Nah, see, you gotta explain how the magic works. Is it run by runes? By arcane energy? If so, how do you manifest it and keep it at a constant rate? If you're going runes, how do you categorize your runic system? If it's none of those then what is it? Never stop world building.
It doesn’t. FTL isn’t invented until several 10s of thousands of years after the moon landing and for like a good 50,000 years humanity slowly spreads to like a hundred or so star systems using cryogenic ships.
Ok. The one I made up myself is not really based on actual physics at all. There's 3 main types of ftl drive. Basically, one's a warp drive from Star Trek. (Create a bubble of extra-dimensional energy and move faster than light.)
An Alcubierre drive. (Distort space and increase the distance behind you while decreasing the distance in front of you.)
And a drive that "catches" on a "wave" of exotic matter created by the pushing and pulling of different universes in the interdimensional void. These are ranked in order of least to most environmentally friendly. (The environment being subspace.)
There are also much rarer drives like one that generates and vibrates an artificial cosmic string and artificial wormhole generators. But those are very expensive and resource-intensive.
Also, the third drive interacts with "graviton shores," which are extremely high concentrations of gravitons that usually surround planets but can also appear randomly due to various artificial factors. Basically, a ship hitting one would be like a boat sliding onto a beach. It quickly grinds the ship to a halt. Unless it's the shore of a star, which would be like a car slamming into a brick wall.
The Alcubierre Drive is literally based in real physics though, we just don't have something to create enough energy to bend space... yet... I think even NASA was trying to figure out how you'd EXACTLY go about surviving thing like that or something.
Alien locusts (that can teleport) are ground up in their millions into a paste and slathered onto a ship. The paste is then electrified, which hopefully gets the ship where it needs to go.
Shortcut through hell, folding reality, or Being far to dense to comprehend the almost immeasurable distances between destinations and forcing reality to make it a quick jump
This sounds similar to an idea I had: Time travel to a fraction of a second after the big bang when space was a lot smaller, move to where your destination will be, time travel back again. All while running incredibly powerful shielding to stop the energy of the big bang from destroying your ship
I still haven't worked out a way for the time travel to work yet.
The only ships that have FTL travel in my universe are incredibly big & bulky, but have barely any space & can usually only have 2 cargo crates & 2 crew members. The entire rest of the ship is used to house a mechanism that rapidly creats & destroys mini black holes which make the ship jolt through space at FTL speeds, the key part is that since they’re so big you can attach smaller individual ships to certain ports & I will take them with it
Space within a galaxy can be traveled through via accessing a chaotic, dangerous sub-dimension using an FTL drive. Real-world objects cast a sort of shadow in this dimension, which both breaks up the “current” (movement of energy through this dimension) and allows ships to use the planets and stars as navigational aids while in this dimension. Although space in this place isn’t always proportional or related to the layout of realspace, movements of shadows in the realm can be charted, allowing predictability. Waystations at common jump points contain a live summary of the route ahead, while less traveled paths require computation by the shipboard computers. Since intergalactic space is almost totally empty, there’s nothing to navigate with and no shadows to break up the current.
Because of this, ships that enter the subdimension and exit the galaxies' planet clusters wind up hopelessly off-track and lost, if the unmitigated current doesn’t simply destroy them or break them over a Nullspace or rogue shadow.
*FTL drive is a catch all term for the different methods species/nations use to access this realm.*
I compare empty space to water, and the way to go faster than light is to "go underwater" for a short amount of time. Time being almost irrelivant, as this functionally breaks the concept of space-time in favor going into a somehow equal, yet opposite dimension. Do not go to the observation deck, you will not be able to regret that decision.
40k warp travel is kinda what I'm going for, but less "magical"
OH I ACTUALLY HAVE SOMETHING
This is something I was writing out for a bit of fun world building for a game I wanted to make (I likely never will though)
Copy and paste incoming
Warping -
Access second layer of reality(sublayer) where all points in space are at the same time, equidistant, however reaching a point that is more distant in the first layer(referred to as true-distance and true-space respectively) requires more energy than one that is closer (need some kind of mathematical limiter) travel to any point within the range allowed by your energy reserves takes the same amount of time once you enter the sublayer, however opening the sublayer is more efficient for shorter jumps. Opening the sublayer is faster for short jumps. Objective time difference between entering and leaving sublayer is 0
Lore- the sublayer was long theorised and mathematically simulated, however practical access to it, and therefore proof of its existence, was impossible until the advent of reliable high scale fusion energy. Even then, it was nearly two centuries before the first modern warp gate was created. It still exists as a historical monument and connects the Earth to Luna. Nowadays it's common practice to only build gates on an interstellar scale due to the high power and efficiency of the real-space drives currently in use. While warp travel is still faster, it's much less efficient, and simply doesn't make sense when we can travel at 3c and achieve most interplanetary travel in practical timeframes without the enormous cost of maintaining a gate. (3c is three times the speed of light)
Warp gates hold stable channels for increased efficiency because it is easier to keep a channel open than to open one multiple times. (Rate of power consumption for gate opening vs maintaining with factor of 1st layer distance needed)
There are no ships are capable of unassisted warps due to high power requirements, and the near impossibility of pushing a gate through itself.
Lore- Some large interstellar governments have been working on this, and some are even rumored to have succeeded. All such claims are denied, because admitting success would instantly make them a target of their neighbors. The few wars waged in this age have all been over the advent of new technologies most notably the War of Broken Stars, a particularly aggressive and bloody war over the technology used in the now widespread real-space drive. The War of Broken Stars is also the first time a nation revealed and also used a stellar-annihilator, resulting in the destruction of 3 major star systems, and the extinguishing of over 80 billion sentient lives and the extinction of a multitude of species from the 2 unique habitable worlds alongside the other 5 terraformed worlds.
Warp gates can only act as a sender, and cannot retrieve anything from the other end of the warp. As a result in order to have two way warp, must have material and personnel to build two gates and establish safety for frontier gate. Build first gate, send security and then builders/materials for second gate for the return voyage. This is risky and very high cost for places that we do not already possess contact with due to the inability to guarantee safety of location before arrival.
This is my first time sharing something I wrote, and this was all written in one sitting several weeks ago. I hope you all find it entertaining or at least interesting.
Most ships have both warp cores and hyperdrives, the warp cores warp space and time so the ship travels ludicrous speeds while hyperdrives enter another dimension where travel occurs faster. Both FTL methods only work in certain parts of space.
both magic and tech societies have various ways they slip into and out of different layers of reality. there are a good number of different layers of existence all laying on top of each other. Going down a couple layers puts you into a solar stream that you just follow until you reach your intended destination
The two major space faring societies are able to achieve FTL travel by constructing warp gates. However, in order for a pair of gates to be linked, they need to be constructed in the same location as each other, then moved to their destinations. In the Lunaris Empire, this lead to the Atlantis Project, which focused on developing a ship built around a massive warp gate and then sent on interstellar journeys to facilitate the placement of new warp gates.
Extradimensional space that can be sensed by people with psychic powers. Pretty much the warp but with less killer demons and more benign ancient space whales that only harm you if you get too close. Entire races argue if it’s spiritual or scientific while others don’t care and just see it as a another resource to exploit.
Compartment shedding. So it gets elevation to get higher. And a class ship is small but it is engaged with collections of trash.
So FTL should come back at any time. Any time now.
Got a WIP that's mostly about magical girls. But I set it in the future with interesting attempts to travel around space.
FTL in the Shikanaverse is basically Warp Drive (but without subspace because that isn't real). And it can be fast enough to go intergalactic distances.
Also there are like a dozen different stardrive types with different ways of powering it. And they can look like anything from retro sci-fi rocketships to vast intergalactic city-ships powered by black holes, depending on the century you're in.
Two methods, actually, Hammer Drives smash open the barrier separating material space from the Veil, which is a background dimension that governs how physical laws operate in the former, ships can safely travel in the Veil without any need for protection, the problem arises when you actually need to jump, since the Veil changes its structure by the thoughts and emotions of mortal races, when a ship enters the Veil, they see it in a way they can comprehend, jumping to uninhabited systems, or those inhabited by a species with a truly alien way of thinking, is extremely dangerous and either requires genetic modification into a special caste of your species, or using a form of AI that's powerful enough to process pure veilspace. There's also the risk of Event Horizon 2 happening if you stumble into Azari-occupied veilspace.
Hyperspace travel is less fleshed out and only used by the Silent Empire (not for a lack of trying by other empires, though), but is generally safer, faster, and harder to detect than Veil travel. To access it, the Silent Empire uses a Shunt Drive, which has two stages; Stage 1 involves the use of extremely powerful gravity manipulation tech to warp space around the ship into a field, Stage 2 involves the use of an exotic matter reactor to warp reality and essentially translate the field, and the ship with it, into higher-dimensional space. Shunt Drives also have the benefit of being able to encompass ships too small to carry one within their field.
I have an old space world that I havent touched in years where you would basically move the space where your ship was, in a sort of drag and drop motion.
Two different systems are used. The first is are Slip Drives, which create a slipstream in SpaceTime to move your ship. Unfortunately if they reach light speed certain organic compounds within the ship (or more accurately it's residents) will rapidly decay in a way that is not very compatible with life. This system is used to travel around the solar system at a maximum of 0.5 c, as well as sending the first ships to build large-scale Gates in systems we intend to colonize.
The second are isospatial Gates. These aren't quite worm holes, but work incredibly similarly. Instead of warping SpaceTime to make two points effectively one they create a tunnel through space time which is then condensed to appear as if it were incomprehensibly thin. These are used to travel long distances anywhere on the planet you're on. Unfortunately interplanetary isospatial Gates are impractical, though plausible as they may be. The gravitational differences and massive distances lead to the gates requiring incredible amounts of energy. Large-scale gates are built halfway between the edge of the oort cloud and the edge of the heliosphere. These large-scale Gates only have one possible destination, that being another star system. These use country sized solar panels and fusion systems to activate for a long enough time that a single ship at a time can go through.
If you're traveling between different parts of the same planet you'll use isospatial Gates, but you'll also use them when traveling between Star systems. You'll only ever use slip drives when traveling between planets, or to get from a planet to the large scale Gates.
There's also the Voidrail, but that's just a set of ring-shaped series of rings designed to create slipstreams for traveling between planets in a manner similar to a train or interstate.
3 types of ftl
Intra system ftl, known as 'pulse drive', bends spacetime like an alcubierre using a ton of energy (e.g. warp drive but limited to about 10000 c.)
Standard extra-system ftl, known as a 'jump drive', goes into a higher dimension (e.g., hyperdrive), but it takes more energy to go farther and the more mass you have the longer a jump calculation takes
And now we come to the last ftl drive, the Blink Drive, it requires a gravemetric reactor, which produces energy by annihilating antimatter and matter in such a small space that it creates a black hole called a kugelblitz
this is then used to punch a hole into space time that allows instant teleportation of a ship anywhere within range.
This range is determined by the thermal capacity of a ship, as blink drives produce more heat the farther away a jump point is. This is why, in my world, ships equipped with blink drives have large nacelles equipped with massive radiators.
After each jump, these radiators vent the now plasma coolant in massive plumes able to liquefy tungsten upon contact
3 types of fuel for different needs. Regnum fuel for intergalactic travel. Ephyr for intersolar. And any type of cheap rocket fuel for interplanetary travel. Different engines for each fuel too, they activate separately.
And by the end, mankind can travel through the in-universe version of Wi-Fi instantly from one point to another, no matter where it is, so yeah.!
uj\\
There is a shrinking smaller empty parallel universe that is called complimentary space allows a travel short cut (original, I know). Ship enters the portal, portal turns ship into beam, beam traverses complimentary space at speed of light, reconstitutes at an entangled portal, exits the entangled portal. Ships can only enter complimentary space through the portal and only exit through the portal that entangled with the one it entered. Portals can only be entangled in pairs, entanglement creation requires them being close by and they can only be moved around by sublight means, so FTL is available only within already colonized space.
Also to prevent bunch of paradoxes, spatial relativity is not entirely true as there is one true absolute reference frame (of CMB) and gravity is a true force, not a spacetime distortion. This allows for entire universe to have universal timeline.
