<![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas - io9 Comments]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas - io9 Comments]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I like books that take the time to really explain how their FTL drives work. The details of what is and isn't possible in terms of interstellar travel would make a huge difference. Snce FTL is made up technology, you can have fun with it...

In Melissa Scott's "Nine Twelths of Heaven" series hyperspace is the Jungian collective unconscious (or Plato's real of ideals? I'm not sure) and is filled with primal archetypes, and navigated by tarot cards.

The one thing I like about the psychic "jaunting" idea is that it lets you give interstellar travel to someone who isn't that advanced. This could explain the often implausible "space barbarians" we keep seeing. For some reason this ability is only given to advanced races in sci fi. I like the idea of stumbling on a primitive race capable of psychic FTL, and getting an interstellar civilizatin without knowing how it works...

In Warpath we learned American Indians reached other plants by canoe...seriously.

EdLincoln

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I'm really surprised that even though you've included Yamato, you've failed to mention the SDF-1 from Macross/Robotech. Space folding is FANTASTIC!

SayAhh

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @fistrodisco: "Gunbuster" sounds very familiar, I think that was it. Thanks! That was driving me crazy.

@JaggyGT: that wasnt it - but it sounds cool also - so now I have another thing to look up. Thanks also!

Im off to bittorr^H^H^H^H^H^H^H amazon.com to go track these down.

blorp

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @blorp: You might be talking about Voices From a Distant Star. A highschool girl goes into space and pilots a ... mech? and as she goes farther out into the solar system, her messages take longer and longer to get to Earth where a brief romance interest is receiving her text messages, pretty much putting his personal life on hold as he ages and she stays the same. Her last message has her carrier ship leaving the solar system by some means of warp and so she wouldn't be able to send him any more messages. It's a very good emotionally provoking short film (~45 minutes).

JaggyGT

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Chiper: I just noticed that the "slipstream" effect in Andromeda, looks a lot like the opening of Dr. Who.

RAHfanboy

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @lazyeight: "For comfort, take your whole city with a spindizzy, 'Okie-style'"

James Blish if I recall, "Cities in Flight." A lot of great economic theory and sociology worked into the centuries long plot.

Not really relevant, but another great one of his was "The Seedling Stars."

RAHfanboy

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Gunbuster had some cool FTL psuedo-science in it.

I think the most likely is the option seen in Babylon 5.

PsycheDiver

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Andromeda used a form of slip-space drive. Ships would use sub-light thrusters to reach points in space where an opening to slipspace could be made. The ship then had a violent roller coaster ride as the pilot controlled which slip-tunnels they would take and decide when to exit the system.

All tunnels weren't connected, however, so sometimes the ship would have to spend a day or more moving at sub-light to reach the next opening.

Chiper

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @arachnophilia: Wow, excellent facts! I stand corrected.

Kevin Kelly

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I was always kind of impressed with the bistromathic drive...

SomeAudioGuy

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]>

[sots.rorschach.net]
What, no Smoots drive? I think sci-fi in general calls it a Stutter drive, but I always remember there was a Marvel imprint sci-fi series, where someone invented a stutter drive and called it The Smoots Drive.

Basically, teleportation is achieved, but not over great distances, just fractional ones. But by cycling the ports over and over, you have intertialess travel where the speed is limited only by your power source and technology's ability to cycle. Plus, no relativistic effects! Whee!

The most recent use was in the video game, Sword of the Stars - they called it stutter-warp / flicker drive. And for fun comparison, the game had one warp-drive (a la Star Trek), two sub-space/jump drives (a la B5), the flicker drive, and one race that had to slow hump at near light speeds, but once there could set up a teleport gate (a la... I guess somewhere between Stargate and BSG - BSG teleporting, but through Stargate style gate points.)

castewar

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Sorry I accidentally posted the pre spellchecker version.

reddingofish

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> First off I think David Brin got it right with e-space. He's realy smart so if anyone is going to get it right he could.
Myself not being that smart but I can fix your computer feel that FTL travel will be a lot like faster than sound travel. The ship will reach the speed of light and there will be a big flash, like a sonic boom but with light. Then the ship will be going faster than light so it will be invisible but so will the stars to the ocupants of the ship. It will look like the first Star Trek from the first movie on without the stars streaking by in the windows or like BSG. That would also explain why astronimers have never seen a spaceship traveling around the galaxy.


reddingofish

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> All we get is the picture from 'Event Horizon'?? That's probably the best part :)

The Stargate used seven chevrons, not nine. Sometimes eight in the series for long jumps (a 'distance' coordinate 'kinda like an area code').

@Seth L: That would be "Think Like a Dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly (which won a Hugo award)... and @z3rks: The Outer Limits adaptation was lame and left out the most important parts of the story (what a surprise).

