Top Ten Sci-Fi FTL Systems
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- Опубліковано 26 чер 2023
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Spacedock breaks down ten of sci-fi's most interesting faster than light propulsion systems.
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1nd place
Do we have to stay subscribed to the Patreon to access the visual dictionaries and other content or can it work like a one time purchase?
@@Agent789_0 You can pledge once and then download those things to keep if you like, yes.
OH MAN, SHAME ON YOU.. using that image of a G'Quan class Narn Cruiser to suck me in, and then having the tiniest reference to Babylon 5 as a throwaway.. which doesnt actually show the narn ship.. .wtaf? LOL
1nd place? 😀
Technically, the actual spacefolding in Dune is done by Holtzmann drives, with the Navigators and the Spice providing, well, safe navigation (which explains, more or less, what's going on in the Lynch scene: the Navigator is using precognition to plot a safe path for the Holtzmann drive between point a and point b). This becomes relevant in the post-God Emperor era, with the Ixians coming out with a technological replacement for Navigators.
A lot of people always get that one wrong. I guess the movies/tv show just do a bad job explaining it properly.
@@fipse It's a mix of it being a bit complicated (though not very) and not very important for the plot early in the series, so it's an easy decision to skip the explanation to save time in an adaptation.
PAUSE
"Spacefold" is already a real FTL term? Damn!
Me and my friends have been referring to the IRL FTL equivalent as a Spacefold and thought it was totally original.
@@TheManOfMyriad it's not just seen in dune. spacefold is also the FTL of the macross/robotech universe
@@Spekor oof
Welp, guess they were all ahead of their time.
I wanna watch Macross at some point, no idea where to find it though.
Stargate's step-by-step world building throughout the series' progression is awesome.
Agreed. It's amazing how far humanity progressed in SG1 when you look back at earlier seasons.
And it felt earned. Like the Tau’ri had setbacks but got lucky, or MacGuyver’d (natch) a solution just by being crazy enough to try it.
And by the end, they're the undisputed galactic superpower with access to the full collective knowledge of both the Asgard and the Ancients and a presence in two galaxies.
There is a preservative lore held by a Chinese mobile game THE UNLIMITED LAGRANGE (无尽的拉格朗日), which makes a story that normal wrap drive in ships even cannot accelerate ships to FTL speed so that stargates located in lagrange points play a important role in travels between solar systems.
I love stargate
My absolute favorite thing about Halo’s reconciliation debt “traffic jams” is that they clear up in both time directions, which is actually noted in-universe at the end of the Forerunner-Flood War. Despite the continued heavy use of slipspace trace by both sides for centuries, about a year before the Array fired, all slipspace debt started clearing up. Many forerunners didn’t particularly care, but some, including the Isodidact, realized that this could only be a result of practically all slipspace travel stopping, and soon. So the Isodidact realized he had no choice but to fire the array, as nothing else could possibly explain such a conclusion. Damn sad when you think about it, but also very interesting
Speaking of Halo and slipspace. I always loved when Cortana explains the difference between covenant and human drives in one of the books. She describes the covenant drive as working in a much more economic and elegant way compared to the UNSC tech (duh, it is much more advanced), capable of seeing all the possible strings inside slipspace and basically just widen the ideal entry point into the other dimension and gliding inside with the slightest effort. The Shaw-Fujikawa drive used by the UNSC on the other hand rips open a hole into slipspace like a human opens a bag of chips in a food frenzy, basically brute forcing through the other side. Just awesome. That also explains why covenant vessels are capable of atmospheric jumping. Better and faster processing of course calculation and the aforementioned ability to "see" all ways of travel inside slipspace.
My favorite part of Halo slipspace is the fact that it’s use causes time paradoxes on a regular basis, with ships not really knowing how long it will take them to get somewhere, and sometimes even arriving at their destination BEFORE they left their departure point.
Everyone’s collective reaction? “Eh, don’t overthink it”
@@gabe9125 As long as it doesn't go as wonky as in Warhammer 40k, where it can happen that a vessel arrives centuries to late or to early (or meeting itself), i think the UNSC will be fine.
@@ThePandoraGuy You mean i can have 2 of my most favourite shooterz?
@@lukeskywalker5392 Yes.
My favorite remains warp travel from 40k, not only for the concept but for the sheer amount of storytelling that can emerge from it and the number of horrific things that can go wrong as a result.
One of my favourite things about it is that you don't know how long its going to take for you to arrive, neither from your perspective, nor from an outside perspective. You could even arrive before you left after travelling for decades
I too really like 40k's Warp travel. It might not be my favorite but it is the funniest.
Well they did cover Event horizon, the unofficial precursor to 40k warp travel
I was gonna mention that too, even if it's kind of a mashup of Dune and Event Horizon
yeah i was waiting on that one ^^
especially since it forces a kinda interessting choice on the users.
Do you risk the unpredictable, insane and potentially lethal but fast-ish track trough the warp or do you do a tau and only skip along its border, dipping in and out of it for a second or two. This makes it MUCH MUCH safer and more reliable but also much slower.
The Infinite Improbability drive from Hitchhikers Guide. Yes I know its a silly idea but I love the whole 'basically everywhere in the universe at the same instant' mechanic.
If you like the idea of being in every part of the universe at the same time, Star Trek Voyager had an episode called Threshold in season 2 in which transwarp travel, going faster than warp 10 turned two crewmen into salamanders
The Heart of Gold was rendered obsolete by the Bistromath. Douglas Adams was the best comic mind in post Python British comedy, and that's saying a lot.
@@Mikey__RKeep your receipts!
I like the FTL in Futurama. The drive doesn't move the ship through the universe, it moves the universe around the ship. According to the senile whackaloon in charge.
Without all that mucking about hyperspace :=)
Huge huge missed opportunity to talk about the skip drive from old man’s war.
Literally leaving your old universe to enter a nearly identical one at your destination. No time travel paradox, but you can never return to your old universe. Absolutely metal, love it.
I remember they said it works by breaking the universe so that the ship can be shifted in a new location as the universe is resolving itself, a bit like cheating at chess by knocking over the board and having a piece be in a more favorable position when you put it back together
@@ICU1337 The thing about parallel universes is, if you travel to a parallel universe that's _very_ similar to yours with the only difference being that in that destination universe your location is 50 light years away, then that _really_ looks like a jump drive that moves you 50 light years. In fact it looks like it so much that it's impossible to tell the difference, except for causality not being violated.
Missing the warshawski sails and drives off the honorverse. There sheer amount of techno-bable Weber gives them amd their rules should ha e made it onto the list.
Was't the Skip-Drive the one that replaces an exact copy of you at the target destination in a parallel universe, including ripping them out of their universe and replacing you? But yeah, Scalzi did a good job. The story and all that stuff is totally bonkers without being too ridicolous. Time to read that again. :)
The Flow from his Interdependency series is also pretty good and is used as such a good plot element.
9:34 Okay but the build up to the eight-chevron address was _crazy_ when it first happened. The gate had been set to automatic, and the guy was going through the chevron announcements out of habit, and then out of nowhere...
"Chevron Seven..." _the gate locks in an icon that is definitely not earth's point of origin, and_ *_keeps going_* "...is encoded...?" _more spinning happens_ "...Chevron EIGHT is locked."
That episode of Stargate you mentioned "The Fifth Race" just might be my favorite episode in the whole Stargate franchise. Watching Jack become more filled with Ancient knowledge while being able to communicate less was so brilliant. You can see Jack getting more Ancient knowledge but viewers are totally in the dark to what he's doing. This all leads up to the crazy reveal of the 8th Chevron and the Asgard planet. It was Stargate at its best
It was a very good episode. But my personal favourite SG1 episode is Window of Opportunity. Not only did it take advantage of a quirk of the gate. The episode is their take on Ground hog day and very funny and light-hearted.
Window of Opportunity. The Other Guys. 200. Space Race.
10=8 was such a great little moment.
How do you travel the universe?
Event Horizon: *Rip through hell!*
Mass Effect: *"Big space gun!"*
Dune: *"We sprinkle worm poop into space"*
Nah, Dune is "If you do ALL THE DRUGS you can fold space."
40K: Welcome to literally hell
@@katherineberger6329We could use a Computer but that HERESY
Dune FTL has nothing to do with Spice. Spice is fed to navigator so that they could replace navigational computers because of AI ban. The drives themselves are purely technological. Just like in 40k that stole the idea.
@@shinyagumon7015 until Leto II thought it is a Good Idea to get rid of the worms and it's back to "we don't call them computers" Non Human Navigators
Mass Effect first won me over by really caring about how all this stuff worked and making an effort to explain pretty much every piece of sci-fi tech it presents to you, despite being a space opera/soft sci-fi by most definitions. I love that FTL drives and energy shields are the same tech applied in opposite ways.
the mass effect is also used in missiles and special ammunition, creating a burst of gravity on impact for massive damage.