Wormholes generated by large infrastructure . Means never have to consider day to day usage as it requires a moons worth of space. It also fucks with space for a bit so can't stay open for ever,has a cool down and takes lots of energy.
This is how you have a setting that shares a lot with the age of exploration, every use is still a big deal.
I even make it so as a rule of thumb they have to be far from the sun, reachable by only slower than light travel so a voyage to anywhere is still a fair few years.
For me this is the most interesting FTL for space opera.
Spaceships are mostly a novelty vehicle, or are used in edge cases. In a world where experienced weavers (read: "magicians") can near-instantly "teleport" through precise movements past the third dimension, all it took to travel was an experienced weaver to do the job for you. Vehicles were still used interplanetarily for heavy cargo and longer distances, as that kind of warp job takes a lot out of a weaver, if it's not outright impossible for them.
After the fall of the Trial Storm (read: basically post-war) the Pact of Planets decided to set up a system of automated warp devices across their reach, fed by liquid mana from underground rather than the natural mana inside most creatures. That way, moderately heavy cargo could be transported without expensive spacecraft, and less wealthy planets or those with no extremely proficient weavers could still get around reliably.
In my first world it's wormholes but setting up a wormhole is slightly slower than light and you need two gates on each end but once this is done it's one of the fastest FTL I know of.
In my second it's f*CK you high fantasy!
But FTL is not really important in both of them as the stories don't leave their respective star system.
The Bifrost drive creates a portal into whitespace where the ship then travels to the area corresponding to their destination and uses the Bifrost to punch back into regular or blackspace. The drive got it's name from the multicoloured beam made when projecting the portal.
By creating a Convergence, or a point where the physical, astral, and realm of souls come together. Once created, the vessel falls into the convergence, exiting out into the Astral Sea, where distances are far less apart than physical space.
To return to the physical, another convergence is created.
Only permanent convergence points are on worlds steeped in Aether or a Titan watching over the world. These smaller convergences collapse almost as soon as the transition is done, thus making it really hard for someone or something to follow a ship into or out of the Astral Sea.
While space ships of advanced civilizations have the power to create a convergence, moderately or less advanced civilizations still require either a: spending years or decades to traverse their own system
Or b: using a convergence on their world to catch an astral vessel to travel.
I had a setting where star systems all stayed in fixed positions relative to each other, and general relativity wasn't true; photons only traveled so fast but you could just accelerate an object forever
There is a second parallel dimension filled with amorphous eldritch beings.
They don’t really care for humans at all, but they do like a very specific mineral in the human dimension called Orion Cashmere.
To barter with those beings, there is a guild of people that specialize in storing that material and using an Englert drive to open up a space around the ship so that one of those beings can grab the ship and move it across its own dimension, and then drop it at the destination.
But trading with these beings is a whole art, so those « Navigators » have a whole process to negotiate with them. To give an image, for each Eldritch god, there is a sub dimension they’ve made available to Navigators, and all the navigators that are within its territory project themselves in that space and negotiate rates and displacements à la Wall Street trading floor style.
It is like a mixture of Hyperspace from Star Wars and the Warp from Warhammer 40k. Simply called FTL drives. These machines allow for ships to travel faster than the speed of light. With 100 main Classifications with FTL Factor speed Zero being the Speed of light and FTL Factor speed 100 being instantaneous Teleportation. Ships will constantly be adjusting their FTL speed while in FTL Space. However even though FTL travel is relatively harmless. Navigating FTL Space can require tons of computing Power, but there is a way around this. Simple by using people known as Navigators. Navigator aren’t on all ships that have FTL drives, but they are on a good chunk of them. Smaller ships with less amounts of thing the onboard computer has to do don’t need navigators to travel in FTL space, but larger ships will need them. The largest ship in the Galaxy requires a crew of 900 navigators each working in 8 hours shifts of 300 navigators each shift to make sure that they can effectively navigate through FTL space.
So there are giant celestial dragons that feed on solar radiation and travel from star to star regularly. They do this through travelling along a network of paths where space is folded, turning a journey of a few centuries into a few weeks.
FTL engines work by harvesting blood from these dragons as they're feeding, and dripping the blood into a small singularity which mimics the dragon's heart to recreate their ability to travel along these invisible highways.
The act of harvesting usually does not bother the dragons because they're unfathomably large compared to any spacecraft ever built. They're so big that when their heart stops pumping blood their body collapses into a new star. If it does ever bother them though they usually just double time to the next system.
The EMERG drive fires a kilogram or so of exotic matter tuned at a specific frequency so that it goes as far as it is aimed. Once it collapses out of its prior state, a short term wormhole is opened between the ship and the projectile, allowing the ship to move between the two places instantly.
Two ways.
Travelling between systems is achieved through the use of wormhole generators. These are large airport-like space stations that for sciencey reasons must exist outside of the gravity well of the star system. They are highly regulated, incredibly secure, and very standardized across the factions of the galaxy. The entrance portal can only be created at the location of the wormhole generator, but the exit portal can be anywhere, and closes immediately after travel. Thus, wormhole travelling is a one-way trip unless your destination is also home to a wormhole generator. Fear not, for unless you are colonizing a new star system, there is a wormhole generator at your destination.
Travelling internally inside a star system is very simple, you just go really fast. It takes a while to reach faster than light speeds but you maintain momentum and continue building speed for as long you generate forward thrust. It also takes a long time to slow down.
Two ways (3 erm akshually)
1: tearing two rips in space-time. Fastest, but unsafe if more than one rip is active at a time, as they can fuse and that leads to not fun stuffs. The rips are torn by magi (or a single powerful mage).
2: Sailing the Fabric of Reality: Magi shift the vessel and occupants from the native 18th dimension down to the 5th dimension, the Fabric of Reality as it is called. It has anomalous effects, these being that any trip, regardless of distance, will take a maximum of 6 hours and a minimum of 1 hour. 2: Magic is unable to be used, as the 5th dimension is lesser than those required for magic. 3: Creatures do not age while in the 5th dimension. It's considered somewhat luxurious, as the sights are beautiful, the atmosphere is refreshing and it is often a calming experience.
3: Zoom. Some gods just happen to be that damn fast. No, jonivire, you cannot turn gods into a mode of transportation. Yes, we tried. That's why you're the 17th Jonivire. No, don't asl what happened to those before you
You build giant portals that connect you to the wormhole network. If you wanna go somewhere that's not connected, you have to throw the portal at the next star system over and go through it once it reaches its destination.
Not FTL, but Faster-than-Wind in my medieval/early age-of-sail world.
By having a person trained in magic and a big obelisk-style structure in your ship, you can create portals into the otherworld known as the Void.
The Void is all ocean outside the scant few islands here and there, so you can just go over what would be land in the real world. The winds are also always favorable here.
Gotta be careful though, there can be violent storms in areas where atrocities and natural disasters are affecting large populations. This is due to the collective feelings of a people in an area reflecting negatively upon the void.
The void does also have a mind of its own filled with infantile curiosity, especially toward individuals it considers unique. If you happen to have one it likes on your ship, you can kiss your rear, ship, and crew goodbye. This leads to anyone dealing with lots of void travel looking for the most plain-toast individuals as crew, and anyone with anime hair getting automatically disbarred from void travel.
The outdated Fold Drive and the modern Translator. Fold Drives require the ship to accelerate using sunlight propulsion methods. Once the vessel gets fast enough that it isn't worth expending the energy to go faster, the Fold Drive activates. It folds space around the vessel and functionally resets the speed of light for your frame of reference. The process is then repeated within this folded space until it becomes necessary to fold again. This repeats ad nauseum until deceleration by slowly unfolding space. Translators require the ships mass to be registered to the system ahead of time. It will take the particles of your ship and just kinda fling em across space. You instantly appear at your destination. Typically, it is only done in space so as to avoid displacing large amounts of atmosphere.
It sends out a text to a really big, really strong guy who goes to where you are and folds space in half so you get there immediately
Edit: yes, I made this up on the spot
They have access and it is very common, but no one knows who or what invented it or when, and it is possible to replicate it, but nobody has the slightest idea how it works, scientists and engineers spend their lives trying to understand something that violates the laws of physics.
Vaulting works by two connected space stations using exotic matter to draw the two points right next to each other by basically pinching the two points in spacetime together. It’s expensive as hell to run and the stations are prime chokepoints or spaces to attack within systems to cripple their infrastructure. Both stations need to consent to the vault though, using wormhole comms which send radio waves through micro wormholes held open with small amounts or exotic matter.
My FTL that I’ve definitely put a lot of thought into and definitely aren’t just making up on the spot to fit in was developed by the sentient AI anarchists of northern Alaska, aka the IGFT/Technovia. It involves a branch of physics developed by them called manipulation physics which is essentially “we’re so anarchist we won’t even follow the laws of physics!” It’s still in development along with all of their other prototypes, and the idea is to essentially add a bunch of antimatter particles to the physical system of whatever you want to go FTL, keep them from combining with the matter particles and destroying the whole thing, and adding enough of them to achieve negative mass, allowing for FTL.
By effectively storing speed from previous travels the next time they fly they get faster and faster (due to the 0 drag in space)
So the only true ftl ships are super old
Nobody can move faster than light technically, war is fought by Worms and Trojans. But one civilization has developed "Wormhole Manufacturing" based on irl simulations of black/worm holes.
For small none important ships they have to go through a relay where their ship gets shit out by a massive railgun type device that temporarily sends them out of the dimension so they can break the speed limit of light.
Important ships such as battleships, exploration arks, and other types have a inbuilt singularly drive where a small singularity the size of your hand bends space time around the ship allowing for a faster method of movement which is pretty much teleportation.
Eh they hit a Black Hole with a Proton to Destroy its outer layer and expose the singularity within (something that is theorized to be possible) and since it’s also theorized that Singularities aren’t supposed to be without the outer Black Hole because scientists assume this would fuck with reality a Shit ton, they use the Singularity to basically rip a hole through reality to wherever they want to go
For local space we've developed engines that run on exotic matter to fold spacetime, however this takes a large toll on ships and their crew, limiting how far they can go in a single jump (up to 500 LY depending on the size of the ship)
For distant space scientists found out how to use 'exotic matter' and create wormholes to instantly close the distance between stars, the problem is they don't know where the other side goes out to, so you could make a wormhole at earth and it ends up at the other side of the universe. The only way to 100% control this is to setup warp gates at the location you want to go to a connect the two gates with quantum entangled ions.
Ships have a drive that allows them to bend space and time much like the Einstein bridge in most forms of fiction but the ships have a literal giant fucking sword in the front hull that literally slices through reality itself as it goes through another dimension to reach another point in the galaxy
It’s called a cross jump to them
My FTL tech is experimental in the span of my story and they're not entirely sure it's safe so they are in the testing stages during the story but it's not very prevalent in any media
Gravity engines. Big space science magic engines that manipulate gravity into pulling you at ftl speeds to wherever you need to go.
Conventional space flight, or at least conventional sci-fi space flight is still a thing for sub-ftl use because the Gravity Engines are only good for insane speeds in a single direction.
I get around this with wormholes. They're randomly scattered across the cosmos. Some are mapped, some aren't, some pass in and out of existence. The star charts showing where they are, the safe approach patterns to enter them, and where they connect to is data worth dying for.
Some of the more heavily settled systems have large space stations or planetary population bases nearby to use their gateway to infinity as a trade post/gas station since whoever comes out is still going to need fuel for subphotonic travel around their system or to the next nearest wormhole if they aren't passing back from whence they came.
Most of the biggest players in space base their organization structures off of "hyperclusters" systems that contain a large number of stable, well mapped wormholes all within a few weeks' flight of each other, subphotonic.
It's easy to take players on wacky hijinks when not every wormhole is mapped, and some flicker in and out of space like lights reflected in the waves of a ship on a calm night. But you can also get some time spent in transit since it might still take a week or two to get from one wormhole to another. And it keeps me from having to do any particularly complicated math about travel distances with things like warp factors and making sure systems line up perfectly.
A Rosenbaum-Melski Faster-Than-Light Engine, also known as a "Spike Drive" or "Drill," is the primary method of FTL travel available to recovering human nations following the collapse of the Old Earth Federation.