Glad to see props to Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination as it's better than anything King.

I would have posted this this morning but Vista and Firefox are still fighting.

doctor_cos

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]>

"...There was this anime movie where a girl has to save earth - and it involves flying around space to complete some missions at near lightspeed..."

That sounds like "Gunbuster - Aim for the Top!", an incredibly superb mix of hard sci-fi/sports anime/romance miniseries:

[en.wikipedia.org]

fistrodisco

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Star Trek's warp drive is a bit of a Heechee thing itself: when a ship produces a subspace bubble, her apparent mass diminishes too (submerged into subspace near completely).

I read somewhere about a SF short story in which people build a hyperspace drive, only to discover that hyperspace travel is actually slower than realspace travel :D

fistrodisco

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @arachnophilia:
That was an AWESOME post! I totally missed that.

Bow and tip o' the hat to you.

Thanks!!


nygenxer

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I liked the system in David Drake's RCN Series, starting with _With the Lightnings_.

Ships would speed up with relativistic drives in normal space to gain momentum. Then using electrical sail arrays deployed around the ship be able to slip into side-real universes with different basic physical constants - like the speed if light, mass, etc.

The trick was plotting which side-real universe to slip into and how long to stay before slipping back into real space.

So you get the same basic 'jump' drive issues where 99% of the users use a navicomp that runs along pre-discovered routes. Then you have people naturally talented at astro-navigation who can better the computer or plot new paths.

You get your helping of 'odd' things happing in side-real space as you end up interacting with stuff in that universe.

For in-system, you where stuck with normal relativistic drives and dealing with inertia. Made for interesting space fleet combat strategies.

vesperi01

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I remember "Jaunting" freaking me out as a kid when I read it - Imagine having to suffer through all that *time* locked in ones head!

blorp

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> There was this anime movie where a girl has to save earth - and it involves flying around space to complete some missions at near lightspeed - so that during the movie all her friends and family would get older after each of her missions while she stayed young. I *think* it ends with her diving dramatically into a black hole, with time slowing the closer she gets to the center. I cant remember the title (or even if Im getting the facts right) - does this sound familiar to anyone?

blorp

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Somebody just mentioned it: farcasting and freecasting from Dan Simmons Hyperion universe.

Of course to freecast you have to imbibe the blood of Aenea or someone who already imbibed her blood. And you feel any pain you inflict on another sentient being, but I'd give up (most) violence to be able to instantly travel to my favorite Manhattan deli from anywhere in the universe!

namanintx

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Seth L: I believe that was the mode of travel used in Ilium by Dan Simmons (for one of the story threads at least). Basically the people stepped into a "teleporter", were scanned and recreated somewhere else.

A couple other ways come to mind that I'm surprised no one's mentioned:

David Weber's Honorverse series uses a 'Warshawski Sail' to ride on gravity currents that allow ships to travel in different bands of hyperspace.

John Ringo's Beyond the Looking Glass has an interesting theory based upon Higgs-Boson particles that open portals to other locations.

One of his other series (The Posleen War one) mentions that there are two possible methods of FTL travel - one involved 'boring' through space that has a greater inherent chance of not coming out on the other side; the other requires moving to certain locations that allow it to be safer ... I don't remember too many details on that one unfortunately.

JaggyGT

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @VoxExMachina:
Since my earlier comments never seem to have arrived (like Sutekh, they will be forever approaching) here I go again:

Cordwainer Smith's "Lady Who Sailed the Soul" was a solar sail ship that seemed to have been contemporaneous or slightly later than the planoforming ships.

But as the story shows, to sail a lightjammer requires the pilot to be slowed down or even periodically "hibernated". NOT FTL at all.

The Wave Motion Drive used a technology that required a stirring opening song:
saraba chikyuu yo
tabida tsufune was
uchuu senkan YAMATO!

And I felt at the time that the wave motion gun --needing to build up pressure until it suddenly discharged down the central tube of the ship--to be age-inappropriate.

My other thought was a story (perhaps by C T Cherry) about a traveler who intentionally walks and loses himself in the forest until he is on another planet. "LSI"-"lightspeed independent travel.

EmperorofMongo

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> The trouble with teleportation is that it would spend years in the court system, as it looks like an assisted suicide machine.

I make another vote for the Tesseract from a Wrinkle in Time. Why move, when you can fold space to make your destination come to you?

[en.wikipedia.org]

splig

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> As awesome as the FTL might be, I'm scared shitless about the idea to be turned inside out through gravitation-bending jumps.

Klappstuhl

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I think the way people travels instantly in the books Ilium/Olympos - Fax portals - and the Hyperion Cantos - Farcaster - could be similar to the stargates... but when you think that faxing required one to die and being recreated at the other end, maybe not so similar!