My kingdom for a (good Bioware era) Mass Effect MMORPG. It was such a great and well realized universe that it's a damn shame there's so little media for it.
@@ledocteur7701mm yes the rare material used in power cores that can duplicate itself if you give it more power (so a tiny bit gives you an infinite amount) that's so rare, it is used as a power cell in toothbrushes...
@@comet.xThat toothbrush cost almost as much as a car, so it’s kind of an enthusiast’s item instead of a common item. And I’m not sure what example you were referring to in the first point.
Artificial gravity is one of the 3 technologies needed to achieve interstellar travel like in Star Trek.
The other 2 being FTL travel and extreme energy prowess.
I like the one from Babylon 5, where they rip a hole in space and dive into another dimension where they just use regular sublight engines like they would in-system, but the distance they travel in there means they're travelling orders of magnitude farther in normal space. And the way the Shadows just cut a me-shaped hole and slip through, closing it behind them so they look like they've just appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared again, because they're just that much more advanced.
"Distances are shorter" is practically the definition of hyperspace, and "Babylon 5" is traditional in that sense. Its own spin on the trope includes: gravitational currents, so that unpowered ships can get swept away; folds that can hide war fleets; and the particular baleful-red visualization.
Yeah, if the content creator is going to use footage from a show, they should at least credit it.
I think one of the more fun things about B5 is all the stupid shit they start doing with jump points, like opening a jump point inside the Markab jump gate, jumping from inside the atmosphere of Jupiter, and jumping straight into attack runs on Mars are the ones that come to mind. While it's a pretty vanilla form of FTL, they definitely came up with interesting ways to use it.
@@frostdillicus or the way the Minbari used it as an offensive weapon, jumping into the middle of a fleet and tearing most of it apart before they even arrive.
ships that don't have an FTL can also use jump gates, which is unusual for space travel fiction. The idea that the Centauri of all people started selling jumpgate tech to others including Earth is also unusual.
The idea of "red space" is also interesting; a ship can enter hyperspace and not notice an entire fleet hiding from it, while a ship can be damaged and stay in hyperspace.
I enjoyed the gradual reveal of how the Expanse's protomolecule rings worked. The builders forced a bubble of spacetime into existence within a previous universe. Ring gates into this zone could cross interstellar distances without breaking relativity because you weren't traveling faster than light, you exited and re-entered this universe at different points. The old universe's sheer resistance to the bubble conveniently served as an inexhaustible power source. Apart from pissing off old-universe entities that started detonating stars, negating physical space cohesion, and obliterating thought at a quantum level, it was a neat arrangement.
And in the epilogue of the final book, Leviathan Falls, it's revealed that [SPOILER] about a thousand years after the Ring Gate network was destroyed, one of the surviving human interstellar colonies figured out a new way to travel faster than light by sort of skirting along the boundary between the two universes. This also has a few downsides, such as requiring actual travel time (the Gates were instantaneous wormholes, while the new drive took 31 days to travel the 3,800 light-years back to Sol system) as well as requiring the crew to spend said travel time asleep in "transit pods" (maybe the psychological effects of this new drive are similar to what humans experience when the other-universe entities attack, so the induced unconsciousness or stasis or whatever prevents them from going insane?). However, it has one enormous upside, and it's that it apparently DOESN'T piss off any extra-dimensional entities and cause them to try and wipe everyone's minds or eat our universe for breakfast or whatever. An acceptable tradeoff, if you ask me.
The first 3 pages of the first book is about Julia pissing lmao
I love the Kearny-Fuchida drive from Battletech. Like Battlestar Galactica, the drive needs time to recharge between jumps. Jumps cause time dilation, so what seems to be a rapid teleportation to the crew of the ship actually takes weeks in real space, and when they come out of the other there is the snap of people's bodies adjusting back to real time, making folks feel sick.
I do love the tech lore from the Battletech Universe.
Well BT is a setting only a fraction of SIFi fans dabbed into. So no surprise it gets no attention.
Where is the time dialation and weeks to actually teleport tidbit mentioned? I never came across it.
Actually, the 'jump time' is way shorter than that. It's measured in minutes, last I checked.
@@TheGenericavatar I seem to recall that particular description being in one of my grey death legion books, though I can't remember which one.
I've always liked the Slipstream from Andromeda for some reason. Something about specific routes, being able to cut off routes, the toll it takes on pilots spending long periods of time in Slipstream, the requirement for biologic pilots, etc. set it apart from a lot of the other FTL systems from the other SciFi I was consuming at the time.
Agree with your #1 wholeheartedly though.
Makes one wonder how had the Star Trek galaxy gotten that bad and if it's something connected to infamous Omega Protocol.
Context: since Andromeda was planned as Star Trek spinoff, I regard it as one of parallel realities, like the one where humans are an empire.
It looked very flashy and exciting. I liked it a lot
You know what they say about Slipstream. It's not the best way to travel faster than light, it just happens to be the only one.
@@TheArklyte Maybe an extension of the "Warp damages subspace" and turns out that the adjustments (variable pylons and whatnot) were not enough?
Slipstream always reminded me of a roller-coaster ride through the universe
Another thing I love about Elite Dangerous's FSD is that they can be supercharged using the jets of neutron stars. The presentation of the process is also great, with the ship getting thrown around and the ship's computer warning you that the FSD is operating beyond safety limits before giving you the "Frame Shift Drive supercharged" message and quadrupling your jump range
It is also very fun to plot a course, seeing you have pulsars on your way and then just surfing the cones.
Feels so good after jumping for hours
Was worried for a moment that Stargate wasn't going to get a mention.
My favorite gate moment that comes to mind was the formation of the super gate. That tech was just so cool and how the ori originally powered it was a great twist. Man i miss Stargate. We really need a new gate show.
Absolutely! The moment the Ori activate the supergate and send their ships through was so awesome!
Also, the second favorite moment is when they team up with Atlantis to block the Supergate, destroying both a Wraith Hive and Ori Mothership in the process!
I still don't understand why fans didn't like Universe, and why it got cancelled. Sure, it had a different tone from SG-1 and from Atlantis, but I still loved it, it was genuinely interesting and well written.
We *really* need a new gate show indeed.
How does Star Trek/Wars not get mentioned whatsoever?
@@randybentley2633 Warp drive from Star Trek is way too "simple" compared to the other ones and way too "mainstream". It doesn't really have too many weird quirks, interesting things that can happen with it and the warp engines themselves are not all that interesting compared to the ones that were mentioned.
@@randybentley2633and since Star wars is a space opera and no hard sci fi, the FTL travel is just a means to get from A to B in the setting, getting the most attention when it doesn't work like in Episode 1 or the thing about dropping out of Hyperspace too early in Episode 5 getting an imperial commander strangled. The sequels did a bit more with the FTL drive with the "I am a very good, established, competent and reasonable character"-maneuver which looks cool and would be neat if it didn't completely break the series.
I love the D.A.V.E. drive ("Dangerous And Very Expensive") from the (surprisingly hard) sci-fi webcomic Freefall, just for how _weird_ it is. It somehow manages to invert temporal dilation, resulting in a vessel that from its own point of view takes years, decades or potentially centuries to get to its destination, but which to an _outside_ observer gets there in a few days. This can only be used for interstellar travel by making extremely big, extremely durable starships which are 99% ice-based radiation and impact shielding by mass and are operated by AI systems while the human passengers are in cryogenic suspension. This means that by the time one of your ships has done a roundtrip to some of the colonies and back to Earth, it likely has centuries of wear and tear on it and requires a full overhaul or replacement of just about every component...and at the same time, cryogenic suspension isn't 100% reliable, so there's always a certain chance that a passenger won't make it.
Freefall as a whole is one hell of a webcomic. It gets into some seriously thought-provoking ideas about AI and what it means to be sentient (the "what does your name _smell_ like" turing test is a great one), yet at the same time keeps a "funny shenanigans in space" tone at the same time.
Such a good comic. Definitely some good sci-fi.
It's really impressive, the worldbuilding that's gone into that comic. And the fact that at first glance you could dismiss it as yet another gag-a-day strip, until you really start reading it.
You might like Greg Egan's Orthogonal. It takes place in a different universe where a single minus is turned into a plus (spacetime geometry is not Lorentzian), resulting in a completely different behaviour of all energy and matter. For example, "plants" in that universe create "sugars" by _radiating_ energy, rather than absorbing it (and are active during the night, rather than the day).