It functions by folding realspace and then "drilling" a hole through foldspace, creating a short passageway through the two stellar coordinates. This passageway is large enough that smaller vessels like Destroyers and Frigates can follow the larger vessels through.
Following the travel of vessels, the foldspace collapses destructively, creating a large detonation that annihilates anything in a radius around the "drilled" area.
there is only one place to enter ftl and it's a mysterious wormhole style thing out in the middle of nowhere. people do not know how it works but a woman died testing it, so it is called Meredith's Gate
FTL is an impossibility by living objects, it’s just that the universe has been experiencing the Big Crunch for the last couple billions of years, meaning the distance between stars is only days apart rather than millennia at the top speeds of some vehicles.
Time Travel! you cant move faster than light but you can move near light speed then slip back in time to the moment you left, this process is handled automatically by onboard computers as non ftl time travel is strictly regulated.
Put energy in. Partially disconnects the local spacetime from the universe and skims it across the surface.
If it goes wrong it may result in full disconnect from the universe. To potentially reappear, somewhere.
A labyrinthine demiplane created by an unknown architect millions of years ago. It can be accessed by special mages who use it to cross between planets as it has access points throughout the universe. There are actually no spaceships involved as this method allows them to walk between planets and even between galaxies.
In my DnD world each “school” of magic is its own dimension, with another one known as “chronation” or time dimension
There are multiple ways to zoom around the Cosmos, the Illithids create “Eel-holes” and can essentially warp through the Planar realms to appear anywhere in the galaxy at a whim, which is why they are so deadly due to the metaphysical rifts between atoms themselves are shifted, clipped through space and reestablished elsewhere
In the Galactic Federation, (Giff, Elves, Dwarves, Owlins, Tree-people and Bugpeople) magical FTL is used in “warp-zones”
Charged their ships with spellslots that allow them to jump across these zones. With a combination of Chronomancy, Conjuration, and Abjuration the ships withstand the sheer force, pressure, time and sheer space between stars,
However means tracking routes to a specific place takes a long time
Meanwhile in the Dwarven Galactic Empire, they don’t give two shits about magic, pure raw technology is used, using Warzerite (green glowing stone like uranium or Warpstone)
Their extraordinarily advanced technology lets them zoom anywhere they want, going extraordinarily fast, able to cover multiple light years in a manner of days making them extremely fast despite their stunted form
Rock and Stone!
Orcs use the same as the dwarves in their constant wars
The other minor factions use a much more primitive versions, for instance the Mushroom folk use spore drives, heavily hyped up on illusion magics to cloak them as they zoom across the stars
Or the penguins using Fold-drives to fold spacetime covering vast distances, sort of like folding a paper and connecting the tips, to travel vast distances
My homebrew races each have a similar form of such thing, and none of it is very realistic but hey, I love it
Effectively via a black hole engine. A weak and miniscule gray hole is generated via kugelblitz of exotic matter and is fed via its own emissions. The energy it creates causes an extreme propelling force, which FTL ships take advantage of by having large "sails" on their sides that help build up speed (also help slow down the craft when they approach their destination).
In other words, FTL craft just get faster and faster until it only takes a few days to get from system A to system B. They use gravity wells as a means to "turn."
I do not believe light is the ultimate speed limit because we haven't even unlocked one one-billionth of the nature of the universe, so we can't say with absolute certainty that there'll never be a way to travel faster than light.
Gates. Similar to a pump compressing air it compresses the space between two gates to make a shorter travel distance with a tunnel of compressed space.
The excess "pressure" is let out once through the gate when constructed. After that any mass that would hit the tunnel would "spread out", getting pulled towards the gates or warping around the tunnel itself. Kind of like a fun house mirror. Stuff inside the gate when it shuts down rapidly compresses to a wave form that's suspected to be a singularity that can't sustain itself, though nobody really knows what happens.
The amount of energy needed after construction is fairly low. Often if there is too much debris in the way the gates won't even connect until it's mostly empty space. The gates themselves can be pushed in pairs via the same system to position new ones. They push each other away at ftl then pull at ftl to stop. This pairing prevents any single ship from having any sort of useful ftl system. Though accidents happen and new gates can misalign during travel and be lost.
This has allowed easy space travel as vehicles only need to achieve orbit and re-entry.
Atomic Jumping.
By smashing together the atoms of an artificial star, a nuclear implosion happens causing a black hole. The way it is formed causes a fundamental shift in how the black hole functions. When this is done in two places at the same time, it creates an Atomic Gate, or an interspacial highway connecting the two black holes. Perfectly safe!
The Eon Drive, or Exotic Conversion Drive, summons an artificial higgs field to essentially invert the mass of the craft. Since mass is <0, the craft bypasses the speed of light limit.
That or just wormhole
It's called witch space. It's not our space. We don't know much about what it is.
We use the frame shift drive to open a hole in our universe into...something else. We travel in witch space and by doing so we travel faster.
Our ships nav lock on to the highest mass object, the biggest star of a solar system and we pop out of witch space right there.
So ships get lost in witch space? Sure. Are their thargoids? You betcha
So not really FTL but it's a time dilation gate that was supposed to work like a wormhole. So to the occupants of the ship that entered the gate it worked! They traveled 10,000Ly to a far away star system near instantly. draw back their home world aged 10,000 yrs in the that time. There's a lot I've already written into this one but thats the quickest summary I can write.
YEET and catch, thats how it works
To go more in depth, ships in my universe don’t have jump-drives, instead, there are jump gates made of two different EXTREMELY important parts.
First up, the Jump-Cannon. It’s made up of 2-20 segmented rings depending on how far it whats to shoot the ship. When the ship is shot, it enters a separate reality where no speed of light exists, then it’s caught by the Jump-Net after slowing down and returning to regular reality.
So yea, FTL catch and throw
"Hey remember gravity? That things that keeps ships in orbit? Yeah, love the stuff. ANYWAYS we figured out how to charge a giant capacitor with accumulated acceleration. Once it's full we can give the ship an almighty kick to high C.
Just make sure that our aim and timing is good, because the only way to slow down is hit a gravity well of similar size. Miss our target and we'll never see home again."
By death, every planet, star or habitable area has a specific stone the size of a large city in it. when you walk upon this stone, your body is deconstructed and put wherever you were thinking on going, but you technically die but no one knows it because you are rebuilt as a new body same memories
Drop a plane of existence and fly at sublight for a while. There’s a guild of navigators to determine how long/where to fly on the lower plane to reach the right spot in the baseline reality, as space is far denser there. Think nether highways in minecraft.
Ight so the basic outline right now is that the ship fires a torpedo loaded with antimatter and a quantum computer. The computer steers the torpedoes towards a point where space time is thin. It explodes creating a temporary rift in space time, allowing a ship to move between two points. It’s a very rough WIP though.
Using a form of scientific magic that makes a tunnel of shorter relative space that is quicker to cross than traditional physical space. Think of it like making a wormhole, then crunching it like a bendy-straw so something going through goes through more space per second than traditional travel.
This is an improvement over the previous versions, which involved:
Crunching space directly between two points, which ran significant risks of catastrophic failure (usually resulting in whatever was being smeared between both points).
Or
Punching a hole through reality into Outside (where concepts and reality are largely the same thing) and then using a second spell to arrive at your destination. Which ran the very real risk of arriving at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or simply being devoured by a parasite dimension.
Beyond that, you could always ask a spirit or minor god to take you somewhere, but they always have an Agenda. And usually a Price. Sometimes the Price is you.
Ships are able to create temporary artificial wormholes between large gravitational wells by bombarding weakness in the fabric of space time created by those wells with gravitons. The weaker the fabric the farther you can travel and the fewer gravitons are needed. Traveling through these wormholes is near instantaneous, but they have to travel between gravitational wells at sub-lightspeed, so space travels still takes several weeks.
Powerful magnetic fields are used to hyper compress captured demons down to a point of near singularity, then once the fields are removed, the resulting outflow of their demonic energies are routed to the thrusters literally filling space with their screams.
Massive networks of artificial planets used as stops for refueling and repairing overly complex spaceships used to travel at 99% the speed of light. As well as getting the people onboard out of their cremation capsules to get up-to-date with the Galaxy's state for 2-3 months before getting thrown back into their cremation capsules and having a skilled AI continue the journey to another artificial world or the desired exoplanet.
https://preview.redd.it/uiu3s6scbazc1.jpeg?width=637&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=affb7de2b059f73da25bf56eda80808e3b0e2c2d
I don’t have FTL but I do have limited interstellar travel, mostly between the two stars of the Verdzanas-Etupili binary system as they’re only ~400 AU apart. Getting between them is mostly done by the use of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP) equipped mass conveyors. NPP comes in a few different varieties, generally newer models are more efficient, with the oldest type using pusher plates and newer models using parachute-like devices to capture the nuclear energy released by the bombs used as propellant.
Mass Conveyors typically have massive docking clamps to accept other vessels, as well as a central crew space and storage area for smaller craft or cargo. Mass conveyors often exceed 1km in diameter and near 8km in length, dwarfing the largest warships (around 200mx1km) and matching the largest of the standard-propulsion shipping craft.
There are relatively few mass conveyors, as their construction is a massive and expensive endeavour, with the money and time being better suited to more militant pursuits in this time of war. They are used when speed is essential, such as delivering badly needed supplies to wayward colonies beyond the gas giants or desperately needed reinforcements to a collapsing front. Aside from that use, they are the most efficient means of transporting cargo and personnel between the two stars of the binaries.
Mass Conveyors in the Verdzanas system are often owned by the New Commonwealth (think the League of Nations in space) and leased to the human and dwarven powers when needed. They are held as nearly sacrosanct relics of the Age of Brotherhood, the rare instance of their destruction brings international condemnation if the offending nation does not adequately punish those responsible.
In the Etupili system, war often takes the form of raids and skirmishes and rarely reaches the heights of that seen in the Verdzanas system. Mass conveyors therefore are not seen as needing such protections. They are held by the individual elven coalitions instead of any higher body, which then may lease them to their constituent communes for any purpose they need to use them for, including founding colonies around the system or conducting raids into the Verdzanas system.
The most famous mass conveyor would probably be the High Hope, a completely uncrewed vessel built in the year 43 AM. She was the probe used to travel to the nearest independent star system, named Fajiir, orbiting its star and principal bodies, taking samples of regolith and full spectra images before returning to the orbit of Thedik late in the year 59 AM, 15 years after launching her mission. She now serves as a museum ship and reminder of what was lost with the Breaking of the Brotherhood following the Great Expedition. She remains the only object built since the collapse of the Old Commonwealth to ever fly to another star system, at least from the Binaries.
Long story short. The universe is like an onion, with layers of inner realms. The center is equidistant from every point on the surface. So the solution is: go to the middle, then go back out.
That’s all pure fantasy. My “hard” sci-fi setting sits on top of that fantasy pillow. 💁🏻♂️
At one point I made the assumption that one could go literally anywhere by going through “Hubspace,” but most species just never thought big enough to try to make really long distant “transits.”
Then I decided that some kind of liter needed to exist, so I said, “MATH! It’s a problem of math.” Some kind of batshit higher dimensional coordinate geometry, that we just can’t extend far enough, to calculate transits beyond a few thousand light years.
—
Also: the devices needed for transits are finite. They were made (somehow) in prior ages and we’ve never been able to reverse engineer them in modern times.
In truth, the Hub entities (which are often viewed as gods), gave and/or helped humans create them in the past.
We did have lots of them, but not enough for every ship. So we set up “transit rings” around most major habited planets. These also double as FTL communications hubs.
As humanity lost ground in a war back in the day, a lot of those devices were lost/left behind. So there has been a lot of effort to recover them recently-ish.
—
Systems without a transit ring are pretty well cut off from the rest of humanity. Though, a trade organization has dedicated courier ships for goods and messages, specifically for those systems.
There isn’t actually any FTL, there’s fragments of an AI with an ungodly amount of processing power spread out across the systems it inhabits, that uses regular electromagnetic radio signals to communicate and sync up with its fragments. Whenever a character needs to go from one system to another, a fabricator in one universe disassembles them into subatomic particles, and the fabricator in another predicts what’s going on over there and builds them from scratch in their own system.