And what about the Encom laser being able to send you to Hawaii ? :o)

ionreflex

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> How about Steven R Donaldsons Gap series. The "Gap drive" needed you to be moving really fast before you engaged the drive. The faster your momentum prior to hitting the gap, the father out you would re-appear.

There are also a whole slew of near light speed drives like the one in Robert L Forwards Rocheworld. A spaceship shaped like an umbrella (hundreds of miles in diameter) is hit with a "solar LASER" assembled on Mercury. The photon pressure is enough to push the ship to near light speed velocities.

FrankenPC

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> i do believe the 'jaunt' from Stephen King comes from 'jaunte' in Alfred Bester's 'the stars my destination' though interstellar jaunteing isn't possible by anyone except the protagonist Gully Foyle and he does it by manipulating time as a well.

coldthing

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Jesse Mrozowski: It's one of my favorites as well. And, of course, Jaunting is FTL in that book as well, since it's instantaneous (including when Gully Foyle jaunts interstellar distances at the novel's end). And it's driven by nothing more than basic human biology!

Ubik2501

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Pohl's gateway universe Heechee: FTL via mass elimination, I think.

Piers Anthony, Macroscope: Planets get squished while its inhabitants, drilled into its side like a burrowing tuber were made into primordial soup, then rebuilt.

Heinleins, Slipstick Libby's ftl in methusala's children: Some magic thing he came up with at the last second.

More as I think of em...

cdibona

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Pohl's gateway universe Heechee: FTL via mass elimination, I think.

Piers Anthony, Macroscope: Planets get squished while its inhabitants, drilled into its side like a burrowing tuber were made into primordial soup, then rebuilt.

Heinleins, Slipstick Libby's ftl in methusala's children: Some magic thing he came up with at the last second.

More as I think of em...

cdibona

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @CyberKender: I was going to say something about the KK drive, but was daunted by the task of having to explain it. I'm tired, and my office is out of coffee.

braak

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I'm rather surprised that no one has mentioned Gay Deceiver's drive from Number of the Beast. Interstellar and interdimentional all in one.

On the other hand, I'm not so surprised no one's mentioned Alan Dean Foster's solution to interstellar travel. In his Commonwealth books, people travel using the KK drive. It projects the gravity well of a small star in front of the ship, which then pulls the ship forward, thus pulling the projector forward, etc. etc. After a certain speed is reached, the ship can shift into Space-Plus to achieve full FTL travel. Not necessarily scientifically sound, but I always thought it had a certain elegance to it.

CyberKender

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @physik: Re: run on sentences.

I consider myself served.

@RAHfanboy: No god doesn't necessarily mean no soul, but then you have to examine the definition of soul. You could say that the software running on your hardware is your soul, and when its gone there's no lingering imprint.

If thats the case i can dig that. Or you could say that theres some kind of hither to unknown quantum imprint on the fabric of space time that keeps going after the physical matter decomposes.. spirits, ghosts, what have you. In that case i don't necessarily buy into that.

capntim

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Signal: well i think that happens continuosly to everyone of us, our cells are constantly dieing and being replaced by not so well made copies. probably u will have to ask your self, is that you?

pharago

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @FruitSmack: Indeed. Now, I find that concept pretty neat :-D

jbq

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @scifijones1974: no he was a dead echo.

The only time traveler in the movie was Donnie, everyone else he saw who interacted with him was a echo of his alter-reality self.

And technically Donnie wasnt much of a time traveler either but rather the engine which kills him in the end is. All Donnie did was open the rift to send the engine back in time so that the events could unfold.

There is a lot of speculation as to if Donnie knew he was going to die in the end, or if he just felt like he woke up from a bad dream and without Frank now warning him (since that future was prevented by Donnies rift making) he ended up getting killed.

Falconfire

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @cognitive: An AI, or Agent Cormac.

Rasselas

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> [home.texoma.net]

Marcus

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @strider_mt2k:
There is a another from 'Known Space'-The Outsiders had an inertialess drive(so did Andy Libby in RLH's 'Methuselah's Children'). No-one had bought it from them as it was too pricey


lazyeight

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Don't forget about the Prof. Farnsworth's Planet Express Ship.

The engines don't move the ship, the ship stays in one place and the engines move the universe around it.

:D

aaron

FruitSmack

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> For comfort, take your whole city with a spindizzy, 'Okie-style'.

lazyeight

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I'd do away with the ship, and just Wrinkle Time.

andrew60647

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Isn't the Interzone where everyone goes to get addicted to mutant bug semen?

I'd think that'd be counter-productive for space travel.

braak

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> How about "Frank"'s time-travelling method in DONNIE DARKO? He was from the future, right?