The relevant bit here is that this change means that the faster you move, the slower time flows _for you_ ... all the way into time literally standing still on the planet you come from relative to your own time.
Seriously hard sci-fi, just set in a universe with different rules. A lot of the books is exploring and understanding how the universe works, and there's supplemental material that goes through all of the science (even stuff the characters don't understand yet), though obviously that's really spoiler (and math!) heavy :D
That sounds like my headcanon for the ships in the Alien universe. They obviously don't take a long tome to get anywhere, from an outside perspective (as seen by Ripley's expectation to get home and be with her daughter, or how soon the Sulaco arrives at LV-426), yet they stick the crews in cryogenic suspension and power down a lot of ship's systems.
I'm a little disappointed that the wormhole/hyperspace system described in the Honor Harrington series didn't make your list. I found it to be one of the most well-established fictitious FTL systems I've ever encountered. The degree to which the author incorporated the rules set up by the hyperspace system into the story and how well tactics around combat and piracy were fleshed out through the series never failed to transport me into the world of the Honorverse. If you haven't read the series, I strongly recommend it. If you have read it and chose not to include it, I would be interested in hearing why.
As always, great show Spacedock! Thank you for your work.
Yeah, I was curious about that, too, especially given the huge amount of explanation that goes into the different hyperspace bands, how the Warshawski sails work and are incorporated into non-FTL drive systems and defenses via conversion to impeller bands.
I don't think Daniel and the others have heard of Honor Harrington.
@@Maria_Erias this is what I was talking about when I said that the details of the system transport me into that works. It feels so well fleshed-out.
@@chaingun1701 that's a real shame. Hopefully they take an interest!
They've referenced it like 3-4 times total. I think there was an old Q&A video years ago where one of them said that basically there isn't enough art, official or otherwise, to use in videos or something like that. Its a shame, the Honorverse is amazing.
NOTHING tops the sound design of a capital ship tearing its way into realspace in Elite Dangerous, but I'd also like to shout out the gates from Galaxy On Fire 2. They're so elegant, each race has their own design, and the personal jumpdrive you can build for your ship is an incredible milestone in the game's context. I also love the way they tie in FTL with the alien enemy faction's mastery of wormholes.
Elite's sound design in general is amazing, they did a great job on it.
Holy crap, another Galaxy On Fire fan. I thought I'd never see the day.
@@BlufyreAudio Mr. Maxwell sends his regards
Based GoF enjoyer
God, I used to play the crap out of that game back in the day! I really miss it. Can't find it available anywhere. :(
I always liked the Hitchhiker's guide method of "start by being everywhere, and then narrow to down to where you want to be".
Not only that but it has interesting side effects, such as turning a nuclear missile into a bowl of petunias.
Ah the Heart of Gold
@@stvdagger8074 And a whale.
I love the mix in Sword of the Stars, where every major starfaring species has their own system. Natural Hyperlanes, Artificial Hyperlanes, Warp Drive, Micro Rapid Teleportation, Star Gates, Warp Drive but fleets work together to go faster, and SPACE CANNONS BABY!
Under-rated game. Deserves more prestige
Was gonna bring this up... one of the races just uses giant hyperspace drills to forcibly make temporary hyperspace lanes for themselves, which just suits them so well.
They had something along those lines in previous version of Stellaris too, and simplified the whole thing later for gameplay purposes
I don't know whether I should have expected a mention of SotS in here, but I'll just settle for being happy to randomly find other people that've played before in the wild XD
@@MjolnirFeawconsidering Paradox advised Kerberos during the development, I wouldn’t be surprised if having different drives in Stellaris was inspired by SotS
The Webway from Warhammer 40k also fits into that Stargate-type category of FTL travel
@@JohnSmith-pu4jg that too, yeah
40k steals from everywhere at once. There is no such thing as an original idea in it.
@@Vaasref yeah, taking inspiration from all over, and influencing others in turn. To take something and make it yours. Like the Orcs & Goblins originating as Tolkien clones before the lore was fleshed out to make them their own thing
@@hamishsewell5990 It goes beyond "taking inspiration".
Aggressively trying to copyright everything so only them can use it (like "space marine" for example) is well into the stealing territories in my book.
They aren't there to be part of culture they are here to spoliate culture.
@@Vaasref yeah, agreed.
One of my favorites is the Warshawski Sail from the Honor Harrington books. For FTL jumps though, they can reconfigure those wedges into giant discs hundreds or even thousands of kilometers across, and then use them to translate into hyperspace. Hyperspace in that universe consists of stacked bands of further and further compressed space. So the Alpha Band, the first layer, might allow you to jump to another star in a matter of months. A really high band like the Theta Band will let you do it in days, however with the caveat of each successive band requiring vastly increased energy to enter and posing greater stresses on the ships travelling in them. Translating up a band results in the ship bleeding off massive amounts of speed, and translating down would cause physical stress such as nausea to humans depending on how fast the ship was moving and how far down the ship is translating, so going down one band at just .1c is a little bump while a "crash translation" at full speed from the high bands to normal space could incapacitate people, think of it like a submarine doing an emergency dive or blowing its ballast for an emergency surface. Overall the ships in that universe are really well thought out, making full use of the ability to manipulate gravity. Their ships use it for FTL, normal space maneuvering in the form of gravity impeller wedges, as well as using gravitational pulses to detect incoming ships similar to sonar and using coded pings for FTL communication. Because those impellers are basically regions of space experiencing tens of thousands of g's, they will rip apart anything they come into contact with making them impenetrable barriers for the tops and bottoms of warships as well as the main payload for smaller missiles as 10000 g's is far more destructive than even a small nuke, at least for direct contact. Hell, they even use it for hover vehicles and building kilometers tall buildings on planets, its very well thought out.
Space Battleship Yamatos Wave Motion Engine not only creates micro wormholes it also comes with the ability to be the energy source for the Planetkiller Wave Motion Gun
Well its the clearest Kzinti Lesson out there.. the wave motion engine can extract limitless energy from vacuum .. so Sanada basically tough "what if we just direct this energy somewhere else in a directional way..." ..and thats why i hated the Star Wars ep 8 "hyperspace ramming" thing.. if that would be possible as despicted everyone with a hyperdrive enabled ship would have a death star at their disposal making any warship or station esentially worthless...in a galaxy where everyone has acess to hyperdrive enabled ships
Man, I loved that show. They had it on after school with the name Star Blazers when I was a kid. The newer version is great though, very much superior in art and animation.The Wave Motion engine is one of the best names invented for an FTL drive.
I love how in the remake, the fact that humanity uses the wave motion engine to create a weapon absolutely horrifies the race that sent them the technology, who only intended humanity to use it for transportation. And that it turns out using the gun is actually extremely dangerous. Not just for the Yamato, but for reality itself.
@@sparrowlt This never bothered me because the downsides are immediately apparent. Using hyperdrive as a weapon is far worse than the Death Star because it creates an ever expanding field of debris flung at lightspeed through hyperspace. The fact that they failed to use that as a plot point in the following movie was so incredibly stupid.
@@RaddSpencer It was also very well explained this time (as in the original Iscandar never ever wondered why humans had turned the wave motion engine into a mass destruction weapon).
Iscandar was very aware of the wave motion tecnology aplication into a weapon as they had done it to great effect in the past.. wich ended in massive destruction galaxy wide..
Yurisha was there to acompany Yamato on the way to Iscandar and during the integration of the wave motion engine into it.. but she ending up comatose and the death of Sasha left no one to told Sanada otherwise..
Even so they were not expecting its power not even by magnitudes less..
Its not explained why Garmillas wasnt able to develop their own WMG using the same principles for navigation.. but i guess it can be explained by earth using directly an Iscandar developed engine while Garmillas probably had to evolve their own by themselves
For me its the warp cores and quantum teleportation from Outer Wilds. Not only are they based on actual concepts (except highly exaggerated), but because a big part of the game is about learning how they work via experimentation and cryptic alien descriptions. It's a puzzle game where instead of pushing blocks around, the puzzle is figuring out how this universe's physics work and how to use make use of it to achieve a certain goal.
Yeah, and also the game acknowledges that you can in fact break spacetime with the mechanics it gives you which is the best thing ever lol
I remember how ManyATrueNerd referred to the teleporting as "quantum _entitlement"_ instead of entanglement... and yeah, the blueball ending from breaking spacetime so close to the final location is hilarious.
If the Stargate is included (which I deeply love), I would suggest the Rings from the Expanse series as well, books included. The whole thing has a set of limitations that mostly work, until they don't, and then the new ones work, until they don't, and this whole thing has a deeply human subtext of "people will grow complacent and take for granted even the most deadly things if they are useful and don't kill people ALL the time".
