I love the idea that navigators in Dune ripped a line of space cocaine to forsee the best path through folded space for travelling.

Infinite Improbably Drive in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engines I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.

Cubert: That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light.

Farnsworth: Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.

I thought the Expanse did this really well. For starters, most travel is restricted as we currently know it. They have the Epstein drive, but something like that is feasible. In any case, humans are still meat bags that can only accelerate so much.

But then the FTL component requires some otherworldly technology with gating. That leaves the physics mystery to having been built by some smarter species and I think that is perfect for suspension of disbelief.

Going plaid in Spaceballs is pretty dope.

Definitely Warhammer 40k.

I was initially thinking Star Trek but I was also only thinking of how the FTL itself works; it's based in actual theory which is cool.

But the "travel through hell and risk being haunted by ghosts and demons" thing in WH4k is dope af.

So I really like the Stargates. They're a lot more limited/less flexible in where you can travel, but with that limitation comes unique challenges and intriguing stories. The biggest pro about them? It's the fastest form of FTL there is. You can travel literally instaneously to any other gate. And there are innumerable gates to travel to.

But there are a lot of cons too.

Convenience... gates must already be where you'd like to go. The gates are relatively small, unable to fit even a car through, and the gate has a time limit on holding it open so there is limited ability to send large quantitaties of goods through and absolutely no large objects.

Risk... connections are blind, so you don't know what's on the other side until you or a probe goes through and relay back details. And it's a single point of entry, and only one way, so it's easy to be trapped or ambushed on the other side without escape. The gate can also be damaged or have its dialing device missing, disabled or destroyed, making it functionally useless from that end. If your gate is dialed into, the only way to stop anyone from traveling through is with a barrier so close to the wormhole event horizon to make molecules unable to materialize. But even then, they can hold your gate open from their end for the time limit of the wormhole, and then immediately redial and prevent you from using it indefinitely.

Unknowns... Certain anomalies like black holes affecting the destination gate can also pose a cataclysmic danger to planet of the gate of origin. Random happenstance with solar flares can cause the wormhole to travel through time as well as space. Gates may be too far to travel without extra power, and there may not be power available on the other side to get back. Gates can be dialed at random or you may have a list of addresses, but without someone who's been to these gates before, you have no idea who or what you'll find on the other side until you dial it.

The typical use for the gates is cool, but the really interesting stuff is when things go wrong, or when people get really creative with the mechanics. Things going wrong like heading home to Earth but being gated unexpectedly to an icy cave with no exit and no dial device to be found and everyone having to figure out where you went even though none of it seems to make sense. And creative things like overcoming the gates' distance limitations/extra power needs to cross between galaxies by daisy chaining hundreds of them in the void between the galaxies and setting up a macro to pass the matter buffer from one to the next without rematerializing the objects and people within in between.

Of course, traditional FTL ships exist in Stargate, but they are much slower than the instantaneous stargates, and have other dangers associated with them, like other armed ftl ships, pirates, replicators... Most ftl ships in stargate use hyperspace travel, but I believe that the Ancient's inter-galactic stargate seeding ship, Destiny, uses a classic warp drive.

Allister Reynolds: Revelation Space universe. Its not FTL its near light speed with time dilation as an actual plot device. The only hand waving part is the power/device to get up to speed, but everything else is in the realm of physics.

What I like about FTL is how it works with the story.

My favourite examples are Elite Dangerous and Dune.

Elite Dangerous's FTL tech is based on alien tech and that allows the developers to do cool stuff that you wouldn't expect in an mmo (this is usually a loading screen so when this first started happening people were terrified).

And Dune's idea of having the entirety of interstellar civilisation dependent on one substance that can only be made on one planet, which also has other uses extremely important to different groups, sets the stage perfectly for what happens in the books.

Stargate is pretty good. Rotary phone 😀. It's an elegant way to minimize CGI costs for the show. Not only that, the concept that you don't know what's on the other side is also interesting.

In the Commonwealth Saga it's trains! It's portals with hugely demanding power consumption. They mostly have to stay fixed to one place and open. So they run choo choos. Their world is commerce and economics. And trains are a lovely symbol of that.