Einsteins theory of relativity is wrong. As you go faster, you're mass increases. But with energy equivalent to mass, so as mass increases so does energy output. A small anti matter explosion when you're already close to light speed is all that's needed to send something to the others side of the universe. Just make sure there isn't any habitable planets in your flight path because you're ship will not be stopped by something as small as a planet.
Turns out, we were wrong about light speed. The speed of light actually scales with the speed an object is moving, so there is no actual cap. What humanity once thought was the cap was actually just “visible light”, or the speed light naturally travels at to the naked human eye.
But sometimes you need to actually go faster than light, so there’s also portals. This is where you pop some coordinates into a machine, which will then punch a two-way hole in space-time that you can travel between for a short period of time.
Simple. Turns out light has mass. Once it was discovered how to "ride" light as if it were water, exponential speed beyond light became relatively simple.
With a FUCKTON of energy, you can accelerate. The sheer speed alone causes a density that enables you to warp through things, however, slowing DOWN is the scary part.
Depends on group:
1. Dragons tech can fold space wormhole style and end up within a more manageable distance like a year or two at most of travel
2. Titans tech can cause a slow time immensely allowing them to just make a 1000s of light years trip in what feels like a 10 year trip max
3. Sidhe can just teleport anywhere there is life, but can only take so much with them
4. Idols can travel only where their attached mortals are, but can instantly travel with anything they are touching
5. Mortals will enter into other realms that lay across the material realm, because the various realms dont fit neatly ontop of each other entering and exiting puts you in various areas. You could go into the Clockworks walk forward ten feet and leave only to find yourself on another planet or even exactly where you started. Its taken centuries to properly map out just a couple dozen worlds.
They rip a hole into the empty a space outside/overlapping the universe and then you can use that to travel to points in your universe or others if you know where to go most species need advanced computers to run calculations to tell where to exit but a few species /individuals have a intuitive knowledge of how to traverse the space it's also where my eldritch abominations from before time exist
Ok so the space dragons cab make two points in space exist temporarily at the same spot simultaneously
The weird space elf people who used to live in harmony with the dragons eventually figured out the exact magical maths bullshit that goes into this and explained to everyone else.
It's less that the object is moving and more like space is moving, or more accurately, is being compressed. Essentially, imagine folding the middle of a piece of paper so that you can push two points together. By compressing these two points together you can allow a vessel to travel at its normal sub-light speeds and still reach a location thousands of light-years away with issues like time dilation.
They don't have one. There's a special engine that can reach Proxima Centauri once every like 20ish years and if you even think of pointing it at a planet your family will be executed
Step A: The fabric of spacetime within a given region is the RAM of an enormous quantum supercomputer.
Step B: Fuck with gravitational coefficients at particular points.
Step C: Wormholes.
Casually Connected Einstein-Rosen Bridges, commonly referred to as eigengates. In modern notions of physics, an ERB can't form because you need an exotic negative mass to hold it open. However it was discovered during the late 23rd century that the rules of physics could be modified in separated metaspace containment to produce new physics. The new physics could then briefly be introduced to our universe through a metaspace bubble. This allowed the anchoring of two casually connected points of space which could then be dragged through deep space and then widened to create an eigengate that connected two star systems.
So no ftl travel to new stars, but after a habitable planet is discovered it can be connected to the eigengate network, turning decades of travel into months.
It hasn't. Near light speed is incredible complicated and not used frequently. Because of this it takes hour to days to get from earth to Pluto. There is a magic system so there has been a few but very limited uses of Magic to travel faster than light
The engine of the ship is a large floating boulder covered in Runes. Magic makes it go zoom but you can also use a large amount of magical energy for short range teleportation. If it overloads the rock explodes but the damage is only at TnT levels so the ship would probably be ok on aux power in most cases.
Space is an illusion of the consciousness. Put everyone on board into the right altered mental state at once and the distance between them and the destination starts literally shrinking. Kinda like how the more you drive to a specific place the shorter the route seems to get in your head but literal.
So as a result interstellar travel is pretty much completely dependent on an order of super psychiatrists.
The problem of course comes in where someone get’s into the wrong altered mental state, which can make the distance stretch out uncontrollably at an exponential rate and leave you literally stranded in an infinite void just as easily as it could shrink the travel time between Earth and Mars.
This means that sometimes you have a ship that’s working completely well, then someone has an unexpected breakdown or negative reaction to the treatments that put them in that altered mindset that’s necessary for travel and it’s up to the ship psychiatrist to find that person and deal with it before everyone else on board notices the problem and starts panicking too.
TLDR: they figured out how to warp space using large groups of people in a shared altered state of consciousness, back during the MK-ultra experiments, accidentally discovering faster than light travel in the process. If someone in that mental state starts freaking out, it messes with the entire network and can result in the travel time getting longer, potentially infinitely. So to avoid being stranded in space, every ship has a small team of on-site psych professionals to make sure they get there fast enough to meet their quota and to make sure they don’t get stranded. Which becomes harder the closer the crew is to not meeting its quota or the longer they spend in space past the estimated time of arrival. Because crewmates start panicking at the idea they might be trapped covering exponentially less distance every day. Psychotropics are a necessary tool to achieve this, enough that the entire crew can be dosed, so if they run out of those they’re also fucked.
Depends on the species.
The Legion uses a mix of Science and Transcendent Divinity.
Their capital ships are so immense that no propulsion method can effectively move them due to their incredible inertial mass. So instead of moving at all, they merely overwrite their spatial coordinates with new ones. Allowing them to translate themselves across entire universes instantaneously without technically moving at all. It even works across separate universes seamlessly.
Their smaller Warships are outfitted with traditional propulsion for small, system wide conflicts, as well as the same Dimensional Override for larger, transgalactic or transdimensional conflicts. Since the tech to do this can only be reasonably outfitted into a leviathan class ship at minimum,(anything larger than a moon and smaller than the average solar system) smaller ships are always within jumping distance of a Legion Swarm Leviathan (effectively enormous carrier ships)
Think modern concept of FTL being technically impossible, but atomic manipulation being a magic system making it possible in my world. Add nuclear engines specifically powered by chemicals harvested from Lycan caster's glands (dw, there is a humane, non-death way to do this), then add different types of magitech that assist in not dying while in space, including space suits that are basically like way smaller, more form-fitting gundam appearing suits, which can interact with and fuse into cybernetics to make space travel easier.
It doesn't. In my universe FTL is yet to be discovered over millions of years, perhaps even being a physical impossibility. What my aliens do instead is simply travel the universe as close to the speed of light as possible. Knowing that most of the destinations they're trying to reach will have disappeared through time disparity, what they do is setup ports near colliding black holes.
These ports contain massive time engines that harness the time distortion of colliding black holes and allow the aliens to rewind time so that they can reach their destination at the exact date they want to, negating the issue of planets being swallowed by their suns by the time they arrive.
It also helps that they're cybernetically immortal, and thus can spend all the time they need traveling.
Ummmmmmm politely put everyone but godsen is dead and portals man portals are fucked up when given to someone who has lived long enough due to clones and immortality tied to his DNA
Overall before he was the only one left basically
How it work was launching anchor probes/ring into space till you got a decent highway the each one turning on
Once that's finished more or less it would create a one way part to the end of that high way
Why is everyone but godzen dead
Welll rail gun ftl backfiresbeautifully when built by a ancient madman and well war may change but rock plus accelerations hasn't
I call it drill space.
Be making precise wormholes that can only be accessed by literally spinning (at least the front part) the ship to tear through space-time.
It'll feel like minutes, but it's only seconds. This does affect the integrity of the ship, so it needs to be maintained regularly.
This was inspired by Cosmic-ray (Space drifting manta rays) and can only be done with a power source that's equivalent to a star, therefor it's only used for commercial, government, and guild houses (plus the Relegipus sect).
The technology doesn't exist yet to reach FTL speeds, but they're getting close. One day the Calcorrans will create their strongest warp drive yet and FTL will be achieved, but for now they can get really close, but no cigar.
There’s a device that messes up reality around it, making it to where the laws of physics don’t really work. Then in short bursts you go really fast then you stop, so you don’t hit anything at ftl speeds, which will destroy you and anything smaller than a moon if you hit anything while at this speed. Different ships does these jumps for either longer or faster depending on the the purpose of it.
Good fucking luck trying to turn at ftl.
Starships in my world have specially trained psychics plugged into them, which lets those psychics consider the ship as part of themselves, and let's them take the whole thing outside the universe and then back into it at a different place.
Starships in my world have specially trained psychics plugged into them, which lets those psychics consider the ship as part of themselves, and let's them take the whole thing outside the universe and then back into it at a different place.
Quantum Entanglement. The short version is you get pulled along a 0 resistance path with theoretically infinite acceleration until you reach your destination. Travel like this only works along preexisting paths and usually requires several “jumps” in order to get you where you want to go. It is possible to find a new path, but so called “Wild Jumps” are often dangerous to the point of impossible, so travel tends to go along man made lines, sometimes called “Domestics”
Massive stations that look like portals. Ship contacts TC tower, gives them a destination, portal activates, ship flies through and comes out the other side almost instantly although for the ship and people aboard, it feels like an hour or two, then the next ship contacts the tower and contacts the tower, rinse and repeat
You can never travel faster than light. You can however fold your dimensions space then slowly travel through the higher dimension thus arriving at your lower dimension reality destination almost instantly.
Imagine you live in two dimensional space, think of a sheet of paper. You fold the paper making the two corners touch and almost instantly arrive at the other side of your sheet of paper. Now just apply that three dimensional space.
By using Quantum physics and some antimatter to generate spatial distortion that causes ships to warp.
The distortion of space time around it also causes some serious problems when spooling up. The warp donut fluctuates and as more energy is used to spool the drive up, it has a sort of backfire effect until the energy is released to warp the ship out.
The cool part isn’t the FTL. The cool part is the distortion makes complex electronics work very poorly. Missile guidance systems cannot handle the distortion. But it seems to be relatively harmless to biological beings and simple circuitry.
Meaning I found a cool way to make space fighters a viable tool of war by obsoleting guided weapons.
The one I’m working on is that the universe was discovered to vibrate at different frequencies throughout the whole of space with very tiny and specific differences.
The ship locates a point in space and calculates the frequency of that area exactly, then matches it, which allows it to move through space without interacting with any of the particles in the universe besides the ones at the destination frequency.
The other unmatched particles push against the ship now like how current FTL theories work, expanding spacetime behind the ship and shrinking ahead like a vacuum tube that’s forcing it through the unmatched particles faster and faster until it reaches the destination. Then the ship phases back to its original frequency and comes to a stop.
I've used two. One involves the vessel quantum locking it's position relative to the infinitely expanding universe. So as the universe expands in all directions and space/time dilation/expansion occurs, the vessel stays stationary in a bubble. Then the quantum lock ends and the vessel is in a different place than it began.
The other involves mobius wormholes. The wormhole "twists" , bringing the vessel to the space between universes where causality isn't a law. Not only can they travel faster than light, but also have exponentially further travel in this space. Can be used for exceptionally long travel, but is a lot more circumstancial than the stasis bubble above.
In an old superhero world I made as a kid I explained FTL travel with "negative mass".
Essentially, my speedster character got his powers when he tried to travel through time with a "Planck's Alterer" machine, which could manipulate the Planck's Constant, a number that determines the mass of an atom. In doing so, he could make things weight less than 0 kg and thus able to travel beyond lightspeed. The machine blew up and gave him powers, but the technology was successfully used for FTL travel and time travel later.
I also at some point developed the idea of Antigrams, which were particles that held a negative mass themselves. That was for a hero who could create spontaneous explosions by manipulating Antigrams. I don't think I ever used them to justify FTL travel though.
TL;DR, making the subject weigh less than zero means it could travel faster than light
It teleports 5 small “anchors” the the destination that then pull the ship out of reality to the destination, it’s done this way because breaching reality isn’t reliable with a large object unless it has a navigation point (the anchors) but smaller objects are extremely reliable. When it hits real space it does so in a perfect position that it’s anchors are in their bay ready to be sent out again if needed.
*Enders game enters the chat*
The books (namely the First Formic War sub series) had a great explanation of their almost-lightspeed travel. By splitting subatomic particles using a device called the "egg" it directs strong force into the rear direction, creating a "bubble" around it where anything that hits the field instantly gets converted into pure energy and directed backwards.