One of the more thought-out FTL drives in written SF is the Alderson Drive, named for its creator, Dan Alderson of (iirc) the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He brainstormed a system in which a huge charge is expended to shunt a vessel along a flux line of potential linking two stars, which need not be equivalent classes.
The Alderson drive was made for famed writers Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. It also appeared in the BattleTech as the K-F drive.
I always liked the Honorverse version of transportation. Allows for long travel like the naval traditions it is based on and is actually explained in the books
Love those books!
Yeah, kinda disappointed it didn't at least get an honorable (pun intended :P ) mention.
Hyperspace is an onion!
(in all seriousness, I find it interesting that it kind of falls in line with some of the "compacted dimensions" ideas for unified theories)
The idea of different "bands" of gravity layers allowing for ever greater speeds at the danger of overloading your cores is what makes it so believable. The idea of standing gravitational waves even meshes with our understanding today of singular gravitational waves generated by the collision of two black holes. Imagine creating a propulsion form based on what is only discovered in the future to be a potential reality. Amazing!
@@RustyDust101 One thing that I always found annoying is that just about any inhabited system seems to be in the middle of a grav wave, since that ratchets up the drama if there is damage to the ship
Star Treks FTL drives like the Coaxial [Warp] Induction Drive should've been mentioned. This allowed a starship the capability to fold the fabric of space, allowing it to travel instantaneously across extremely large distances, and also the Borgs Transwarp Drive and also the Quantum Slipstream Drive, all extremely fast drives
And the Coaxial warp drive was of course completely forgotten by next week and never mentioned again, despite them _having a shuttle fitted with it_ sitting in their shuttle bay.
Not to mention Paris completely understood the tech and in fact solved its major glaring issue.
Voyager could have been fitted with it, and if there was some "size based" limitations then at least the Delta Flyer could have been equipped.
There's also the Protostar Drive from Prodigy which uses a literal protostar to travel faster than warp and is capable of crossing over 4,000 light years in a matter of minutes.
@@casbot71 yeah just forgotten about!
It's like in Star Trek Picard, were are the transphasic torpedoes or the highly advanced ablative armour brought back in time my Admiral Janeway?
@@casbot71It was probably removed by the pilot and put in his old shuttle craft which he used to return the criminal.
@@jacko_jaxonthey have transphasic torpedoes, they're just a lot more resource intensince than even quantum torpedoes. And as for the armor, it's probably still too difficult for them to properly reverse engineer for the rest of the fleet.
A popular headcanon is that the Event Horizot black ole drive is an early prototype of W40K Warp Drive.
And honestly if it ios the result are pretty tame fro traveling the Warp wit a Geller Field (through the Horizont probably did have a long trip).
Remember, it would take place well before the Birth of Slanesh.
@@Iceykitsune also, while length of jump does not matter very much (1 second is all ya need to become some daemons thong) the "depth" of the warp jump in 40k matters, lower tech jump drives such as the T'au are not capable of diving as deep into the warp and thus, are less daemony if/when things go wrong, the tradeoff being a massively reduced possible maxiumum jump range
So happy you included the Frameshift drive from Elite Dangerous! You didn't mention in the video, but by far the coolest part of a capital ship jumping in or out is the mind blowing sound of it.
Agreed. Not only feasible, but awesome to behold as well.
How could you miss the best and most hard sci-fi of them all? The Infinite Improbability Drive from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-series! 😁
Homeworld's FTL abilities were very unique.
One of the things that I did with my own stories is utilizing wormholes, but it's also possible to have siege warships with gate rings in front of them (as Spacedock would say "Weaponizing your FTL"). They could open up a wormhole in the ring and fire a railgun round through it, essentially allowing ships to shoot from one solar system to another. There were obvious limitations to it, being the fact that energy-based weapons can't shoot through it, having to coordinate shots, and the fact that opponents could still shoot through the wormholes, destroying the attacker, but it was always an option.
That reminds me a lot of how shields worked in David Drake's Northworld trilogy: since shields were an impervious barrier, it was just as impossible to shoot out of them as to shoot into them. So the tech was synced with the gun of the person using the shield so that when trigger was starting to be pulled, it would open a hole in the shield just large enough for the bullet. But that also meant that if someone was watching (and had a computer analyzing everything), they could counter-fire right through that hole and hit the person inside the shield.
The failed experiments on ftl is also one of thebthings that makes the PDA works só well too.
Sounds like the Galaxy Gun from star wars legends.
If anything, just the sound of the drive running in Homeworld is enough for me.
@@mementomori7825 I actually go as far as to state that superweapons were so common long, long ago that they left a trail of destroyed systems in the galaxy known as "Dead Space" (No relation to the game) where there is no life and the alien race is too afraid to venture to from the destruction their ancestors made.
"In the middle of my backswing!"😂
Back in 1990 there was a short-run (just three issues) comic book series from Innovation called _Celestial Mechanics_ which featured a form of FTL named "The Semantic Loophole Drive."
The idea was an exploit of "nothing can go faster than light" where the drive contained a small area of literally nothing, and would achieve FTL speeds by accelerating that "nothing".
lol
Special mention goes to the Traveller universe's jump drives. The only thing that sets them apart is that each jump takes a week (regardless of range) and uses 10% of the ship's volume in liquid hydrogen per pcs. But from a very simple set of mechanics, they've done 50 years of world building to figure out how interstellar cultures evolve around the limitations of the system.
I’m hoping Starburst from Farscape is on here. It’s cool the idea that not only does a spacefaring creature travel faster than light, but it does better than a machine can (if I’m remembering the lore)
With the downside of it being fairly random
Yeah slipping into a 2 dimensional space is great and all, the only downside is not even the pilot will know where exactly the ship will end up.
Farscape was very vague with it's lore, just handwaving it with alien terminology and it being beyond modern understanding
@@EvGamerBETA thats what made it so alien, loved it.
they introduced a spaceliving hyperspace using giant whale thing with tentacles in star wars rebels - so that is a part of the new canon
Missing these on your list
the babylon 5 has 2 (3) different systems it seems like - the jump gates we see in the shows (that also can be generated by powerfull enough ships), the "updated version" that can be seen in one movie and the thirdspace that are basicly jumping in a other dimesion discovered like 10 000 years ago by the vorlons whom later realised that it was a bad idea...
Also the slipstream in Andromeda
"bad idea" is an understatement.. when the only extant species in 3rdspace was inimically telepathic and carnivorous to the point of eating anything/anyone else they encountered.
@@ZakhadWOW it just makes you wonder what other things Lyta did refer to in the end scenes. Also i didnt want to "spoil" a 20-ish year old movie as it is worth seening if you havnt seen it :)
Historical point - the Mass Effect...mass effect seems to be a riff on Doc Smith's inertailess drive from his Lensman series. In those books, when a vessel engages its Bergenholm generators, all mass loses inertia; this allows its thrusters to move and maneuver at faster-than-light speeds, limited only by the interstellar medium. Smith had the smarts to think about one ramification of this system: when the drive is disengaged, the mass of the ship (and everything and everyone within it) revert to the vectors and momentum they had when the drive was engaged. So, you either plotted approaches to your destination that allow you to safely shed your intrinsic speed and vector, or you needed hotshot pilots to wrestle your ship into orbit or a landing.
Oh, it was more than just that, showing how much Smith considered it. Two ships that started in different locations could meet and exchange material and personnel, which was fine as long as both ships remained inertialess, but as soon as someone turned off the Bergenholm, Very Bad Things happened. The end result was that ships had rooms where small items that were sufficiently tough and packed in sufficient padding could be placed, the room itself structurally isolated from the rest of the ship by absurdly strong shock absorbers. You placed the item in the room, locked the door, stood back, turned off the generators, and waited until what sounded and felt like a herd of rampaging elephants stopped and then you could safely remove the item, which now had the same inertial state as the rest of the ship. Since trying that with people would only result in fine red mist and possibly chunky salsa being left, ship to ship transfers required really good pilots and a lot of time to pull off in order to match inertial states before someone could transfer.
@@keith6706 QX, ace! I didn't have time to get into all that detail, but by Klono's carballoy claws, I'm glad someone else knew what I referred to!
Honorable mention to Battletech. The K-F drive, or Kearny-Fuchida drive, is similar in function to the ones on Battlestar Galactica- charge times, instant point to point teleportation, etc. But it had a hard cap limit of around 30 or so LY for each jump before the batteries had to recharge, which normally happened via use of solar sails. Near constant warfare has eliminated all but a fraction of jump-capable spacecraft, so now the precious few that remain are guarded jealously by almost all major powers in the 'Inner Sphere'.