In The Final Architecture it's jaunty. Unspace helps you go fast but you are always alone. Crewmates gone. When you come out they reappear. When you inside there is something coming to get you. Something that lives in unspace and doesn't like that we use it for travel. The terror of its hunting you drives everyone to suicide. So instead they sleep. Magic "you sleep now" pods for everyone.

Except. You can only sleep if you are on a known route. Some rare people can feel out new routes. And they have to say awake. Most shows just follow normal routes. But the special ships with these other folks can go all over the place! At the cost of route terror.

The books are about coming together in the face of adversity cosmic horror. And unspace is a foil to that. You are alone. But we do what we can anyway. Your alone now, but not forever. Unless the monster gets you.

In the Battletech universe, the Kearny-Fuschida drive jumps a ship instantly up to 30 light years, but then the jumpship needs to deploy a huge solar sail and wait two weeks to charge the capacitors. They also can't jump (safely) except to the low-gravity Lagrange points, and then dropships need to detach and make their way to the planet or whatever.

I like the A Fire Upon The Deep version where Earth is in the "slow zone" but the speed limit gets faster in other regions of space. It makes enough sense that you could easily imagine a universe working that way, at least if you don't know too much about physics.

My favourite is definitely BSG (Big Sexy Giant Battlestar Galactica) where the big ships just go 'poof' in a flash of light and suddenly they're somewhere else. Pure kino. :3

I enjoyed reading Ursula Le Guin's stories about instantaneous travel.

The process of instantaneous travel is so bizarre and unexplainable that every crew member experiences it differently. Some people think they haven't gone anywhere, some people think they're on the other side of the universe, and some people think the ship has disintegrated around them.

The only way for the process to succeed is for the entire crew to agree on a shared reality. It has the effect of making FTL travel a dangerous thing that requires training and planning. You can't hop on a ship with random people and expect to survive. Everyone has to train together to really trust each other's perception and experiences.

I think later in the 3 body problem series they talk about ftl like a paper boat on water in a tub with soap on the backside. It accelerates by making that water it touches a little bit slicker and accelerates the boat in the process.

But it leaves a slight trail behind and you can’t use that same path because it’s already been made slick.

Visually it's gotta be Leviathans' Starburst from Farscape.

That sequence never got old when I was a kid even though they reused it

The Infinite Probability Drive from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.

My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven't played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.

You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.

Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.

Then an aquatic species that doesn't do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.

And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.

And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don't have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.

So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.

For visuals, Mass effect is great. Giant space guns that shoot spaceships across.

I think it was the Old Man's War series that had a really creative form of FTL travel that played off of the infinite multiverse theory.

Instead of traveling through space, they would jump into a parallel universe were everything was the exact same, except that their desired destination was closer to them and the same group of travelers were also jumping to a different verse at the same time.

Cowboy Bebop 👩‍🚀🤠

Ender's sagas adresses not only near light speed travel, but also the relativity on communications between the traveling veasels and "stationary" posts via the ansible

Halo's Slipspace has always been my favorite. It's another dimension where instead of being able to move in four directions, things can move in eleven. This results in travel being faster there than in normal space.

The fun part is that the UNSC and the main antagonists- the Covenant- use the exact same method of FTL travel. The Covenant are just dramatically better at it, to the point of UNSC ships that attempt to run away from the Covenant via slipspace sometimes having the Covenant fleet they were fleeing already there and waiting on them.

Event Horizon… it just had a few downsides.

I like gate type things and prefer them in space like babylon 5 and buck rogers.

There's a theory about Even Horizon that it was basically the Warp from Warhammer 40k.

Warp Drive in Star Trek. Largely because there is modern day physics that points to the possibility of it being an actual possibility.

From a story telling, fits into the narrative version, the FTL in the newer Battlestar Galactica series. Look no further than the Battle of New Caprica. That was fracking awesome.

I liked the wormholes from the Bobbyverse. You had instantaneous travel across interstellar distances but you had to get there via slower than light speed first. So no matter how technologically advanced you became your interstellar civilisation still grew at a rate of one or two systems per decade.

For practicality: Whatever it is that The Nox do in the Stargate TV show. It's not well explained because, well, no other race is advanced enough to understand it. Something about briefly causing two distant points in space to touch. Instantaneous travel to anywhere.