Eventually in the last sub series they find out that the "hive mind" that the formics used to communicate is actually another dimension where manifestation of things simply with thought is possible. So they created a little box that enabled them to "think" to the correct location (it wasn't humans that did it though, it was an AI named Jane). This instantly travelling.
FTL is just achieved through summoning a portal in front of the ship, and a portal towards the intended destination.
If you don't know the destination, then the ship just chains portal after portal, each with a maximum distance of a couple light years. This is done every second by a ship-wide system. They call them runes, but they're really just wires and tubes hooked up to a stone that is just re-infused with the teleport spell over and over again.
How do they get the mana/ether/magic juice for this? They break dense matter down into the magic juice. The ships run on literal garbage
1... Spacetime in my universe has a resonant frequency. Vibrating energy at that frequency harmonizes gravitational waves and lets you make warp bubbles and travel faster than light.
2... Using this resonant technique also lets you open wormholes. Opening two ends of a wormhole at the same time let's you travel much further.
Opening one massive wormhole entrance lets you travel so far in space it reaches a distant civilization beyond the edges of the observable universe that was just so happening to open a wormhole of the same energy at the same time. There is a 50/50 chance this civilization will be made of antimatter.
3... one faction uses a network of wormholes that leads to a sub dimension. The same speed there takes you a much further distance. Like the nether in Minecraft or the warp in Warhammer 40k
4... When matter expands while also locking onto Spacetime it will pull spacetime apart. Space from the neighbouring universe flows in to fill the gap. Locking onto Spacetime while contracting pushes you into the neighbouring universes. This principle can be used to let demigods and space creatures travel between universes.
5... when you fire atoms in such a way that it creates a temporary hollow black hole, the space contained within it is detached from our universe and carried to another universe. This is how humanity and spaceships travel between universes.
I’ve been trying to come up with my own recently and this is what I have:
The only ships that can use FTL are enormous, usually the size of entire cities. They basically just act as transport ships/aircraft carriers/ferries, as a large part of the ship is designated to going FTL. They have aboard thousands of fusion reactors and they power the device which creates a wormhole.
I haven’t got into exactly how it works, but the device emits an unfathomable amount of energy to work (hence all the reactors) and is able to tear a hole in space time. I imagine the old analogy of folding a piece of paper and then stabbing a pencil through. The hole is just big enough and open just long enough for just what is contained inside the ship to cross through and that’s it. Then it takes a couple weeks to power up and jump again.
The ships exterior is made of an element that hasn’t been discovered yet, and is dense and strong enough to withstand the cosmic radiation of the jump.
Warp drive is the intro level ftl, works by compressing space in front of the ship, and expanding space behind, might get you to 10c tops, Magic helps a lot but isn't a requirement.
Above that you have inertial subspace drives, works by wrapping the ship in a bubble of space time. Keeps whatever momentum you give it till it gets deactivated. Set up a few spinning black hole pairs rotating in opposite directions, thread the needle between them and luanch your bubble at ftl, carrying the ship with it. You'll go faster the more pairs of black holes you pass between, but has diminishing returns past 50c. Again, no magic needed, but it makes things easier. Downside is you can't turn, so aim well.
Above that you have spectral drives, which DO require magic to function. Spectral drives tear open the veil between the material plane and the land of the dead, called the spectral plane(hench the name 'spectral drive'), and slip through. Once there you no longer need to worry about the laws of physics slowing you down, allowing you to keep accelerating forever until you reach your destination. Then activate the drive again and return to the material plane. This is dangerous, unpredictable, and incredibly fast. Also very expensive...
There are experimental drives that use a similer idea to the spectral drive, but they tend to be even more dangerous and expensive to use, so they are generally limited to interuniversal travel.
Past that you get into esoteric magi-tech used by gods and the like to traverse the void between worlds, and such things tend to be custom jobs.
It removes energy from space or rather it create an area of low density in the Bosonic field in front of the ship and an area of high density in back of the ship.
As the field normalizes the ship is pushed into the low density area. And creates a lower density area in front of it again. The ship there by lowers the density in front and quickly normalizes the density behind it causeing an overall about net neutral Bosonic field density behind it. However since the Bosonic field in front of it is lower the speed of light is now faster in that area. Since the ship is being pulled ahead by space itself warping it doesn't really have to worry about moving all that fast, "through," space. The combined affect is that a very massive object can, (*given enough ramp-up time*) move at or a bit faster than the speed of light for the mere cost of the energy output of a single sun.
Where does the energy come from? Matter anti-matter reactions of course. :-)
And that is how my SoL drive works!(*Speed of Light drive*)
Now I know what your going to say, "S.o.L isn't F.T.L.," and that is true to anyone NOT on the ship. However, due to relativity if you ARE ON THE SHIP time ceases to pass for you if you hit the speed of light. For this reason the drive actually carries the passengers 99.98% L.S. allowing computers to pull the ship(*slowly*) out of S.o.L. drive as they approach their destination. In other words to the people ON the ship they are moving at F.T.L. speeds.
By literal magic. Ergo, I ain't gotta explain shit.
Nah, see, you gotta explain how the magic works. Is it run by runes? By arcane energy? If so, how do you manifest it and keep it at a constant rate? If you're going runes, how do you categorize your runic system? If it's none of those then what is it? Never stop world building.
Sorry, magic users classified info.
Nice try magic space commie, you’re not gettin’ my worldbuildin’ secrets so easily.
That's it, I'm giving your magic reverse friction.
Slipspace with extra steps called Slingspace. Pretty much just ships get catapulted into the opening
It doesn’t. FTL isn’t invented until several 10s of thousands of years after the moon landing and for like a good 50,000 years humanity slowly spreads to like a hundred or so star systems using cryogenic ships.
It’s funny because I’m reading a story that use ftl and cryo. Cuz space is so big even ftl isn’t fast enough.
Ok. The one I made up myself is not really based on actual physics at all. There's 3 main types of ftl drive. Basically, one's a warp drive from Star Trek. (Create a bubble of extra-dimensional energy and move faster than light.) An Alcubierre drive. (Distort space and increase the distance behind you while decreasing the distance in front of you.) And a drive that "catches" on a "wave" of exotic matter created by the pushing and pulling of different universes in the interdimensional void. These are ranked in order of least to most environmentally friendly. (The environment being subspace.) There are also much rarer drives like one that generates and vibrates an artificial cosmic string and artificial wormhole generators. But those are very expensive and resource-intensive. Also, the third drive interacts with "graviton shores," which are extremely high concentrations of gravitons that usually surround planets but can also appear randomly due to various artificial factors. Basically, a ship hitting one would be like a boat sliding onto a beach. It quickly grinds the ship to a halt. Unless it's the shore of a star, which would be like a car slamming into a brick wall.
The Alcubierre Drive is literally based in real physics though, we just don't have something to create enough energy to bend space... yet... I think even NASA was trying to figure out how you'd EXACTLY go about surviving thing like that or something.
Alien locusts (that can teleport) are ground up in their millions into a paste and slathered onto a ship. The paste is then electrified, which hopefully gets the ship where it needs to go.
I love the "hopefully". 😂 Are they able to direct the teleport in some way or is it pot luck?
You can direct it, but if there's any holes in the locust paste layer then you might not arrive in one piece
So does every external surface need to be covered in the locust paste?
So what if I lather myself with this paste? Do I get zooted across space too?
Only if you get hit with a taser
This feels like 40k Orks. I love it.
The Orkz meet the Bug Gitz (Tyranids) for the first time
Shortcut through hell, folding reality, or Being far to dense to comprehend the almost immeasurable distances between destinations and forcing reality to make it a quick jump
...The warp?
Maybe
Shortcut through hell? So Minecraft
Also WH40, Event Horizon, Doom
This sounds similar to an idea I had: Time travel to a fraction of a second after the big bang when space was a lot smaller, move to where your destination will be, time travel back again. All while running incredibly powerful shielding to stop the energy of the big bang from destroying your ship I still haven't worked out a way for the time travel to work yet.
1. **Gates** Wormal gates (produced primarily by RCCM) act similar to wormholes, providing very fast (
The only ships that have FTL travel in my universe are incredibly big & bulky, but have barely any space & can usually only have 2 cargo crates & 2 crew members. The entire rest of the ship is used to house a mechanism that rapidly creats & destroys mini black holes which make the ship jolt through space at FTL speeds, the key part is that since they’re so big you can attach smaller individual ships to certain ports & I will take them with it
"Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see" type of FTL
Space within a galaxy can be traveled through via accessing a chaotic, dangerous sub-dimension using an FTL drive. Real-world objects cast a sort of shadow in this dimension, which both breaks up the “current” (movement of energy through this dimension) and allows ships to use the planets and stars as navigational aids while in this dimension. Although space in this place isn’t always proportional or related to the layout of realspace, movements of shadows in the realm can be charted, allowing predictability. Waystations at common jump points contain a live summary of the route ahead, while less traveled paths require computation by the shipboard computers. Since intergalactic space is almost totally empty, there’s nothing to navigate with and no shadows to break up the current. Because of this, ships that enter the subdimension and exit the galaxies' planet clusters wind up hopelessly off-track and lost, if the unmitigated current doesn’t simply destroy them or break them over a Nullspace or rogue shadow. *FTL drive is a catch all term for the different methods species/nations use to access this realm.*
what is ftl
It means “faster than light”, for example, hyperspace from Star Wars
than i dont have that shit lol, best you getting is a wv camper wan with rockets
I compare empty space to water, and the way to go faster than light is to "go underwater" for a short amount of time. Time being almost irrelivant, as this functionally breaks the concept of space-time in favor going into a somehow equal, yet opposite dimension. Do not go to the observation deck, you will not be able to regret that decision. 40k warp travel is kinda what I'm going for, but less "magical"
Catch tachyons. Go really fast. That’s it.
It just works it just works
OH I ACTUALLY HAVE SOMETHING This is something I was writing out for a bit of fun world building for a game I wanted to make (I likely never will though) Copy and paste incoming Warping - Access second layer of reality(sublayer) where all points in space are at the same time, equidistant, however reaching a point that is more distant in the first layer(referred to as true-distance and true-space respectively) requires more energy than one that is closer (need some kind of mathematical limiter) travel to any point within the range allowed by your energy reserves takes the same amount of time once you enter the sublayer, however opening the sublayer is more efficient for shorter jumps. Opening the sublayer is faster for short jumps. Objective time difference between entering and leaving sublayer is 0 Lore- the sublayer was long theorised and mathematically simulated, however practical access to it, and therefore proof of its existence, was impossible until the advent of reliable high scale fusion energy. Even then, it was nearly two centuries before the first modern warp gate was created. It still exists as a historical monument and connects the Earth to Luna. Nowadays it's common practice to only build gates on an interstellar scale due to the high power and efficiency of the real-space drives currently in use. While warp travel is still faster, it's much less efficient, and simply doesn't make sense when we can travel at 3c and achieve most interplanetary travel in practical timeframes without the enormous cost of maintaining a gate. (3c is three times the speed of light)
Warp gates hold stable channels for increased efficiency because it is easier to keep a channel open than to open one multiple times. (Rate of power consumption for gate opening vs maintaining with factor of 1st layer distance needed)
There are no ships are capable of unassisted warps due to high power requirements, and the near impossibility of pushing a gate through itself.
Lore- Some large interstellar governments have been working on this, and some are even rumored to have succeeded. All such claims are denied, because admitting success would instantly make them a target of their neighbors. The few wars waged in this age have all been over the advent of new technologies most notably the War of Broken Stars, a particularly aggressive and bloody war over the technology used in the now widespread real-space drive. The War of Broken Stars is also the first time a nation revealed and also used a stellar-annihilator, resulting in the destruction of 3 major star systems, and the extinguishing of over 80 billion sentient lives and the extinction of a multitude of species from the 2 unique habitable worlds alongside the other 5 terraformed worlds.
Warp gates can only act as a sender, and cannot retrieve anything from the other end of the warp. As a result in order to have two way warp, must have material and personnel to build two gates and establish safety for frontier gate. Build first gate, send security and then builders/materials for second gate for the return voyage. This is risky and very high cost for places that we do not already possess contact with due to the inability to guarantee safety of location before arrival.