One of the most memorable to me types comes from a teen semihard russian sci-fi from 90's.
They have mumbojumbo wormhole that to outside viewer operates the same as "printer" teleporters of Star Trek. However as it's a pulse system, it has some weird offshoots that one can make. For example you may be limited in size of your cargo by diameter of two receivers... but nothing stops you from putting them kilometers apart from each other and sending giant blocks. Or on another note another civilization found a broken device, haven't figured how to properly copy it, but were able to prolong the pulse to 6 seconds. So how do they send a lot of cargo through? They treat space between dishes as gate and aim maglev/railgun through. And since portal doesn't have to be stationary on the other side, they make it move so that cargo arrives as stationary. So that to outside viewer it looks like Homeworld drive.
What's the name of it?
@@caav56 if I recall right, the book in question is Долг Перед Видом. As I've said, obscure 90's sci-fi.
I'm a fan of the Tachyon Drive from Odyssey One, a very awesome book series. All the matter in a ship is charged into high energy tachyons with just enough energy to get them to their destination and the ship reaches the target if all the math was done correctly. The way the books interact with the logical use of such a system is very cool
and probably the most disturbing FTL around, witnessing your ship disintegrate before your very eyes and the transition sickness on the other end.
@@adrianburchell8075 Sounds a lot like the Battletech universe K-F Drive. You spend days or even weeks in normal space travelling to a Jumpship, which has spent the last couple of weeks charging up its drive, clamp onto the outside and it jumps almost instantly to the destination system, where you unhook and spend days in normal space getting to your destination. Arrival in-system is often accompanied by severe nausea.
It is really an interesting drive.
And not the only one which allowed fast travel.
Also interesting the general setup with the technical stagnation of the bigger players and then a new one shows up and all they can do is wonder :D
Or shorter:
We need to hit harder? Well, more energy it is.
Odyssey/Humanity: Efficiency? Ever heard of that?
My favorite FTL is from a little web comic called "Outsider." It's a jump drive, but I like it because the creator has developed a ton of rules about how it works and various ways it can go wrong, like ending up jumping into the center of a star or bouncing off of or breaking through real space and never being seen again.. Also, Wahammer's Warp is pretty cool, because it's Hell.
Yep, outsider is a great niche web comic
Too bad the writer rarely releases new material
@@hoominbeeing A new page just came out yesterday. But yes, your right.
Good episode. I'm a fan of Moya and her Starburst, in Farscape. Not so much as a technical thing, but as a way of making it integral to the plot, and making the ship a character. ..... also.... Muppets.
For all the Final Space fans out there, light fold drive is the superior FTL drive!
YEAHHH
The drop drive from season 2 was pretty cool, no idea how it works
the Singh-Jenkins Relay from Sunless Skies is just perfect as a steampunk warp gate. It clicks, clunks and hisses dramatically as it dials in your destination like an old rotary phone, and then throws you through the gaps left in spacetime left by some ancient burrowing worm-god. If you're very unlucky you might brush up against it on your trip.
Thank god someone knows the Fallen London games.
Wave Motion Engine from Space Battleship Yamato.
I loved the original series (Americanized Star Blazers), in season two, surrounded by Gamilons, they execute a short warp out of the trap, and slam into Leader Desslok's command ship, knowing the other ships won't fire on them.
Then they attack splitting into multiple groups, and board the enemy ship.
Such a great episode, Battlestar Galactica used the same strategy in Daybreak part 1
Speaking of ftl, I've always wanted someone to go into detail about how the Jump Drives from Space Engineers work. If I'm not mistaken, they were put in the game to shorten the time it takes to travel to other planets. I would say that they mirror Battlestar Galactica the most in that you set coordinates and hit a Jump button. But, in terms of flair (I guess), their function differs.
Edit: I would say that their main drawback is that they ignore relativity entirely. I've seen people say that the Jump Drive is impossible (in terms of ftl systems, at least) because it's instant. It's not so much ftl as it is simply ignoring physics altogether.
I personally love the use of fixed larger then ships drive networks, it looks cool and gives the setting a natural limit of how far you can go.
Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century used fixed points in space called stargates to travel vast distances as well in 1979
It also raises questions that can have interesting answers, like how they built the starship-sized gate network in the first place if you need a gate at both ends.
Exactly what the answer is will depend on the setting, of course, but getting answers to questions like that - and then doing interesting things with that knowledge - is what a good story should aim for.
@@tba113well, it actually can be very trivial. Most settings I've encountered explain such things as built by some specialised frontier expeditions. It is not necessary to be an epic story itself, however. Like, you do not necessarily have to endure and overcome unfathomable hardships to build, let's say, a railroad or an elevator. Their destinations can be normally accesible by less complex, but less effective means, like walking uphill or driving off-road, still nowhere near fancy, and adding mechanization which makes such travel faster and cheaper is just a technical task. So that said, it depends on author's will to implement struggle or not. It can be a story of itself, like in Interstellar, or it can be an important, yet rather passive world detail, like in B5, Expanse or EVE, or it can be a crucial point of a larger concept, like in Hyperion Cantos.
personally I really enjoyed the different FTL systems in the 'Eridani series' by C.G. William (first book in the series is 'Species C1764') and how the story centers around the benefits and downsides of the different systems
(spoilers for the book series start here, I do suggest you go read it)
So the humans in the story have an FTL drive that uses large antimatter detonations to punch through reality, leading to near instantaneous jumping between destinations. The main evil alien empire has a FTL drive that requires tachyon beacons as destinations to jump between systems, and the travel is also slower (taking hours to days to travel between systems).
The empire has been slowly expanding, by sending the tachyon beacons out at sublight speeds to systems, and then once they arrive they can finally begin colonization efforts. It's mentioned that the empire is very very old, but even then they've only really taken over a single arm of the milky way galaxy. The entire story is about the empire trying to get the human antimatter FTL drive to be able to expand and colonize at a thus far unprecedented rate. It should be noted here that the empire's tech surpasses humanity's by a lot, especially in combat.
My favorite bit has to be at the end of the first book in the series where the frigate Yamato is staying in rear guard as the remnants of humanity are trying to escape the alien ship 'singer'. The Yamato is one of 2 ships in the entire fleet that's trying to escape, which is capable of FTL. but due to the situation becoming dire, Yamato has to stay behind as others escape. And then the Yamato starts doing tiny jumps around the enemy, trying to conserve it's antimatter for as many jumps as possible, making sure to engage the singer from it's flank where it had been wounded earlier in battle. So whilst the singer is trying to get it's guns on target, Yamato is just buzzing around it peppering it with shells up until the Yamato decides to use it's last antimatter reserves to try and jump directly into the singer in a final kamikaze strike.
I realize my description doesn't do the scene justice, but just trust me, go read it. the first book is on amazon kindle, but all of the books thus far in the series are also available on reddit on r/HFY for free
I'm currently reading through The Lost Fleet and it has a pretty neat, albeit basic, FTL system. Or rather systems, because there's 2 in use. It's basically Stellaris, with the old school method being system to system jumps through defined jump points in a distant orbit around each star, and the newer Hypernet which is just gateways.
with an optional nova scale bomb as an unexpected bonus
But what's the strange lights in hyperspace?
@@rwill156 The spirits of the ancestors, aka the living stars.
Great series.
For a difficult FTL system that's also a variety of weapons, a good example is in an old sci fi novel called *The Space Eater.* _Anomalous Physics_ [AP] is a branch of science/tech that basically involves messing around with the settings of the universe, changing the laws of physics.
It has a variety of effects, but some serious limitations and risk as well, to the point that the story is about trying to "convince" others not to experiment with it.
Near future Americans developed a secret wormhole program that created a _Stargate_ big enough to drive through to another habitable planet and set about colonising it. The Gate only needs facilities at one end, and the other end is a projected wormhole.
Trouble is they didn't really understand the theory and the gate destabilised when they accidentally discovered the _nullbomb,_ a perfect matter to energy WMD. Half the East Coast went up in an explosion, and the rest of the US thought it was a Russian attack and launched WW3 as a response. Europe and Africa screamed neutrality and survived.
But now it's not a nice Earth, few governments survived and the Brits only keep in power because they have special forces [the Force] that use Tissue Resurrection technology - kind of like super bacta tanks that can bring you back from the dead, even reattaching bits and growing back parts if a lot of you is missing. Most people can't survive psychologically, but those that are not vegetables after tryouts (where you are put on a killing ground with death traps until...) become super soldiers that are immune to pain (a lot of desensitisation will do that), and very experienced and _skilled_ as they have regular live firing exercises where they actually kill each other in battles and then get brought back by the very expensive fluid (there's rumours about one of the ingredients of the rNA matrix being those that failed). They are fixated on combat and also occasionally go kill crazy, but it's just a laugh for them. They are pro gamers at kill or be killed.