[www.topsyturvy.us]

scifijones1974

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Grey_Area: You use hyperspace, I use the interzone. What we need is more serious consideration in physics for the multiverse. You have to think that something is at least possible before you can develope theories that will allow us to access and use the "above" and "below" dimensions.

I liked Eric Nylund's hand-held transporter. It transported you instantaneously (as Bear used with Moving Mars), and ran off the momentum of the spinning galaxey.

Jeff-Minor

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> The FTL drives in BSG are aptly named: if something is traveling faster than the speed of light, you won't be able to see it. It just looks like it's teleporting.

Gyrus

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Then there's one of the more notorious and outre methods from Norman Spinrad's, The Void Captain's Tale. Interstellar flight spacecraft are powered by specially trained women whose orgasms power the ships.

knyne

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @deckard97: Huh. It'd suck if you used the hyperdrive to push a space ship into a "hypospace," where the speed of light was actually slower than it was here.

I'm not sure what kind of a use there'd be for something like that.

braak

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Larry Niven, also developed the idea of a "teleportation drive" in one of his rambling essays on what might happen if... If I recall it correctly, he assumes that you need a 'sending' device at one of you hop and a 'receiving' device at the other. If you put the sending device at back end of the space ship and the receiving end at the front and then jumped, the length of the ship would be instantly be transported. You've only moved the length of the ship, but you've done it *instantly*! Do it again! The rest, including speculation about time dilation and other fun stuff, was left as an exercise for the student...

schwap23

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I rather like the Alderson Drive from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye.

Basically between any two close stars there is a line of gravitational weakness (called a tramline) upon which you can (using the Alderson Drive) create an artificial wormhole allowing instantaneous travel. The caveats being:
1. Not all stars are close enough. Some (i.e. the Mote System) may in fact have one or no tramlines.
2. Even if a tramline exists, it may not be strong enough to allow for the creation of a wormwhole large enough for a starship.
3. Travel between the tramlines in a system takes time, weeks if not months.
The whole system always made sense to me. Not to mention lots of story telling oportunities with systems lost or hidden away from the tramline system by galactic drift.





ShadRS

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Grey_Area: Shit you already pointed it out for me. "The Stars, My Destination" is one of my favorite books. It's like Count of Monte Cristo in space. That point at the end of the book where all his senses get mixed up is pretty awesome.

Jesse Mrozowski

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]>

[pilter.com]
(Pushes up his glasses,puts on his "Teal'c is my Homeboy" t-shirt.)

I believe The Stargate Gate System only required 7 Chevrons to travel within our galaxy. In some cases when exo-galactic travelling took place they would use an 8th Chevron.

slmcdee

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @capntim @Signal
Phillip K. Dick touches on the immortality through a duplicate of one's self in "We Can Build You". Pris, who incidentally is a basis for the Daryl Hannah Pris from Blade Runner, argues that due to the fact that the simulacrum(android duplicates of actual human's from history) are perfect copies, even though the timeline may have a blank spot between the death of the "real" person and the simulacrum, to the simulacrum they have never died and just woke up when they were created. Phillip K. Dick does a better job of explaining it but it touches on your ideas/dilemmas. And he probably doesn't use run-on sentences of that length either.

physik

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]>

Oh, you guys mean 'fictional' faster than light...
This one could be made real. There is just no funding for research.
[www.newscientist.com]
Be sure to look up the AIAA papers and the work of Dr. Martin Tajmar. Big calculus.

deckard97

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Additional great FTL:
The gap series by Stephen Donaldson - a nice interpretation of hyperspace as being another layer to existence where you can move through it depending on your vector of entry, faster you enter the further you jump in the direction of entry.
Peter F Hamiltons Commonweath saga and their excellent wormhole system where you travel to other planets on a train :)

Darkedge

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> The old computer game Elite had a pretty basic A to B hyperspace system, but every now and then it would dump you in the in-between 'Witch Space', where you were likely to be attacked by alien Thargoids. They were tough, but their remote control fighter drones were very valuable on the open market. So if you were good enough, you could force a jump into Witch Space. Profit!

muteboy

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Jumper has Hayden Christensen and his pals moving at the speed of thought to anywhere he wants. I digg that.

[ia.media-imdb.com]

SamVed

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Finstern: That wasn't hyperspace in Cowboy Bebop, it was a mistranslation. It's actually called a "phase-space gate," which makes use of something called the "blinking universe theory." In it, our universe blits in and out at a set rate, and the universe that exists during the "blinks" is 1/48th the size of ours. The phase-space gates tunnel into that universe, so ships in the gate system only have to cover 1/48th the distance, hence the shorter travel time.

Sorry, I'm a translator -- I didn't do Bebop, but I did the Outlaw Star TV series that's mentioned elsewhere in this thread -- and I'm kinda anal about this stuff. ^_^ I specialize in technobabble-heavy anime.