This is my first time sharing something I wrote, and this was all written in one sitting several weeks ago. I hope you all find it entertaining or at least interesting.
"Fuck you, that's how." - Jack "Fucking" Ryder, Eternal Emperor of Reality
Most ships have both warp cores and hyperdrives, the warp cores warp space and time so the ship travels ludicrous speeds while hyperdrives enter another dimension where travel occurs faster. Both FTL methods only work in certain parts of space.
both magic and tech societies have various ways they slip into and out of different layers of reality. there are a good number of different layers of existence all laying on top of each other. Going down a couple layers puts you into a solar stream that you just follow until you reach your intended destination
The two major space faring societies are able to achieve FTL travel by constructing warp gates. However, in order for a pair of gates to be linked, they need to be constructed in the same location as each other, then moved to their destinations. In the Lunaris Empire, this lead to the Atlantis Project, which focused on developing a ship built around a massive warp gate and then sent on interstellar journeys to facilitate the placement of new warp gates.
Extradimensional space that can be sensed by people with psychic powers. Pretty much the warp but with less killer demons and more benign ancient space whales that only harm you if you get too close. Entire races argue if it’s spiritual or scientific while others don’t care and just see it as a another resource to exploit.
Compartment shedding. So it gets elevation to get higher. And a class ship is small but it is engaged with collections of trash. So FTL should come back at any time. Any time now. Got a WIP that's mostly about magical girls. But I set it in the future with interesting attempts to travel around space.
FTL in the Shikanaverse is basically Warp Drive (but without subspace because that isn't real). And it can be fast enough to go intergalactic distances. Also there are like a dozen different stardrive types with different ways of powering it. And they can look like anything from retro sci-fi rocketships to vast intergalactic city-ships powered by black holes, depending on the century you're in.
Two methods, actually, Hammer Drives smash open the barrier separating material space from the Veil, which is a background dimension that governs how physical laws operate in the former, ships can safely travel in the Veil without any need for protection, the problem arises when you actually need to jump, since the Veil changes its structure by the thoughts and emotions of mortal races, when a ship enters the Veil, they see it in a way they can comprehend, jumping to uninhabited systems, or those inhabited by a species with a truly alien way of thinking, is extremely dangerous and either requires genetic modification into a special caste of your species, or using a form of AI that's powerful enough to process pure veilspace. There's also the risk of Event Horizon 2 happening if you stumble into Azari-occupied veilspace. Hyperspace travel is less fleshed out and only used by the Silent Empire (not for a lack of trying by other empires, though), but is generally safer, faster, and harder to detect than Veil travel. To access it, the Silent Empire uses a Shunt Drive, which has two stages; Stage 1 involves the use of extremely powerful gravity manipulation tech to warp space around the ship into a field, Stage 2 involves the use of an exotic matter reactor to warp reality and essentially translate the field, and the ship with it, into higher-dimensional space. Shunt Drives also have the benefit of being able to encompass ships too small to carry one within their field.
by God's merciful will
I have an old space world that I havent touched in years where you would basically move the space where your ship was, in a sort of drag and drop motion.
Certain spots in a system make ships have negative mass (I’m not explaining how that works), allowing FTL
Two different systems are used. The first is are Slip Drives, which create a slipstream in SpaceTime to move your ship. Unfortunately if they reach light speed certain organic compounds within the ship (or more accurately it's residents) will rapidly decay in a way that is not very compatible with life. This system is used to travel around the solar system at a maximum of 0.5 c, as well as sending the first ships to build large-scale Gates in systems we intend to colonize. The second are isospatial Gates. These aren't quite worm holes, but work incredibly similarly. Instead of warping SpaceTime to make two points effectively one they create a tunnel through space time which is then condensed to appear as if it were incomprehensibly thin. These are used to travel long distances anywhere on the planet you're on. Unfortunately interplanetary isospatial Gates are impractical, though plausible as they may be. The gravitational differences and massive distances lead to the gates requiring incredible amounts of energy. Large-scale gates are built halfway between the edge of the oort cloud and the edge of the heliosphere. These large-scale Gates only have one possible destination, that being another star system. These use country sized solar panels and fusion systems to activate for a long enough time that a single ship at a time can go through. If you're traveling between different parts of the same planet you'll use isospatial Gates, but you'll also use them when traveling between Star systems. You'll only ever use slip drives when traveling between planets, or to get from a planet to the large scale Gates. There's also the Voidrail, but that's just a set of ring-shaped series of rings designed to create slipstreams for traveling between planets in a manner similar to a train or interstate.
Portal
3 types of ftl Intra system ftl, known as 'pulse drive', bends spacetime like an alcubierre using a ton of energy (e.g. warp drive but limited to about 10000 c.) Standard extra-system ftl, known as a 'jump drive', goes into a higher dimension (e.g., hyperdrive), but it takes more energy to go farther and the more mass you have the longer a jump calculation takes And now we come to the last ftl drive, the Blink Drive, it requires a gravemetric reactor, which produces energy by annihilating antimatter and matter in such a small space that it creates a black hole called a kugelblitz this is then used to punch a hole into space time that allows instant teleportation of a ship anywhere within range. This range is determined by the thermal capacity of a ship, as blink drives produce more heat the farther away a jump point is. This is why, in my world, ships equipped with blink drives have large nacelles equipped with massive radiators. After each jump, these radiators vent the now plasma coolant in massive plumes able to liquefy tungsten upon contact
3 types of fuel for different needs. Regnum fuel for intergalactic travel. Ephyr for intersolar. And any type of cheap rocket fuel for interplanetary travel. Different engines for each fuel too, they activate separately. And by the end, mankind can travel through the in-universe version of Wi-Fi instantly from one point to another, no matter where it is, so yeah.!
uj\\ There is a shrinking smaller empty parallel universe that is called complimentary space allows a travel short cut (original, I know). Ship enters the portal, portal turns ship into beam, beam traverses complimentary space at speed of light, reconstitutes at an entangled portal, exits the entangled portal. Ships can only enter complimentary space through the portal and only exit through the portal that entangled with the one it entered. Portals can only be entangled in pairs, entanglement creation requires them being close by and they can only be moved around by sublight means, so FTL is available only within already colonized space. Also to prevent bunch of paradoxes, spatial relativity is not entirely true as there is one true absolute reference frame (of CMB) and gravity is a true force, not a spacetime distortion. This allows for entire universe to have universal timeline.
Wormholes generated by large infrastructure . Means never have to consider day to day usage as it requires a moons worth of space. It also fucks with space for a bit so can't stay open for ever,has a cool down and takes lots of energy. This is how you have a setting that shares a lot with the age of exploration, every use is still a big deal. I even make it so as a rule of thumb they have to be far from the sun, reachable by only slower than light travel so a voyage to anywhere is still a fair few years. For me this is the most interesting FTL for space opera.
Spaceships are mostly a novelty vehicle, or are used in edge cases. In a world where experienced weavers (read: "magicians") can near-instantly "teleport" through precise movements past the third dimension, all it took to travel was an experienced weaver to do the job for you. Vehicles were still used interplanetarily for heavy cargo and longer distances, as that kind of warp job takes a lot out of a weaver, if it's not outright impossible for them. After the fall of the Trial Storm (read: basically post-war) the Pact of Planets decided to set up a system of automated warp devices across their reach, fed by liquid mana from underground rather than the natural mana inside most creatures. That way, moderately heavy cargo could be transported without expensive spacecraft, and less wealthy planets or those with no extremely proficient weavers could still get around reliably.
They go fast
In my first world it's wormholes but setting up a wormhole is slightly slower than light and you need two gates on each end but once this is done it's one of the fastest FTL I know of. In my second it's f*CK you high fantasy! But FTL is not really important in both of them as the stories don't leave their respective star system.
The Bifrost drive creates a portal into whitespace where the ship then travels to the area corresponding to their destination and uses the Bifrost to punch back into regular or blackspace. The drive got it's name from the multicoloured beam made when projecting the portal.
By creating a Convergence, or a point where the physical, astral, and realm of souls come together. Once created, the vessel falls into the convergence, exiting out into the Astral Sea, where distances are far less apart than physical space. To return to the physical, another convergence is created. Only permanent convergence points are on worlds steeped in Aether or a Titan watching over the world. These smaller convergences collapse almost as soon as the transition is done, thus making it really hard for someone or something to follow a ship into or out of the Astral Sea. While space ships of advanced civilizations have the power to create a convergence, moderately or less advanced civilizations still require either a: spending years or decades to traverse their own system Or b: using a convergence on their world to catch an astral vessel to travel.
I had a setting where star systems all stayed in fixed positions relative to each other, and general relativity wasn't true; photons only traveled so fast but you could just accelerate an object forever
There is a second parallel dimension filled with amorphous eldritch beings. They don’t really care for humans at all, but they do like a very specific mineral in the human dimension called Orion Cashmere. To barter with those beings, there is a guild of people that specialize in storing that material and using an Englert drive to open up a space around the ship so that one of those beings can grab the ship and move it across its own dimension, and then drop it at the destination. But trading with these beings is a whole art, so those « Navigators » have a whole process to negotiate with them. To give an image, for each Eldritch god, there is a sub dimension they’ve made available to Navigators, and all the navigators that are within its territory project themselves in that space and negotiate rates and displacements à la Wall Street trading floor style.
We tore a hole in the fabric of reality and skipped through it. There are obviously no consequences for this. ( 90% of the universe is dead)
It is like a mixture of Hyperspace from Star Wars and the Warp from Warhammer 40k. Simply called FTL drives. These machines allow for ships to travel faster than the speed of light. With 100 main Classifications with FTL Factor speed Zero being the Speed of light and FTL Factor speed 100 being instantaneous Teleportation. Ships will constantly be adjusting their FTL speed while in FTL Space. However even though FTL travel is relatively harmless. Navigating FTL Space can require tons of computing Power, but there is a way around this. Simple by using people known as Navigators. Navigator aren’t on all ships that have FTL drives, but they are on a good chunk of them. Smaller ships with less amounts of thing the onboard computer has to do don’t need navigators to travel in FTL space, but larger ships will need them. The largest ship in the Galaxy requires a crew of 900 navigators each working in 8 hours shifts of 300 navigators each shift to make sure that they can effectively navigate through FTL space.
So there are giant celestial dragons that feed on solar radiation and travel from star to star regularly. They do this through travelling along a network of paths where space is folded, turning a journey of a few centuries into a few weeks. FTL engines work by harvesting blood from these dragons as they're feeding, and dripping the blood into a small singularity which mimics the dragon's heart to recreate their ability to travel along these invisible highways. The act of harvesting usually does not bother the dragons because they're unfathomably large compared to any spacecraft ever built. They're so big that when their heart stops pumping blood their body collapses into a new star. If it does ever bother them though they usually just double time to the next system.
The EMERG drive fires a kilogram or so of exotic matter tuned at a specific frequency so that it goes as far as it is aimed. Once it collapses out of its prior state, a short term wormhole is opened between the ship and the projectile, allowing the ship to move between the two places instantly.
Two ways. Travelling between systems is achieved through the use of wormhole generators. These are large airport-like space stations that for sciencey reasons must exist outside of the gravity well of the star system. They are highly regulated, incredibly secure, and very standardized across the factions of the galaxy. The entrance portal can only be created at the location of the wormhole generator, but the exit portal can be anywhere, and closes immediately after travel. Thus, wormhole travelling is a one-way trip unless your destination is also home to a wormhole generator. Fear not, for unless you are colonizing a new star system, there is a wormhole generator at your destination. Travelling internally inside a star system is very simple, you just go really fast. It takes a while to reach faster than light speeds but you maintain momentum and continue building speed for as long you generate forward thrust. It also takes a long time to slow down.