Anyway, four years after WW3, when labs in Britain thought, "Let's try again, but more carefully this time," the light from Alpha Centuri *going nova* arrived. Turned out the Gate destabilised 6% of stars in the universe instantly, judging by the nova lights that keep appearing over the years.
So now there's a _lot of theoretical research_ before any experiments at all at the one hidden poorly funded lab. You plan carefully before messing with the universal constants of reality.
So they've come up with a lot of weapons from AP, besides the ones that are deployed on Earth such as the Nullbomb, which has replaced nukes and made WW4 plausible if relations between Western Europe and United Africa ever deteriorate too much.
There's the Jammer which messes around with electronics just enough to make every computer crash, so no AI or Drones, nullbomb cruise missiles are piloted by mildly drugged Forcemen who aren't sure if it's a training exercise or not.
They developed a safe version of the Gate called the mini gate, it has limitations such as a energy gradient and oh *the diameter is 1.9 cm* (the housing isn't much bigger, it's just a tube a few metres long)
But it still has a lot of applications, such as the sunbeam - stick one end in a Star and the beam coming out the other end can scorch the surface of a planet in a narrow straight line or whatever target you want gone.
Then there's sticking the other end in a black hole and pinching off a bit of it, that's useful (and very deadly) if you have a remote operated minigate in space.
The minigate can also be used for FTL travel, of course, but with the limitation that anything going through it has to be less than 1.9cm in diameter. So just stick small construction robots through it and pump materials through, and you build a space ship in another system.
Of course, there is the problem of how do people travel through it? Well, remember the Force tanks and Tissue Resurrection ....?
"Stick one end in a star..."
YEEESSS!
I wanted to do that once in a game of homebrew space D&D using magic, but with a much bigger hole.
It was soft banned before I could try, because if I could do it, then our enemies could do it too.
My personal #1 has to be the warp from Warhammer 40k. The idea that FTL requires travel through a psychic dimension made of the collective thoughts of all conscious beings, and all of the extra stuff that entails such as Chaos, the 4 gods, psychers and all that, is just so cool and unique to me 😅. Added by the uncertainty when travelling through it if when you'll actually reach your location very thematically adding to the Imperium's nightmare beurocracy
Literally took “Go to hell.” In a whole different (psychic) light.
Should we understand that you actually like/love/worship the Warp? Expect a visit very soon!
The gellar field is down
It's also became more interesting when your learn that ftl travel "didnt" exist in 40k universe, basically you cant Go fazer than lightspeed, but you can travel across the Galaxy throught hell or mistic portals that were created by giant space frogs
@@sergioeduardol.carneiro8198 Inertialess drives, though. Necrons use those.
The method of intergalactic ftl travel in the Yoko Tsuno comics is pretty neat as well. Send a ginormous space station on its way millions of years ago and have it create a sort of sub/dark/somethingsomethingspace tunnel along the way. You then go into hibernation in a big sort of bulletshaped spaceship and gets fired through the tunnel to the other galaxy where you arrive at a similar space station a couple of months later.
Oh, and the way I remember it, the ship kept accelerating until about halfway when it had to start breaking. So a smidge of realism as well.
"Because anything traveling faster than light leave its energy and desintegrate... except if it travels in an environment where light has been suppressed"
So... internal coherence rather than realism. It works.
A cool thing about the frame shift drive is how it appears to interact with black holes. You can go as close as the game allows to a black hole (as you might a non-landable planet like a gas giant) and see pretty extreme lensing effects, but being close will heat you up more and more, almost as though it was a star - Since you cannot fall into the black hole, and the black hole obviously has no thermal output of its own, it's kind of implied that the FSD runs to keep your "frame" separate to the black hole so you don't die or suffer relativistic effects. The forces can be too great to maintain - attempting to approach Sag A* at the galactic centre too closely will destroy your ship via heat damage, but a small black hole is literally harmless, the safest thing that you can jump to.
By “close to the black hole”, do you mean to the event horizon or the singularity? Because if it’s the former, that’s a bit odd, given that not only would the forces at singular points an equal distance from either horizon be equal, larger black holes actually have much gentler tidal forces.
the thing about BSG ftl is that it also could be sort of weaponized, since we saw boomer jump right next to the galactica and it blew off a part of the armor just from how the space bended during the jump, and later the same happened in the final fight
which makes me think... any time the cylons borded any ship, if the bording action failed, they could just jump the heavy raider from inside the ship (or from the hull if they borded that way) and just tear the ship apart from the inside... then again if FTL didnt have this side effect they could just give every heavy raider a briefcase nuke to do the exact same thing. But i suppose that would make bording actions non-practical for the plot.
@@BBanzaj the Cylons don't weaponize their ships like that, they are shocked when even one basestar is gone. FTL requires special coordinates and calculations. One can't just jump into another ship. Otherwise Galactica would have immediately jumped into the Colony.
@@SantomPh
I said it would be used to jump out of things not into them, that needs no calculation a blind jump would be enough, but now that u mention it, cylon could just jump into things, their tech is better and they are machines, calculations is what they do best
Another fun little detail with the FTL drives in Elite: Dangerous is that both modes are consistent in that gravity wells halt their function. Going near a planet will pull a planet out of supercruise, whereas the interstellar FTL exits near the object with the greatest mass in the system - in a binary or trinary system with multiple stars, you'll end up next to whichever one has the greatest mass.
To me, it makes sense too that the only thing you can aim for over interstellar distances are the stars themselves. Hitting anything other than the gravity well of an entire system would require insane amounts of accuracy to pull off
Another detail is that capital ships overcome that limitation by using an older but more powerful drive. The "black smoke effect" is because it basically rips a hole in spacetime to transit between witchspace and normal space.
It does have some serious safety issues though, requiring very precise navigation or using beacons to avoid getting lost or coming out "wrong", so the modern FSD was developed to make space travel safer, but it isn't powerful enough to work for huge capital ships and has some limitations.
Personally my favorite FTL system is the Ring Network from the Expanse. Sure, it uses hyperspace and wormholes like a lot of FTL systems. But unlike other stories, the Expanse treats it like a *place* rather than just a handwavium way to get from point A to point B. Although you could pass through the Slowzone to go straight from one system to another, Medina Station remains firmly put there to act as both a port for 1300 worlds and as a base to control the space as a whole
there is neither hyperspace nor wormholes involved. It is a completely unique tech manipulation the RIngspace is a pocket dimension created by the builders, which was found to be harmfully impinging on the dimension of another major life form, which eventually figures out how to reach through the barrier and manipulate time/space/matter etc in our universe. The major results of that are depicted in the final 3 novels not put to screen (so far).
You appear to not fully understand the Einstein-Rosen bridge concept, which does involve a
tunneling effect, as is normally depicted in Star Trek and Stargate.
The Expanse rings arent tunnels.. they are almost closer to wounds in the dimensional barriers.. If anything is truly FTL related it is the tech that creates the ringspace and it's controlling sphere. Remember, It takes an insanely long time to traverse Sol system (ring out around orbital pla ce of Uranus) and then again an insane distance from the Ilus gate to the actual planet. THe rings appear to be placed far out near the outer third of a heliosphere, but all the planets depicted thru the materials are all int he "goldilocks" zone which varies form star to star. Ilus, Laconia, Auberon.. all are very very far in-system from where their gates are.. LITERALLY MONTHS OF TRAVEL using the Epstein drives.
@@ZakhadWOWHyperspace and tunneling are both fairly nebulous fictional sci-fi concepts with the former not based on any real science and the latter based loosely on a mathematical quirk of general relatively that, in its real life conceptualised form as things currently stand, is *proven* to not work. For all intents and purposes jumping into an alternative distinct space to travel long distances *is* hyperspace, and persisting pathways through which such jumps are a simple matter of travelling through are tunneling, because they do the same thing as those concepts in other stories. The specifics of how they do it and why that matters vary but The Expanse would be a very long way from the only story to point out harmful effects of interacting with the FTL dimension (see Halo in this very video with Slipspace getting jammed up because of causality violation)
My personal favorite is the version of Hyperspace in Babylon 5. I just love that it ships don't need an FTL drive because of the gates, and the way it is depicted in the shows as this mysterious place where strange things can happen and no one really fully understands.
like when Bester was saying that being in hyperspace for some unknown reason greatly amplified his range. so why haven't I heard of that? "because we're not cannon fodder!" gotta love Bester
the FTL system in the Black Ocean series by J.S. Morin is kind of interesting too.
it has submarine-analogies by making The Astral (their version of hyperspace) have _depth_ where the deeper you go, the faster you go, but the more pressure/forces your ship is subject to. Controlling your depth in the astral is not done by means of machines, but rather by wizards, so it introduces an adversarial relationship between science and magic.