CantankerousDave

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Final: re: sub-ether drives in Outlaw Star. The author cribbed much of this tech from E.E. Smith's "Skylark" books. Their sublight tech gets them to about 10% c, and about 1 LY a day when under FTL.

CantankerousDave

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> this is one of the few places i feel ok making an insanely geeky correction.

the ship in alien is travelling faster than light while the occupants are in hyper-sleep. LV-426 is in zeta 2 reticuli, which is about 39 LYA. lambert (the ship's navigator) reports that they're "ten months" away from earth. that's close to 40x the speed of light.

in the next movie, the sulaco makes the same trip in 3 weeks or less, according to the script, and ripley reports that she promised her daughter she'd be home in time for her 11th birthday. (evidently, relativity does not apply?)

the fact that she drifted for 57 years was more of an accident. she "drifted right through the core system" and was picked up by a deep-salvage team on the other side of the galaxy. ie: she missed.

but yeah, they didn't really sell the "OMG WERE TRAVELLING FASTER THAN LIGHT" aspect -- it's not like truckers would sit around a rest stop amazed that they were going faster than 30 mph. it's just their job, and the facts of life. why would space truckers be any different?

arachnophilia

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Iconian gateways.

ndgmtlcd

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Tesseracts?

Lizzie24601

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Personally I dig the holoship concept from Red Dwarf.

By it's very nature a ship composed entirely of photons would be able to travel at light speed...

nygenxer

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Final:
That would actually happen, even between ourselves and our closest neighbor (Proxima Centauri) because of the distances involved and the increasing changes in technology.

The Alpha Centauri system is 4.77 light years away. Keep in mind the scale involved: if a star like ours were the size of a golf ball and was placed at the Empire State Building in NYC, then the next closest golf ball would be in Chicago!

The fastest we can go right now is less than 50,000 mph but for argument's sake, let's multiply that number by ten and say we can travel 500,000 mph. It would then take 6400 years (ignoring the slight relativistic effects and time for acceleration) to get to our closest neighbor.

Now dontcha think we'd be able to at least double that speed in a hundred years? Let's say it takes us 500 years to double our maximum speed to 1,000,000 mph. The journey for the second ship would "only" take 3200 years.

Adding the 500 years spent in R&D developing the second ship and you can see that the second ship would've almost completed a round trip by the time the first ship even got there.

That Rod Serling was just amazing!


nygenxer

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I've always considered quantum leaping to be a viable way to travel, as long as you ignore the whole problem of "energizing" matter, but what sci-fi doesn't? The main difficulty of the Samuel Beckett version was its function as a time machine; there's not much evidence out there for persistent temporal linearity (that past events exist somehow after themselves as a sort of cosmic backup file). However, if one were to make a device that used the unique "leaping" property of quantum particles (their ability to move from point a to b without crossing the space between them) and to do so in such a way that the destination could be controlled for, then it'd be an excellent way to travel around space. Of course, it's pretty much the same thing as the Improbability drive when you think about it.

AngryLagomorph

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Let's not forget the Icarus in The Planet of the Apes. In one of the movies they explained it as the ship having travelled along an S spline (or something like that) through space and time. And as an added bonus you just might get to see talking apes!

GiltProto

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Brinn's uplift series had a number of ways of traveling faster than light. Multiple levels of hyperspace, probability drives, and who knows what else.

And farcasters are very different from stargates.

daveNYC

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @capntim: Does no God necessarily mean no soul?

RAHfanboy

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> How about travelling in E-Space, from David Brin's "Heaven's Reach"? The entire universe is visible as a fairly small tube, making it pretty easy to get pretty much anywhere, as long as you can point to the right spot in the tube. Downside: memes are living things in E-Space, and would like to eat you.

Turlough

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Final: The term you're looking for is "Sub-Ether Drive".

Rhainor

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> There's always the method used in Richard Morgan's _Altered Carbon_ and sequels, where they download your mind from your cortical stack, transmit it via laser to your destination world, then download you into a new 'sleeve' (ie. body)...

Or the Void Which Binds, using the universal force of love to instantly teleport yourself anywhere you've been before...

Qev

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I really liked the hyperspace gates from Cowboy BeBop, still dont think its actually faster than light as it takes a few hours to get to Earth from Mars but it was still a pretty awesome take on inter-planetary travel...

There was another show when I was little (damn memory I cant remember its name) but I remember they had ships like raptors from bsg and when they "jumped" theyd have to charge up the engine to generate a "hyperspace bubble" then they disappeared in a flash... twas awesome

Finstern

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I remember a story where the method of travel was a "stop" drive. It would anchor the ship in place and teh universe would move by it. Unanchor when you are close to where you want to be. If I remember right you had to travel at sublight to the actual destination.