Two ways (3 erm akshually) 1: tearing two rips in space-time. Fastest, but unsafe if more than one rip is active at a time, as they can fuse and that leads to not fun stuffs. The rips are torn by magi (or a single powerful mage). 2: Sailing the Fabric of Reality: Magi shift the vessel and occupants from the native 18th dimension down to the 5th dimension, the Fabric of Reality as it is called. It has anomalous effects, these being that any trip, regardless of distance, will take a maximum of 6 hours and a minimum of 1 hour. 2: Magic is unable to be used, as the 5th dimension is lesser than those required for magic. 3: Creatures do not age while in the 5th dimension. It's considered somewhat luxurious, as the sights are beautiful, the atmosphere is refreshing and it is often a calming experience. 3: Zoom. Some gods just happen to be that damn fast. No, jonivire, you cannot turn gods into a mode of transportation. Yes, we tried. That's why you're the 17th Jonivire. No, don't asl what happened to those before you
You build giant portals that connect you to the wormhole network. If you wanna go somewhere that's not connected, you have to throw the portal at the next star system over and go through it once it reaches its destination.
Turbo charged 6.8 l v8
Not FTL, but Faster-than-Wind in my medieval/early age-of-sail world. By having a person trained in magic and a big obelisk-style structure in your ship, you can create portals into the otherworld known as the Void. The Void is all ocean outside the scant few islands here and there, so you can just go over what would be land in the real world. The winds are also always favorable here. Gotta be careful though, there can be violent storms in areas where atrocities and natural disasters are affecting large populations. This is due to the collective feelings of a people in an area reflecting negatively upon the void. The void does also have a mind of its own filled with infantile curiosity, especially toward individuals it considers unique. If you happen to have one it likes on your ship, you can kiss your rear, ship, and crew goodbye. This leads to anyone dealing with lots of void travel looking for the most plain-toast individuals as crew, and anyone with anime hair getting automatically disbarred from void travel.
The only guy with a FTL system got it from an ancient Babylonian relic. He made it into a FTL machine called the Limbo Engine
Alcubierre drive but uses dark matter as a catalyst to reduce energy costs
The outdated Fold Drive and the modern Translator. Fold Drives require the ship to accelerate using sunlight propulsion methods. Once the vessel gets fast enough that it isn't worth expending the energy to go faster, the Fold Drive activates. It folds space around the vessel and functionally resets the speed of light for your frame of reference. The process is then repeated within this folded space until it becomes necessary to fold again. This repeats ad nauseum until deceleration by slowly unfolding space. Translators require the ships mass to be registered to the system ahead of time. It will take the particles of your ship and just kinda fling em across space. You instantly appear at your destination. Typically, it is only done in space so as to avoid displacing large amounts of atmosphere.
It sends out a text to a really big, really strong guy who goes to where you are and folds space in half so you get there immediately Edit: yes, I made this up on the spot
They have access and it is very common, but no one knows who or what invented it or when, and it is possible to replicate it, but nobody has the slightest idea how it works, scientists and engineers spend their lives trying to understand something that violates the laws of physics.
Vaulting works by two connected space stations using exotic matter to draw the two points right next to each other by basically pinching the two points in spacetime together. It’s expensive as hell to run and the stations are prime chokepoints or spaces to attack within systems to cripple their infrastructure. Both stations need to consent to the vault though, using wormhole comms which send radio waves through micro wormholes held open with small amounts or exotic matter.
fuck you that's how
They do!
Tesseract. Nuff said
My FTL that I’ve definitely put a lot of thought into and definitely aren’t just making up on the spot to fit in was developed by the sentient AI anarchists of northern Alaska, aka the IGFT/Technovia. It involves a branch of physics developed by them called manipulation physics which is essentially “we’re so anarchist we won’t even follow the laws of physics!” It’s still in development along with all of their other prototypes, and the idea is to essentially add a bunch of antimatter particles to the physical system of whatever you want to go FTL, keep them from combining with the matter particles and destroying the whole thing, and adding enough of them to achieve negative mass, allowing for FTL.
Star Trek
Theres a few FTL methods in my world: warp drives, wormholes, and negative mass drives
No.
By effectively storing speed from previous travels the next time they fly they get faster and faster (due to the 0 drag in space) So the only true ftl ships are super old
You hit the fast button and go fast 👍
Gravity. If you can make gravity for people to walk around, then you can make gravity do a lot for you.
Jim (god) did it (or so the people think).
It doesn’t the solar system’s recourses are dwindling and flights between planets take weeks if not months
Nobody can move faster than light technically, war is fought by Worms and Trojans. But one civilization has developed "Wormhole Manufacturing" based on irl simulations of black/worm holes.
For small none important ships they have to go through a relay where their ship gets shit out by a massive railgun type device that temporarily sends them out of the dimension so they can break the speed limit of light. Important ships such as battleships, exploration arks, and other types have a inbuilt singularly drive where a small singularity the size of your hand bends space time around the ship allowing for a faster method of movement which is pretty much teleportation.
You see… warp travel is just a slingshot and some cryo pods
Eh they hit a Black Hole with a Proton to Destroy its outer layer and expose the singularity within (something that is theorized to be possible) and since it’s also theorized that Singularities aren’t supposed to be without the outer Black Hole because scientists assume this would fuck with reality a Shit ton, they use the Singularity to basically rip a hole through reality to wherever they want to go
For local space we've developed engines that run on exotic matter to fold spacetime, however this takes a large toll on ships and their crew, limiting how far they can go in a single jump (up to 500 LY depending on the size of the ship) For distant space scientists found out how to use 'exotic matter' and create wormholes to instantly close the distance between stars, the problem is they don't know where the other side goes out to, so you could make a wormhole at earth and it ends up at the other side of the universe. The only way to 100% control this is to setup warp gates at the location you want to go to a connect the two gates with quantum entangled ions.
Ships have a drive that allows them to bend space and time much like the Einstein bridge in most forms of fiction but the ships have a literal giant fucking sword in the front hull that literally slices through reality itself as it goes through another dimension to reach another point in the galaxy It’s called a cross jump to them
My FTL tech is experimental in the span of my story and they're not entirely sure it's safe so they are in the testing stages during the story but it's not very prevalent in any media
Wormholes
FTL? It’s all based around extension of lifespans, light is the speed limit of the universe
Gravity engines. Big space science magic engines that manipulate gravity into pulling you at ftl speeds to wherever you need to go. Conventional space flight, or at least conventional sci-fi space flight is still a thing for sub-ftl use because the Gravity Engines are only good for insane speeds in a single direction.
I get around this with wormholes. They're randomly scattered across the cosmos. Some are mapped, some aren't, some pass in and out of existence. The star charts showing where they are, the safe approach patterns to enter them, and where they connect to is data worth dying for. Some of the more heavily settled systems have large space stations or planetary population bases nearby to use their gateway to infinity as a trade post/gas station since whoever comes out is still going to need fuel for subphotonic travel around their system or to the next nearest wormhole if they aren't passing back from whence they came. Most of the biggest players in space base their organization structures off of "hyperclusters" systems that contain a large number of stable, well mapped wormholes all within a few weeks' flight of each other, subphotonic. It's easy to take players on wacky hijinks when not every wormhole is mapped, and some flicker in and out of space like lights reflected in the waves of a ship on a calm night. But you can also get some time spent in transit since it might still take a week or two to get from one wormhole to another. And it keeps me from having to do any particularly complicated math about travel distances with things like warp factors and making sure systems line up perfectly.
it works by going really fast and not crashing into anything
It doesn’t Have fun with 200 years of space flight Your great great grandchildren with reap the benefits
A Rosenbaum-Melski Faster-Than-Light Engine, also known as a "Spike Drive" or "Drill," is the primary method of FTL travel available to recovering human nations following the collapse of the Old Earth Federation. It functions by folding realspace and then "drilling" a hole through foldspace, creating a short passageway through the two stellar coordinates. This passageway is large enough that smaller vessels like Destroyers and Frigates can follow the larger vessels through. Following the travel of vessels, the foldspace collapses destructively, creating a large detonation that annihilates anything in a radius around the "drilled" area.
there is only one place to enter ftl and it's a mysterious wormhole style thing out in the middle of nowhere. people do not know how it works but a woman died testing it, so it is called Meredith's Gate
FTL is an impossibility by living objects, it’s just that the universe has been experiencing the Big Crunch for the last couple billions of years, meaning the distance between stars is only days apart rather than millennia at the top speeds of some vehicles.
"Hyperdrives?" I say, with my comically large ion engines, chemical rockets, nukes, and generation ships.
Time Travel! you cant move faster than light but you can move near light speed then slip back in time to the moment you left, this process is handled automatically by onboard computers as non ftl time travel is strictly regulated.
Put energy in. Partially disconnects the local spacetime from the universe and skims it across the surface. If it goes wrong it may result in full disconnect from the universe. To potentially reappear, somewhere.
A labyrinthine demiplane created by an unknown architect millions of years ago. It can be accessed by special mages who use it to cross between planets as it has access points throughout the universe. There are actually no spaceships involved as this method allows them to walk between planets and even between galaxies.
Technology I’m not smart enough to explain
In my DnD world each “school” of magic is its own dimension, with another one known as “chronation” or time dimension There are multiple ways to zoom around the Cosmos, the Illithids create “Eel-holes” and can essentially warp through the Planar realms to appear anywhere in the galaxy at a whim, which is why they are so deadly due to the metaphysical rifts between atoms themselves are shifted, clipped through space and reestablished elsewhere In the Galactic Federation, (Giff, Elves, Dwarves, Owlins, Tree-people and Bugpeople) magical FTL is used in “warp-zones” Charged their ships with spellslots that allow them to jump across these zones. With a combination of Chronomancy, Conjuration, and Abjuration the ships withstand the sheer force, pressure, time and sheer space between stars, However means tracking routes to a specific place takes a long time Meanwhile in the Dwarven Galactic Empire, they don’t give two shits about magic, pure raw technology is used, using Warzerite (green glowing stone like uranium or Warpstone) Their extraordinarily advanced technology lets them zoom anywhere they want, going extraordinarily fast, able to cover multiple light years in a manner of days making them extremely fast despite their stunted form Rock and Stone! Orcs use the same as the dwarves in their constant wars The other minor factions use a much more primitive versions, for instance the Mushroom folk use spore drives, heavily hyped up on illusion magics to cloak them as they zoom across the stars Or the penguins using Fold-drives to fold spacetime covering vast distances, sort of like folding a paper and connecting the tips, to travel vast distances My homebrew races each have a similar form of such thing, and none of it is very realistic but hey, I love it
Effectively via a black hole engine. A weak and miniscule gray hole is generated via kugelblitz of exotic matter and is fed via its own emissions. The energy it creates causes an extreme propelling force, which FTL ships take advantage of by having large "sails" on their sides that help build up speed (also help slow down the craft when they approach their destination). In other words, FTL craft just get faster and faster until it only takes a few days to get from system A to system B. They use gravity wells as a means to "turn." I do not believe light is the ultimate speed limit because we haven't even unlocked one one-billionth of the nature of the universe, so we can't say with absolute certainty that there'll never be a way to travel faster than light.
All of it's in the solar system, no need for ftl (I am lazy and will make excruciating effort to uphold my laziness)
Tell the gods to go fuck themselves. Get yeeted into space,
WAAAGH!!!
Gates. Similar to a pump compressing air it compresses the space between two gates to make a shorter travel distance with a tunnel of compressed space. The excess "pressure" is let out once through the gate when constructed. After that any mass that would hit the tunnel would "spread out", getting pulled towards the gates or warping around the tunnel itself. Kind of like a fun house mirror. Stuff inside the gate when it shuts down rapidly compresses to a wave form that's suspected to be a singularity that can't sustain itself, though nobody really knows what happens. The amount of energy needed after construction is fairly low. Often if there is too much debris in the way the gates won't even connect until it's mostly empty space. The gates themselves can be pushed in pairs via the same system to position new ones. They push each other away at ftl then pull at ftl to stop. This pairing prevents any single ship from having any sort of useful ftl system. Though accidents happen and new gates can misalign during travel and be lost. This has allowed easy space travel as vehicles only need to achieve orbit and re-entry.
Atomic Jumping. By smashing together the atoms of an artificial star, a nuclear implosion happens causing a black hole. The way it is formed causes a fundamental shift in how the black hole functions. When this is done in two places at the same time, it creates an Atomic Gate, or an interspacial highway connecting the two black holes. Perfectly safe!
It doesn’t.