I love the Space Fold drives from the original Macross. They generate some kind of warp bubble that sends anything inside it into FTL; When Macross first uses it, it drags an entire island, several ships, and a huge hemispherical chunk of ocean with it. There’s also time dilation when in warp, and the effects for folding, traveling, and de-folding are amazing. The first Macross’ first fold and the de-fold of the Zentradi fleet above Earth are some of the most visually impressive shots of the show, and that’s saying something!
Hyperdrives and Jump Drives in Endless Sky are also super interesting. Aside from the gameplay differences (both need your ship to come to a stop relative to the target, but the hyperdrive gives you max velocity when arriving while the jump drive doesn’t, etc.) they feel extremely different, which ties into the lore of them using totally different mechanisms (Warp vs Weft). They also have different limitations on where they can travel, further adding to their distinctiveness.
One thing I hate about space folding is that, in the RPG, you end up stranded if you sail through a rift and end up in the Three Galaxies setting, because folding doesn't work due to the presence of ley lines.
What is Weft?
@@adamofblastworks1517 Weft is going horizontal, rather than, but complementary to, warp, which is going vertical or longitudinal. They are the two basic components of the weaving process.
Nice to see Eve Online getting some love! Although you forgot about the fact they have both FTL warp drive and also Jump Drives, where they can go full Galactica and teleport to a beacon another ship lights.
The lore on that is actually fascinating, as the race that invented them would aim for a colony in a sunlight generational ship, get there 200 years later, light the beacon, and suddenly fleet happens.
All in all, a good episode, cheers mate.
So, wait, no mention of the Warp Drives from Star Trek of the Lightspeed Drives from Star Wars? Those are like the grandaddies of FTL travel. And the Warp Drive is detailed enough to where they are trying to design on in real life.
My favorite will always be my first love, Robotech and the “space folding’ point to point drive the SDF1 used in the first episode that set up the entire first Macross saga.
Personal favourite, based purely on terminology (not tech), is the “lightfold” in Final Space… just sounds so epic.
Love that it’s more a verb than a noun - ie “lightfold the ship”, not “engage the lightfold drive”
i'd say one of my favourite FTLs out there is the space bridge from transformers, especially the way it's depicted in animated
It's not technically FTL, but Arthur C Clarke had a drive in one of his later novels that was powered by zero point energy and the ship had to have a block of ice a mile wide in front of its direction of travel because it was going so fast cosmic dust and low powered radio waves were getting blue shifted into hard radiation.
One thing I've noted about the frame shift drive in Elite: Dangerous is that it doesn't matter if you are jumping 1 light year or 65 light years, the jump takes 15 seconds.
Unless your computer loads slower.
@@adamofblastworks1517 true. The few times that happens to me I chalk it up as lag on the connection to the server. My system can handle ED without effort and I have fibre optic cable internet (500 mbs) so for me, it's probably just lag. I've also had it occur and then get kicked out with an error message.
@@Rigel_Chiokis imagine getting kicked out of reality and being given an error message.
Not living in a computer simulation, but reality itself being able to crash.
@@adamofblastworks1517 like The Matrix. Yeah, that would suck.
8:16
No, it's because it sounds cool!
Homeworld invented Hyperspace ASMR.
Even without the sound here I can still hear it when I watch the clip
I play Elite Dangerous, and my favorite thing about the Frame Shift Drive is the gunshot sound when entering or exiting both supercruise or witchspace.
Every time I read witchspace I instantly have in my mind the picture of an anime where only a small amount of young girls called witches can do FTL and everyone tries to win as many of them over as possible.
Among my favorite FTL drives is that of the VHOLE engine from IXION. It's mysterious in how it functions, has different methods of both navigating and traversing what they call self-similar space with different ramifications depending on the methods (though only explored in text), and simply looks cool.
The Tau'ri went from no space presence to intergalactic ftl in less than a decade. While also defeating an interstellar empire that had existed for 8000 plus years. Earth is hilariously OP in the setting. They also have the greatest plot armour in sci-fi.
Agreed, and they actually point it out quite a few times. The fact that humans are so _stupid_ (in comparison) actually is a plot point for the Asgard quite often, as they've "evolved past the point of being capable of such primitive ideas" as... defeating an energy-absorbing enemy with _metal going really fast._ And those "primitive ideas" combined with good old _determination_ manages to fuck up and destroy a power balance that had lasted for _millenia._ Imagine if the writers of Star Trek had decided to make humans that OP in their setting... Even the Q (which the Ascended are kinda smaller-scale versions of) would probably be nervous...
"an" interstellar empire??? ... I guess that's true. and an intergalactic one. Defeated both the Gouald and the Ori. Also did huge dents to the Wraith.
to be fair, explained plot armor. first, goauld considered earth some annoying mosquito, then didnt really knew what to do with the situation, then earth got under asgard umbrella, then earth got some bogeyman superweapon, then simply placed it's foot on galactic arena. not to mention the fact that humans made their enemies very busy by actively causing chaos in galaxy
-Hyperspace
-Teleportation
-Slipstreams
-Singularity breaches
Those are my favorite methods of space travel and also there is the FTL travel, but they form a bubble around the ship to put it in a state of suspended animation while traveling through the stream.
Hyper-space jump drive, warp-drive, time pulsar gates, quantum tunneling transporter, Lorentz traversable wormholes, electromagnetic affected matrix portal, cylinder beam powered gates...are my favorites.
I really like the ftl in call of duty infinite warfare, thought it felt a bit more realistic seeing the ship slowly get more and more damaged the longer it jumped
I love the Void from Warframe. It's basically Warp from 40k, but instead of having Chaos gods in it, *it is* a Chaos god. And that's the most normal thing about it.
I feel like Vindor Verge's "Fire Upon the Deep" trilogy should both be here and not, since part of the setting there is that the speed of light/information is variable depending on how close to a large gravity well there.
It's a very cool idea that plays with the fact that we could be wrong about something as fundamental as the speed of light, and allows for speeds higher than C...if you're in certain parts of the universe.
Yes, I love "Fire upon the deep", the idea of the galaxy having different physics laws with the outermost parts permitting basically literal magic and the innermost parts being so hostile they can't support even the functioning of the brain, it's very cool.
Spellcheck (for the convenience of anyone googling): Vernor Vinge (pronounced vinj-ee).
One of my favorite types of FTL comes from Neal Asher's Polity Series'. The series has a form of FTL called Underspace or U-Space that ships dive into in a similar sense to a submarine diving under the sea. i find these drives to be fascinating because of how in the story U-space, while primarily being a form of FTL, also has a myriad more applications like data storage, energy storage, instantaneous teleportation and can also be integrated with other technologies in the universe to transmogrify and magnify those technologies though how this stuff is applied in the books is spoilers. In Universe there's also an interesting barrier to entry for the more advanced uses of underspace making the more wild applications very uncommon and a fascinating thing to see. I absolutely adore those books and I'm always disappointed that I never hear anybody talking about them because they're really really good.
I really liked the curvature propulsion engine in Remembrance of Earths Past book trilogy by Liu Cixin. I like how it’s based on real scientific evidence and has a major plot point in the final book because it reduces the speed of light in area is has traveled through effectively making a massless black hole. I liked the application of the engine to be used as a defensive weapons to protect the solar system by shattering any photoids that hit the barrier.
I know you mentioned Eve, but I really, really liked the jump drives in that game. The effects were really nice, and there was this whole logistical effort if you wanted to use them over any great distance - not only the systems you would jump to (space actually having a geography such that often gate to gate routes using normal warp drive were way different from jump routes), but also getting a cyno beacon to the systems you were going to jump to. Felt like actually navigating a big ship.
I once took a Buzzard 25 jumps to then bridge a Falcon trough using a blops. To then jump my carriers there. 25 jumps with gates was less then seven light years with the jump drive
I always thought of a neat concept for FTL, this machine creates a bubble then stretch every particle wave function inside of it in a line all at once until it reaches the destination, then the machine contracts everything in the destination forcing everything inside the field to show at that place again, it is called a caterpillar maneuver. It could be done in small steps or in a single leap.
That sounds rather like the FTL system in the "Bill The Galactic Hero" books by Harry Harrison. It's years since I read them, but I think the colloquial name was the "rubber drive" or "elastic drive".
@@tamsinp7711 It was Bloater Drive in Bill:tGH
@@StrewthStoatPirate That's the one!
