didn't have the humans' force field technology to survive at the far end of the trip, so explorers never came back.

* In [[C. J. Cherryh]]'s [[Alliance Union]] universe each star system only has a limited number of other star systems which can be reached via hyperspace. Anyone trying to go anywhere else is never seen from again, presumably trapped in hyperspace. Even trying to stop partway between two connected systems is impossible.