For impracticality: #1 The ring network in one of Stephen Baxter's novels. Kind of like the eponymous rings in the better known Stargate franchise, but the ring source and destination are fixed and transport time between rings is light speed, so you arrive years after you enter. And IIRC, you come out as an approximation of what you were when you went in. A very good approximation, but still an approximation. The advantage is that the journey seems instantaneous to the traveller.

#2 Whichever story has it that travel in hyperspace / subspace turns out to be slower than travel in real space. This may have been a throwaway Internet joke, but it still amuses me.

#3 Stephen King's Jaunt.

I like the system in Asimov's Escape (from the I, Robot series). Spoilers ahead:

Two field engineers experience bizarre, dreamlike disorientation during the jump; afterward Susan Calvin explains the Brain discovered that hyperspace causes a momentary cessation of existence (i.e., you’re effectively disassembled and reassembled), which would panic a robot under the First Law—so the Brain (ship's AI) masked it with funny/benign hallucinations and only reveals it after they return.

I'd imagine that a lot of future experiences led by true AI would be philosophically challenging like this.

I like the kind where they didn't try to explain it. Trying to show how they make their sausage never works out well. I can suspend disbelief for FTL but not for their stupid explanations

I love the Farcaster network of the World Web from Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos (for anyone who hasnt read the books, they're essentially frameless stargates that are always on). Such a cool concept of being able to build a series of them linking the main commercial streets of the biggest cities on different planets together; thus making one gigantic and near endless market across hundreds of worlds... and anyone can just walk from one planet to another across hundreds or thousands of light years.

What I really like about that book series though is that the Farcasters are not the only means of FTL... and that there are sound reasons to use another method over them OR even to oppose your planet getting connected to the Farcaster network. Just seriously good world building.

Hyperspace in Babylon 5 is pretty cool.

Also in Star Trek TNG when the Traveller uses his mind to go crazy fast.

I wouldn't say it was my favourite FTL but it has some interesting implications.

The artificial wormholes of The Algebraist by Ian Banks. I can't say too much if you haven't already read it, but it's artificial wormholes that have to be transported sublight.

All the new wormholes are of course lovely and high capacity, but much of the network is still the original tiny little ones first installed. So your military at least uses kilometer long needle ships that can fit through these small points.

Think fitting an aircraft carrier through a Stargate.

I like the Stargate-lite system in the game Terminus (2000). Unlike Stargate, each gate connects 1 to 1 with another, so there’s no “dialling up” a new destination. In fact, these gates don’t go anywhere unexplored. They only go where we’ve already been (around the solar system).

See, in Terminus the space ships can only fly at realistic speeds (similar to real life rockets) and maneuvering is difficult (with pretty decent Newtonian physics). If you want to travel to other places in the solar system it takes an extremely long time, so the gates make it actually feasible to get around.

This all had the effect of making space feel like the age of railroading. You can get around but you’re limited to where the rails can take you. I don’t know why, but there’s something so romantic about that.

the farcaster network built by a machine super intelligence in Hyperion. unbelievable

Whatever it is, I'm inclined to like the versions where FTL is a teensy bit dangerous. Not necessarily 40k's "FTL is actual hell and frequently fails in terrible ways", but more... it's risky. It's a mundane risk, maybe. But still, there's that little bit of risk in the background and it needs to be approached carefully...

Like, Babylon 5's hyperspace is an actual place you make trips into, but it's also highly nonlinear, and so it is entirely possible to get lost or stuck if your ship malfunctions. Also, there are living things in there which may not be friendly.

Even Star Wars' Hyperdrives can be dangerous. It doesn't get played up in the stories much, but a malfunctioning or improperly programmed hyperdrive can strand you in deep space, subject you to severe time dilation, or just splat you against a realspace object.

One of the more interesting (and creepy, and appalling!) FTL systems I remember is from Scalzi's The God Engines. Way back in the day The Lord subjugated all other gods, and these gods are now prisoners of human ships, and responsible for moving them through the stars.