@@tamsinp7711 I took a look and they're very similar, but instead of stretching the gaps between atoms like the bloater drive, my idea is to stretch the wave functions itself in a single direction, then retract it. Making the probability of the materials show up at the destination 100% like an enlarged quantum tunneling.
Visually I always liked the Babylon 5 jumpgates/jumppoints and hyperspace there. It's not the usual blob of light, but an actual corridor with depth. And with unusual colors.
Plus the fact that, aside from the Old Races, no one else can properly navigate it so you have to use beacons to guide you and woe betide those that went "Off The Beacon"
As well as the option for someone to go into Hyperspace and they could just hold up there if they wanted.
@@danielseelye6005 the Shadows, being ancient when even the Vorlons were young (Delenn's story) dont even need gates.. they have mastered energy phasing. And we saw that the Vorlons have the ability to mainpulate the physics of Hyperspace dimension to hide their giant ass fleet. no one would have known ANYTHING if the White Star 2.0 hadnt detected them with it's own Vorlon elements.
These videos always pop up just in time for me to get in the mood to run my Traveller sessions. Just... *chef's kiss*
A little known anime call Lost Universe uses something call a Phase Drive, which has unique enter/exit animations depending on drive/ship's manufacturer. Basically a visual short hand to tell which ship is in which faction. Not only that, the unique hero and villain ships all have different animation, some swift, some menacing. The FTL system can also be weaponized. The hero ship has a weapon that shoot entrance gate of this FTL, forcing everything within the 'explosion' radius to be ripped into FTL. At one point, when the hero ship's Phase Drive was damaged, they used this weapon to engulf themselves to escape the battle, flinging themselves to a random point in space.
Aww, no honorable mention for Ludicrous Speed? Inconceivable!
Some of my favourite FTLs not mentioned are: Warp from Star Trek but especially when, in TNG, everyone was forced to start using lower warp speeds because Sub-space was being torn up and causing, or would cause very soon if nothing be done, issues for everyone using it. Star Wars Hyperspace when it was, or still is not entirely sure what is currently considered canon in regards to it currently, that you had to map out and follow hyperspace lanes for any major galactic traveling otherwise you risk having a lot of issues, and while traveling not using them would be possible the danger and difficulty would increase the further away from mapped/ known hyperspace lanes you go. Warp in Starcraft is cool because of how each of the three major groups use it differently and it looks different for each one: For Terrans it is mainly just a standard sci-fi ship based FTL with them also being able to do short jumps to get around obstacles in space, the Zerg use Leviathans to travel in space and they are just giant living Zerg that can generate their own FTL corridors, and the Protoss are masters of Warp tech, being able to warp in entire armies and/or armadas on a whim as long as there are pylons nearby, and even then they can warp in pylons as well either by drones manually doing it or the Spear of Adun doing it. And there is also just the absolute craziness that is The Warp in Wh40k. Also not sure how much of it counts as FTL but the Void from Waframe and its various uses for travel in the Sol/ Origin system is very cool too.
star wars is not sci-fi
@@bobgabriels8456exactly, it’s fantasy
This is why I love this channel. Sci Fi nerds have somewhat forgotten stargate, and they talk about trek or wars only.
Auto-like for mentioning Elite: Dangerous! You guys should do more ship breakdowns from that game. Also seeing some great ideas in the comments, mighr be enough for a pt 2 of this list
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is a book instead of a movie. It had one of the most unique FTL methods. The FTL engine worked better the closer to absolute zero the temperature became.
The warp drive from Space Battleship Yamato? Made possible the wave motion engine, it's described as riding a wave through space-time, as if surfing it.
Really good episode discussing the various FTL drives!!
I also share your enthusiasm for the Stargate:SG1 forms of FTL travel.
Really nicely done - Thanks for this!!
Great overview of the FTL methods used in lots of sci fi stories. Keep up the great work!
I think a overlooked Method is the one used in the "old man's war" series wich is another type of instantaneous relocation, although to another universe. Which is an exact mirror image of the one the ships originates from, except maybe the position of a single electron.
And another Typ is the gravity based FTL method used in the Honor Harrington series although it isn't worked out as much.
Honestly, I'm a sucker for anything that allows navigation and plotting a course in FTL, so things like Babylon 5 hyperspace are always charming to me. That's the kind of FTL I'm using in my own novel.
Woe betide those that go "Off the Beacon" 😉
David Drake's RCN Series might appeal to you in that regard. A ship spreads out sails of a special fabric which responds to a handwaved kind of radiation to enter what's variously called the Matrix or sponge space. Then, a skilled astrogator can look around at the Matrix's local patterns and determine that adjusting the position of the sails in particular ways will increase (or decrease) the ship's speed relative to normal space. (They can't change course while in the Matrix, though -- only alter how fast they're going.) Astrogation is at least as much of an art as a science, and Daniel Leary, one of the two main characters, is among the finest astrogators alive, able to cut not just hours but DAYS off the time to reach certain destinations. The second book mentions him having reduced the travel time on one route to four days less than what was supposedly the best time mathematically POSSIBLE.
I came for The Orville callout & you delivered!
I've just discovered your channel & so far I'm loving your videos so I've dropped you a sub!
I love the stargates as well because it almost never feels like they're broken or misbehaving for no reason. You can break the warp drive on a Federation ship by stubbing your toe on the wrong bulkhead, the plot uses them liberally as a tension device but never really gives a good explanation or for why they are malfunctioning nor explains what will be required in order to repair them, they just have to be offline for a while, then, after the required time is elapsed, poof! it's better and you can carry on.
Stargate doesn't often do that, the gates nearly always work as expected, and when they don't, that's a focus point of the episode, with the plot revolving around why and how to fix it. You always know the rules and so you can relate better to the story because it's a shock to you just as it is to the characters when the iris is somehow in danger of being breached, or when the 38 minute time limit is reached but the gate doesn't shut down. Etc. etc. You wonder if you can just physically break a gate and what would happen if you did, that's explored in universe. You think, what happens if you're halfway in when the gate shuts off, the characters get to to wonder the same thing and discover that it would be a very bad day. The operation of the gates is shown in pretty clear detail so when something is amiss, the audience gets to share the emotions of the characters because we know what they were expecting to happen and we know that it's going to be a big problem to resolve.
In contrast, Star Trek's warp drive is just this glowing tower that breaks down any time the ship is outmatched or needs to escape from somewhere quickly and there's rarely any exploration of why it is broken or how it will be repaired, the captain just demands that it be repaired and the engineer yells about it then a few minutes later, it's working again and the crew can continue on as if nothing happened. They will never discuss how to overcome similar circumstances in the future, there will be no mention of how shocking it was that the drive failed in this particular way and there's no progression of the technology or evolution in the story to account for discovered shortcomings or exploits.
Event Horizon is an example of what traveling through the Warp is like in Warhammer 40k.
Without a Gellar Field and a Navigator that is. ;D
The Japanese novel and animation series Crest of the Stars has a two-dimensional hyperspace (planar space) accessed through naturally-occurring gates called sords. Ships and torpedoes generate little pockets of 3d space so they're not crushed, but you can't shoot a beam through planar space. So a lot of the military action looks a lot like wet navy warfare with cruise missiles and point-blank gunfire when two ships' pocket spaces overlap. A lot of the strategy revolves around controlling sords.
man I havent seeen that series in 20 years.... only vague memories floatig through my brain
I love that setting too. In the settings where FTL travel uses folding space - taking a shortcut from point A to B outside the usual three dimensional space, sci-fi authors usually prefer to increase the number of dimensions, taking the concept of "extra dimension axis to travel along" quite literally - and this is harder to imagine for our poor threedimensional brains. Two-dimensional space is the very opposite of hard to imagine. I also love how planar space coordinates have zero correlation with our space - which allows for changing the location of the sord - literally loading it to the cargo bay - without changing the location of the point it opens to in Plane space.
Honestly COD Infinite warfare had a decent FTL drive concept, next to being able to detect the ship coming seconds before it does and knocking out any nearby electronics for a moment. And also the fact that there is an accuracy margin and a certain chance of failure with every jump made. And also how it started out with the trips taking weeks and being shortened as the technology behind it advanced. The game may have been average at best but it still had a decent amount of attention put into the details of everything in it, the suits, the weapons, the fighter space jets, and even the ships themselves.
Probably just because I'm a fanboy, but I have to give a shout-out to the gravitic impeller drives of the Honorverse and the method of rigging them into multiple hundred mile diameter "sails" for hyperspace FTL. There was a lot of thought that went into the implications of the accelerations allowable with it in realspace, the semi-useful weirdness of the drive field geometries, and what having fields of thousands to millions of chaotic gees did to matter trying to pass through them, especially for a series that's mostly Admiral Nelson in Space until much later in the books.