Groovychk

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> The leviathan's ability to Starburst was pretty cool. I think they could also use it as a defensive weapon.

Mutton_chops

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @wolfjoat: It's like higher "wavelengths" of spacetime where all points are closer together and there are gravity waves all over the place that you can ride by projecting "Warshawski sails" made of gravitons. In hyperspace you're traveling at sublight speed, so the real speed limit of c is respected, but since all points are closer together than normal, from n-space's POV you're effectively traveling FTL.

starbuck1011

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Smeagol92055: Are you SURE you're remembering that story correctly? I remember that they actually died, were revived, and while dead each had his own insane vision of the afterlife.

Pope John Peeps II

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]>

There's also Babylon 5's jump gates which open a jump point into hyperspace. The really big ships don't need jumpgates cuz they can make their own jump points. I'm just sayin'.

Dustin L.

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Larry Niven's "Known Space" has three levels of Quantum Hyperdrive if I'm not mistaken.

I think the third was seeded into the superconducting mesh holding the Ringworld together under the Scrith, effectively turning the entire structure into a MASSIVE hyperdrive vehicle.

Big fan.

strider_mt2k

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> From a stylistic point, I like the drive in the _Alien_ franchise -- the time dilation effect reverses after you exceed the speed of light, so subjective time is slower than outside time. In other words, a three-week trip might seem like three months to the crew. So, the crew does the hypersleep thing, to avoid having to stock food etc for a long boring trip. (I don't know what the author of the article was talking about. Ripley's problem was that she was adrift in a non-FTL lifeboat with a broken beacon, not that the trip was supposed to take that long.)

chrisweuve

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @B:

Hahaha, hell yes!!!

dead_red_eyes

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I've never read "The Jaunt", and I must do so now.

I really liked how they did FTL travel in the game "Mass Effect".

dead_red_eyes

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Seth L:

Wall around a Star by Frederick Pohl.

You step into a unit, then step back out and live your life as usual. Your exact duplicate steps out of a box elsewhere on a one way trip and lives his life far, far away.

Sometimes your body is tailored to a new environment like aquatic or heavy-G, but you're still you. But as far as your consciousness is concerned you will never see your loved one at home again (unless they come with), and "you" could go back, but it would just be an essence of you, and you would still be without your love.

Thats all I can remember from the book

Capn_Marrrrk

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I can think of three more.

In some of Orson Scott Card's Ender books, Jane, the intelligence that developed in the ansible network, was able to somehow transport ships across vast distances. It's kind of explained here.

In Vernor Vinge's Marooned In Realtime, complete stasis fields called "bobbles" are used to completely freeze time in a spherical area, and nuclear explosions push the bobbles through space.

In A Fire Upon The Deep, Vinge posits the existence of "zones of thought" in the galaxy, in some of which the laws of physics differ from ours and allow FTL travel.

CSX321

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Dark Star

lunadude

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I've read of books involving 'generation ships', which always struck me as an awesome idea and probably the only really feasible way to get people to neighboring solar systems. (Maybe a little boring, though.) The biggest problem there seems to be that extended space travel involves a lot of environmental toxins in the ship itself, which might adversely affect the passengers' reproductive capabilities.

The horror of the machine from The Prestige to me is not the question of which body you are, because they're both presumably separate perfect copies of you- the horror was (SPOILER ALERT?) that character killing himself over and over again in the ultimate act of self-negation. It seemed kind of cosmically sick to me in a way that suicide isn't: endless reduplication, creating a fully human life identical to your own, and then ending your own.

taxbaby

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Lost of names for the same inaginary thing, of course. Remember tesseracts? Or the folded scarf analogy?

Mathmos

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Alastair Reynolds' 'lighthuggers'. Hard sci-fi to a certain degree, the drives would push a ship close to the speed of light, and the tapered prow was covered in tens of metres of ice to ablate and absorb any impacts at that speed - which would be rather nasty on a thin hull. I liked the tyranny of distance in his books - even with high tech gear, there was no way to beat the lightspeed limit...

Dr_Wally

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Signal: See? its a great question.

Personally I think that the software is more important than the hardware its running on.

of course your software is constantly changing too. Thats why i'm happy to be who and what i am at any given movement. The me of 10 years ago is barely similar to the me now, and he hasn't lamented his death. I'm sure the me of now will be just as quiet when either i've been replaced by another iteration of myself, or i've died entirely.

capntim

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Harry Harrison's Bloater Drive from "Bill the Galactic Hero". Your ship expands to fill the cosmos, then contracts in the direction you want to go. When you resume normal size, You're there! Bowbity bowb!

Cordwainer Smith's FTL was called planoforming. (I find Smith to be the most original and compelling SF writer in the pantheon. No axes to grind, here.)