I'm fuzzy on the details, but I remember engineering was replaced by a priest caste, and their prayers kept most ship systems running (this Lord is a very active deity!) I also remember that the ship-gods can be very recalcitrant - I think the book opens with the captian having to whip the ship's god into compliance.

goes Plaid

Slipspace from Halo.

You can weaponize that shit in a pinch if you wish. It seems to be the appropriate FTL method for humanity to use.

The FTL in the game FTL.

It's not really explained or important in the game, but Christ almighty have I put hundreds of hours into that infuriatingly addictive thing; so it must be my favorite FTL.

I prefer the STL in Card's Ender's Game series. They asymptotically approach the speed of light so the passengers only have several weeks pass when travelling to far flung locations but the universe around them experiences a normal passage of time which may be tens of years. This has really big implications on the plots in several stories.

They do have an ansible communications system that does allow instantaneous communication over astronomical distances.

In the Bobibverse (book series) they used SUDAR for FTL. SUDAR was a gravity based communication. I believe this started coming out before the gravity wave discovery and we confirmed(/it became common knowledge) that gravity travels at the speed of light. It was a cool idea though.

Does L space in the Discworld novels count?

I like the version from BSG.

Andromeda was weird. Able to travel from galaxy to galaxy otherwise they travel at sub-light.

Julian May's Galactic Milieu trilogy from the '90s has a fun FTL concept involving a ship generating an upsilon field to break through superficies into a "grey limbo" hyperspace. Each translation (in and out) causes physical pain; the tighter the catenary and the longer the jump, (the faster the trip) the more pain is caused.

A hard choice, so many of them have been well done in media and text.

If I had to make a choice I would pick versions that match up with what we think could be possible. And that means anything based on or similar to the Alcubierre drive theory. The "slower" travel around a system in Elite Dangerous uses this idea of moving the space the ship is in faster than light, avoiding any relativity issues. Stephen Baxter's "Flood" and "Ark" novels (mainly Ark) use this idea and his descriptions of what it looks like from inside and departure/arrival are fantastic and not intuitive (Elite Dangerous gets the leaving right, but not the arrival maybe because it would look weird). When the ship arrives it would suddenly appear from nowhere, but then its virtual image would move away into a point as the light catches up.

For a great video of it, here's a wonderful collection of potential future interstellar ships with the Alcubierre drive as the final solution to .

The exact mechanics are never explained, but I’ve always loved “fenestering” in David Zindell’s Neverwhere and Requiem For Homo Sapiens trilogy.

A pilot, in a one-person “lightship”, interfaces with their computer, merging their minds into one. They then solve maths equations which have never been solved before and prove new mathematical theories. This opens up a window underneath the ship, which it falls in to, into hyperspace. They then need to do more novel maths to open up the window to where they’re going and fall through that.

It’s weird and it’s nerdy and it’s poetic and it’s mystical, like everything in the books, and it’s just so incredibly cool.

Silfen Paths from Judas Unchained. Aliens called Silfen walked from planet to planet directly via actual forest paths. Everything gets wonky time wise when your on one so you might emerge 100 years later. The technology itself is sentient and not maintained. The Silfen who lost interest long ago are asked how they manage the paths. They say they just let them do what they want. At least one path exists to/from Earth. But humans are boring and make things boring, so the aliens avoid Earth.

So if you're on a walk and you get lost you may be walking to another planet.

Does a TARDIS count?

Robotech (or Macross for the purists).

Folding space, essentially.

No mention of Futurama? Screw moving the ship, just move the universe around it!

The Mirrors in Book of the New Sun. Basic idea is to surround yourselves with mirrors until you create an infinity room and then, through 'exactly aligned' lights, the light waves don't cancel out but instead 'push' objects out of the universe, returning at the destination when the light slows down to universal speeds.

My favourite one is Red Dwarf when they see the future. Requires a fair amount of "dont think about it" but its still a great plot.

The Drop Drive from Final Space, just because it's so amazingly silly. XD

Implosion drives from the Borderlands games.

Can't travel faster than light in realspace? Fine. We'll just annihilate all realspace between here and our destination.

Warp Speed from Star Trek, I think, is the one I remember the most.

Star Control had an interesting take on it, where you're able to jump between eiffererent "levels" of space if you have something that can induce the right field and at the right level of power. Sort of like jumping between electron shells or something.