TheAardvark

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Come on now!

The stargate uses SEVEN chevrons to allow travel to another gate in our galaxy. As explained by Daniel Jackson in the movie, you need six points in a 3D space to uniquely identify a point (the target gate). Then you need one additional point to identify the source gate (usually filled in by pressing the big red button on the DHD). Seven chevrons. The eighth chevron is used when you are traveling outside of our galaxy (e.g. from the Earth gate to the Atlantis gate). This is to specify what galaxy's stargate system you are providing the necessary seven chevrons for. Finally, the ninth chevron has only been used once, and it allowed for time travel. This, however, has never been explained in the series.

Get your facts right!

jeffsix

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @papercup mixmaster: There was also an Outer Limits episode that used the consciousness-teleportation-from-one body-to-another convention.

z3rks

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @capntim: Consider this situation. If someone makes you unconscious, makes a perfect copy of you including all memories, and then destroys the original. Then only the people involved in the procedure would know you are a copy. When you wake up, there is no way for the copy to know anything happened because it can remember everything up to being unconscious. Is that copy still "you"? What if the original was not destroyed, and both original and copy awake at the same time? There is no way for you to know if you are the copy or the original!

Now let's imagine we don't actually need people to perform this replication; it can be a natural phenomenon. And imagine that you don't need to be unconscious for very long, just a tiny fraction of a second. And that this replication / destruction process happens continuously, at all moments. Would this situation be any different from us living normally?

Signal

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Or, as they did in Futurama, just increase the speed of light so you can travel faster.

B

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> How about Lint speed from the animated Tick universe? When you get your pants out of the dryer, how is the lint already in your pocket? It's just that fast.
Also, from the Hitchhiker books, theres the bad news, because nothing in the universe travels as fast as bad news, the downside being when you get there, nobody wants to hear from you.
Or there's the Italian Resturant drive, which is based on the theory that the rules of mathmatics never work right inside an Italian Bistro.



B

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I remember in the old Star Fleet Battles game there was a weapon similar enough to the Wave Motion Gun that you could, in a BPV battle, retrofit the USS Enterprise with the WMG and cause all kinds of mayhem.

Yeah.

njudah

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> What about how they do it in timeline? Pop yourself into a universe where really really fast travel (or time travel, it doesn't really matter there's a universe for everything) is possible, move really fast, then pop back.

solOptimus

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Pinlighters! Gocaptains! The Up-And-Out!

(Ok, cats too.)

Ahh, Cordwainer Smith, you total weirdo.

In the Instrumentality books (by Smith,) humans develop a kind of hyperspace drive that lets them go into the Up-And-Out, but there are predators there that eat minds.

I actually like his earlier ideas (or rather, the technology that develops before the Up-And-Out,) where humans undergo a process that turns them into "scanners," which are kind of emotionless, robotic beings that can withstand the unfettered horror of space.

Whr is cranchng wire, plz?

VoxExMachina

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> While the Tardis is cool like a Ferrari would be a wonderful car, I'll choose suspended animation. Let's face it, I'm pretty much restricted to Honda types for the rest of my life, so I'll continue that trend and focus on technology that I might see in my lifetime. Also, imagine the power of compounding interest used in conjunction with suspended animation. ...might get that Ferrari after all.

newgalactic

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Both the Buck Rogers TV series (with Gil Gerard) and Cowboy Beebop have an affair that's not quite hyperspace and not quite Stargate -- basically, one can set up a shortcut bolthole "Just hop me from Point A to Point B" thing between two gate-like structures.

Unlike hyperspace or most FTL drives, anything can go through them, so it doesn't require a special kind of ship. Unlike Stargates, you can only go from one fixed spot (that has a working gate) to another fixed spot (that also has a working gate).

YoungWilliam

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Mine is from Bruce Coville's "My Teacher" series, though I don't remember what it's called. Basically, the starship drive folds a slice of space up (like a noodle, if I'm remembering the analogy correctly) so that where you are is right next to where you want to go, and the ship can step across.

allreb

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Seth L: Its a delicious question.

As an athiest I don't believe in a soul. Would you even notice? The one you would stop existing and the other one would think it was you. At that point isn't it? What is you isn't necessarily the cells that make up your brain, who you are changes over time. Is the matter you or are you the sum of whatever meme like programs are running through your hardware at one time.

If its new identical hardware and the same program is running...

Its a tough call.

Maybe too tough to call for you to be comfortable risking it for simple travel. But what if the payoff was upped? What if you could get hooked up to a machine that could scan your entire brain and create an artificial replica in an artificial body (think something like data, fully functional)

the cost is the process of scanning your brain fries it. You wake up in the new body, but its not really you, its a perfect immortal copy.

Most people I've asked this say that they'd be willing to do this near the end of their lives, but not now.

We apparently place a high value on our matter.

capntim

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Seth L: Sounds like you're thinking of The Prestige. In the book, the machine teleports you and makes a shell-like dead version of you which is left behind. The film has a much more morally distressing version wherein the machine teleports and creates a fully conscious fully-you double and it's sort of a crap-shoot which one is actually which.

papercup mixmaster

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @tyr540: Ward drive (supposedly) works by sort of partially encasing the ship in a supra-universe bubble which then exist in a different universe (subspace) where it can move fast than the speed of light...

I think that the ship partially exists in both universes at once (or flips back and forth)

DocGratis

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I'd suggest that the FTL drive in Galactica isn't misnamed; the ships arrive at their destination faster than a beam of light would, therefore, they get there faster than light. No?

clevermonkey

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Don't forget "Somewhere in Time" where Christopher Reeve travels through time (and space) by immersing himself in the time period he wanted to travel to and convincing himself he was there.

Although they don't specifically say so, this method would undoubtedly work for space travel under the same parameters.

snowpufff

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> One of my favorites was from the anthology "I, Robot", in which the two intrepid roboticists Powell and Donovan are sent faster than the speed of light in a prototype ship, and the effects of the voyage literally kill them and then bring them back to life.
As a practical joke, the "Brain" robot that designed the ship played sounds of bells tolling and eulogies being said over the loudspeakers while the two were in their "dead" state.

Smeagol92055

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> The TARDIS, of course. ;-)

nutmeag

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> There is Jack Vance's "Intersplit" which allows the ship to enter a space where FTL flight is possible, but the ship has to have a probe tip in the real universe so it can see where it is going.

Larry Niven did a lot with Hyperspace, a better description than most, including "The Blind Spot"

My personal space cruiser uses the Lensman universe drive, where you just step on the etheric gas and go faster. None of this Einstienian mucking about with relativity.

Of course, at speeds above a few hundred parsecs an hour, streamlining becomes important.

codydog

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> How is warp drive supposed to work? I was under the impression that it didn't make the ship go faster, but just bent space so that the ship didn't have to travel as far.

tyr540

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @Silver_Back: Maybe he got murdered? Who knows! And...okay, dammit. Fixed.

Kevin Kelly

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @wolfjoat: I can think of a number of other examples that use similar alternate dimensions/universes to travel through. Does it still count as pressing the pedal down if you're actually shortening the road, or changing physical constants along the way?

icelight

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> "In fact, they send a convicted murdered through while awake, in exchange for him getting a full pardon."

Oops, I found a goof! Should be murderer. :)

Silver_Back

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Glad these are available, since we are in the middle of a dilithium shortage.

Mathmos

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> @aspiringexpatriate: Solar-sails have been a staple of SciFi for a while now. I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure that NASA was looking into them at one point...

[blag.xkcd.com]
A good - and fun - explanation of the "science" behind them.

While the Infinite Improbability Drive is awesome, I am still intrigued by the Starship Bistromath, which uses bistro-mathematics to flip a ship across interstellar space.

And the TARDIS - nothing like vworping in and out of reality via the vortex.

Dunny0

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> There's also the hyperspace "bands" made popular by David Weber. Within each ascending band everything is a little closer or the speed of light is faster. I don't quite remember off hand.

wolfjoat

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> I guess the tardis is the best way to travel, though you don't have an excuse for being late anymore ^^

tuacker

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> So teleportation? Are you dead, and your exact duplicate steps out at the destination? Or is it still you?

I can't remeber which short story I read that dealt with this?

Seth L

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Slip stream/ ether stream from Outlaw Star

I love the Twilight Zone where the astronaut is put to sleep for the long journey but wakes up to discover a faster unmanned craft beat him to his destination and he basicly wasted his life and connections with everyone he knew for no reason.

Final

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Never heard of "The Jaunt" but I just did a wikicheck, jaunting was a term for telepottation in Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination". King mentions this in his story so that's cool. I like the Stargate through a door & ta-daa you're there method. Especially the way Dan Simmons used it.

Grey_Area

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> with time dilation, you just need to get near lightspeed

Steve

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> Neal asher's underspace/U-space/runcible gates from the Polity universe.

all need AI's to use, like pushing out out ot and into a different space where energy is alot more effective, but requires alot of energy to enter.

also while in u space people go nuts if they look into space.

cognitive

]]> <![CDATA[Forget Warp Speed, Try One Of These Alternative FTL Ideas]]> What about that solar powered sail ship Sisko built that went from Bajor to a Cardassian planet, proving the Bajorans were space-faring long before the Cardassians showed up?

It still sounds as improbable as it did then, but it made for a cool episode.

aspiringexpatriate

]]>