But you can jump from normal space, to hyperspace on top of that, to quasispace on top of that. And maybe others above (and below). Traveling a certain distance in each space allows you to travel an exponentially larger amount of distance in the lower space.

So you induce a field, pop up to hyperspace, move at less than FTL (as relative to hyperspace), then fall back to regular space.

Not ftl but I really like cryo sleep themes. Someone wakes up 100+ years later and the world is post apocalyptic. James axlers deathlands audio books, alien, some obscure video games.

CJ Cherryh and Joel Sheperd use basically the same system in their universes (Sheperd admitted he basically adopted CJ’s almost verbatim).

Ships can travel FTL transitioning into another plane of existence (to say it in an uncomplicated way), but to do so they must first acquire a speed very close to c. And when they transition back to the regular space they do it at transluminic velocity, that they must shred off pulsing their hyperdrives before coming down to ‘maneouvring’ speeds.

All of this makes for interesting tactical situations in the intent of an interstellar conflict.

Hyperdrives, sg1,sga,sgu. wormholes, and interdimensional teleportation, bsg is one such one. Warp is basically just "manipulating the space around it, using subspace(an alternate dimension for both sg1 and star trek). apparently its the slowest form of ftl. compartively to the likes of borg. even caretaker has a very advanced intergalactic ftl( interdimensional rift) later in sg1,sga, they have access to intergalatic hyperdrives which are superior to interstellar ones. with hyperdrives they arnt restricted to the limit of travelling faster than light speed in the normal universe. they explained hyperspace does not have such a limit, and isnt subjected to time dilation effects of approaching close or faster than light speed.

it seems ftl that requires traveling through a medium like warp hyperspace have limitation of power requirements and engine designs. Teleportation seems dont have that limit, aside from power requirements.

trek also have other form of quirky ftl, like the vortex drive of the xindi, coaxial and the rift generation. most other shows use teleportation, or interdimensional portals.

I like how Stellaris does hyperdrive; certain systems are connected by hyperplanes. Presumably something "man-made" in those systems generates the field and "throws" the ship to the next system.

Similar to Mass Effect except that whereas in Mass Effect, one generator can connect to any other, in Stellaris each one only goes between two points, like a subway.

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. It deals heavily with causality and "light cones." There's some super advanced entity in the universe that enforces a ban on causality-breaking FTL, so it's not possible for anything to mess with the entity's development, iirc.

Stross's Neptune Brood also has some interesting stuff about FTL economics. It's somewhat of a satire on cryptocurrency, NFTs, and marketization in general.

The one where humans discover a way to "skip" through space in jumps – which shouldn't be possible and puts a strain on the traveler – until they discover the real deal from aliens.

Aside from that, the more common type with beacons or gates.

FTL travel in the series of book "the interdependency" is one of the major plot devices, so it's one of those that marked me the most.

Without going into spoilers: FTL is limited to using a natural phenomenon that are pretty much akin to space-rivers, so humanity has no power onto what systems are connected to one another.

As rivers do, those "currents" can also shift and have done so in the past: the place where the books happen are completely cut off from earth since pretty much forever, for example.

The Hyperspace Gates in Cowboy Bebop always seemed to be pretty plausible. They didn't explain all the science behind them, but there was enough to show that the was science behind it, and it had been commercialized enough that people had a basic understanding of them.

Recently read Hayden’s World and there’s some FTL in there that (mostly) obeys relativity and the associated time dilation issues, so that was fun to see. Also, a generally unpleasant experience for the humans on the craft. Otherwise I liked KSR’s Red/Blue/Green Mars, how the story developed travel technology organically on a timeline.

As long as it's got "dat woosh", I'll love it.

Elite Dangerous, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Battletech are my favorites, though.

FRIENDSHIP DRIVE CHARGING BABY!

"Warning! Hyperspace conduit unstable!"

Uh oh.

Whatever the hell this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVEQRj_WJG4

One thing I'll say is that I prefer gates or portals to "Teleporters" for the obvious "it actually kills you" thing

The warp from warhammer 40k.

Just because of how grim dark and batshit it all is.