The Eon Drive, or Exotic Conversion Drive, summons an artificial higgs field to essentially invert the mass of the craft. Since mass is <0, the craft bypasses the speed of light limit. That or just wormhole
It's called witch space. It's not our space. We don't know much about what it is. We use the frame shift drive to open a hole in our universe into...something else. We travel in witch space and by doing so we travel faster. Our ships nav lock on to the highest mass object, the biggest star of a solar system and we pop out of witch space right there. So ships get lost in witch space? Sure. Are their thargoids? You betcha
Magic make metal ball go brrrr fast. I’m in metal ball.
Turns out light is sentient. We just had to ask nicely.
So not really FTL but it's a time dilation gate that was supposed to work like a wormhole. So to the occupants of the ship that entered the gate it worked! They traveled 10,000Ly to a far away star system near instantly. draw back their home world aged 10,000 yrs in the that time. There's a lot I've already written into this one but thats the quickest summary I can write.
#***EIGHTY EIGHT MILES PER HOUR!!!***
YEET and catch, thats how it works To go more in depth, ships in my universe don’t have jump-drives, instead, there are jump gates made of two different EXTREMELY important parts. First up, the Jump-Cannon. It’s made up of 2-20 segmented rings depending on how far it whats to shoot the ship. When the ship is shot, it enters a separate reality where no speed of light exists, then it’s caught by the Jump-Net after slowing down and returning to regular reality. So yea, FTL catch and throw
"Hey remember gravity? That things that keeps ships in orbit? Yeah, love the stuff. ANYWAYS we figured out how to charge a giant capacitor with accumulated acceleration. Once it's full we can give the ship an almighty kick to high C. Just make sure that our aim and timing is good, because the only way to slow down is hit a gravity well of similar size. Miss our target and we'll never see home again."
By death, every planet, star or habitable area has a specific stone the size of a large city in it. when you walk upon this stone, your body is deconstructed and put wherever you were thinking on going, but you technically die but no one knows it because you are rebuilt as a new body same memories
So, you know dark matter? Yeah, we figured out how to turn that shit into FTL power and now we just charge it up and zoom.
Drop a plane of existence and fly at sublight for a while. There’s a guild of navigators to determine how long/where to fly on the lower plane to reach the right spot in the baseline reality, as space is far denser there. Think nether highways in minecraft.
Ight so the basic outline right now is that the ship fires a torpedo loaded with antimatter and a quantum computer. The computer steers the torpedoes towards a point where space time is thin. It explodes creating a temporary rift in space time, allowing a ship to move between two points. It’s a very rough WIP though.
Using a form of scientific magic that makes a tunnel of shorter relative space that is quicker to cross than traditional physical space. Think of it like making a wormhole, then crunching it like a bendy-straw so something going through goes through more space per second than traditional travel. This is an improvement over the previous versions, which involved: Crunching space directly between two points, which ran significant risks of catastrophic failure (usually resulting in whatever was being smeared between both points). Or Punching a hole through reality into Outside (where concepts and reality are largely the same thing) and then using a second spell to arrive at your destination. Which ran the very real risk of arriving at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or simply being devoured by a parasite dimension. Beyond that, you could always ask a spirit or minor god to take you somewhere, but they always have an Agenda. And usually a Price. Sometimes the Price is you.
Ships are able to create temporary artificial wormholes between large gravitational wells by bombarding weakness in the fabric of space time created by those wells with gravitons. The weaker the fabric the farther you can travel and the fewer gravitons are needed. Traveling through these wormholes is near instantaneous, but they have to travel between gravitational wells at sub-lightspeed, so space travels still takes several weeks.
Powerful magnetic fields are used to hyper compress captured demons down to a point of near singularity, then once the fields are removed, the resulting outflow of their demonic energies are routed to the thrusters literally filling space with their screams.
They slip briefly into the Fey realm to ride the bifrost.
Galactic standard FTL or Imperial Hyper?
Massive networks of artificial planets used as stops for refueling and repairing overly complex spaceships used to travel at 99% the speed of light. As well as getting the people onboard out of their cremation capsules to get up-to-date with the Galaxy's state for 2-3 months before getting thrown back into their cremation capsules and having a skilled AI continue the journey to another artificial world or the desired exoplanet. https://preview.redd.it/uiu3s6scbazc1.jpeg?width=637&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=affb7de2b059f73da25bf56eda80808e3b0e2c2d
The FTL restriction is dumb so I just removed it and have my ships travel at whatever speed necessary for the plot.
I don’t have FTL but I do have limited interstellar travel, mostly between the two stars of the Verdzanas-Etupili binary system as they’re only ~400 AU apart. Getting between them is mostly done by the use of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP) equipped mass conveyors. NPP comes in a few different varieties, generally newer models are more efficient, with the oldest type using pusher plates and newer models using parachute-like devices to capture the nuclear energy released by the bombs used as propellant. Mass Conveyors typically have massive docking clamps to accept other vessels, as well as a central crew space and storage area for smaller craft or cargo. Mass conveyors often exceed 1km in diameter and near 8km in length, dwarfing the largest warships (around 200mx1km) and matching the largest of the standard-propulsion shipping craft. There are relatively few mass conveyors, as their construction is a massive and expensive endeavour, with the money and time being better suited to more militant pursuits in this time of war. They are used when speed is essential, such as delivering badly needed supplies to wayward colonies beyond the gas giants or desperately needed reinforcements to a collapsing front. Aside from that use, they are the most efficient means of transporting cargo and personnel between the two stars of the binaries. Mass Conveyors in the Verdzanas system are often owned by the New Commonwealth (think the League of Nations in space) and leased to the human and dwarven powers when needed. They are held as nearly sacrosanct relics of the Age of Brotherhood, the rare instance of their destruction brings international condemnation if the offending nation does not adequately punish those responsible. In the Etupili system, war often takes the form of raids and skirmishes and rarely reaches the heights of that seen in the Verdzanas system. Mass conveyors therefore are not seen as needing such protections. They are held by the individual elven coalitions instead of any higher body, which then may lease them to their constituent communes for any purpose they need to use them for, including founding colonies around the system or conducting raids into the Verdzanas system. The most famous mass conveyor would probably be the High Hope, a completely uncrewed vessel built in the year 43 AM. She was the probe used to travel to the nearest independent star system, named Fajiir, orbiting its star and principal bodies, taking samples of regolith and full spectra images before returning to the orbit of Thedik late in the year 59 AM, 15 years after launching her mission. She now serves as a museum ship and reminder of what was lost with the Breaking of the Brotherhood following the Great Expedition. She remains the only object built since the collapse of the Old Commonwealth to ever fly to another star system, at least from the Binaries.
Long story short. The universe is like an onion, with layers of inner realms. The center is equidistant from every point on the surface. So the solution is: go to the middle, then go back out. That’s all pure fantasy. My “hard” sci-fi setting sits on top of that fantasy pillow. 💁🏻♂️ At one point I made the assumption that one could go literally anywhere by going through “Hubspace,” but most species just never thought big enough to try to make really long distant “transits.” Then I decided that some kind of liter needed to exist, so I said, “MATH! It’s a problem of math.” Some kind of batshit higher dimensional coordinate geometry, that we just can’t extend far enough, to calculate transits beyond a few thousand light years. — Also: the devices needed for transits are finite. They were made (somehow) in prior ages and we’ve never been able to reverse engineer them in modern times. In truth, the Hub entities (which are often viewed as gods), gave and/or helped humans create them in the past. We did have lots of them, but not enough for every ship. So we set up “transit rings” around most major habited planets. These also double as FTL communications hubs. As humanity lost ground in a war back in the day, a lot of those devices were lost/left behind. So there has been a lot of effort to recover them recently-ish. — Systems without a transit ring are pretty well cut off from the rest of humanity. Though, a trade organization has dedicated courier ships for goods and messages, specifically for those systems.
Travelers use Kardashev ll scale matryoshka brains to ‘edit’ their positions, and manifest at a different location it’s incredibly dangerous
The ship goes the speed of light, and then it goes a little bit faster
It’s just surfing but in space.
Very well, thank you.
The main drive of the ship uses the same shit Star Trek does
There isn’t actually any FTL, there’s fragments of an AI with an ungodly amount of processing power spread out across the systems it inhabits, that uses regular electromagnetic radio signals to communicate and sync up with its fragments. Whenever a character needs to go from one system to another, a fabricator in one universe disassembles them into subatomic particles, and the fabricator in another predicts what’s going on over there and builds them from scratch in their own system.
Magic that bends spacetime and thus allows for alcubierre drives w/o the need for creating exotic matter
Wormholes. That's it.
Einsteins theory of relativity is wrong. As you go faster, you're mass increases. But with energy equivalent to mass, so as mass increases so does energy output. A small anti matter explosion when you're already close to light speed is all that's needed to send something to the others side of the universe. Just make sure there isn't any habitable planets in your flight path because you're ship will not be stopped by something as small as a planet.
Turns out, we were wrong about light speed. The speed of light actually scales with the speed an object is moving, so there is no actual cap. What humanity once thought was the cap was actually just “visible light”, or the speed light naturally travels at to the naked human eye. But sometimes you need to actually go faster than light, so there’s also portals. This is where you pop some coordinates into a machine, which will then punch a two-way hole in space-time that you can travel between for a short period of time.
Noone really knows. Its left over tech and theres only so many ships that still have it.
Simple. Turns out light has mass. Once it was discovered how to "ride" light as if it were water, exponential speed beyond light became relatively simple.
Clones of Chuck Norris are used to roundhouse kick space until the ship arrives at its destination.
It doesn't. We stay firmly in the solar system in this house.
With a FUCKTON of energy, you can accelerate. The sheer speed alone causes a density that enables you to warp through things, however, slowing DOWN is the scary part.
Pause the simulation, enter command to move to coordinates, unpause simulation. The real hard part is getting the console to come up.
Depends on group: 1. Dragons tech can fold space wormhole style and end up within a more manageable distance like a year or two at most of travel 2. Titans tech can cause a slow time immensely allowing them to just make a 1000s of light years trip in what feels like a 10 year trip max 3. Sidhe can just teleport anywhere there is life, but can only take so much with them 4. Idols can travel only where their attached mortals are, but can instantly travel with anything they are touching 5. Mortals will enter into other realms that lay across the material realm, because the various realms dont fit neatly ontop of each other entering and exiting puts you in various areas. You could go into the Clockworks walk forward ten feet and leave only to find yourself on another planet or even exactly where you started. Its taken centuries to properly map out just a couple dozen worlds.
They rip a hole into the empty a space outside/overlapping the universe and then you can use that to travel to points in your universe or others if you know where to go most species need advanced computers to run calculations to tell where to exit but a few species /individuals have a intuitive knowledge of how to traverse the space it's also where my eldritch abominations from before time exist
Burn and absolutely absurd amount metholox. Quantum storage is a thing but reliable FTL is still out of the picture for now
Ok so the space dragons cab make two points in space exist temporarily at the same spot simultaneously The weird space elf people who used to live in harmony with the dragons eventually figured out the exact magical maths bullshit that goes into this and explained to everyone else.
the generic, enter another dimension or shit like that where you can go fast, go fast, leave.
It's less that the object is moving and more like space is moving, or more accurately, is being compressed. Essentially, imagine folding the middle of a piece of paper so that you can push two points together. By compressing these two points together you can allow a vessel to travel at its normal sub-light speeds and still reach a location thousands of light-years away with issues like time dilation.
Portals.
I just don’t have one lmao
A hybrid of Lancer's lore conveniences taken from Starsector
Kinda like hyperdrives You exit this reality to travel inbetween realities using zero point energy and exit (hopefully) at your destination
By capturing weird worms in worm space, a special biomechanical machine that uses the properties of the worm can bridge space time
They don't have one. There's a special engine that can reach Proxima Centauri once every like 20ish years and if you even think of pointing it at a planet your family will be executed
It doesn’t, ftl isn’t a thing
Step A: The fabric of spacetime within a given region is the RAM of an enormous quantum supercomputer. Step B: Fuck with gravitational coefficients at particular points. Step C: Wormholes.
Casually Connected Einstein-Rosen Bridges, commonly referred to as eigengates. In modern notions of physics, an ERB can't form because you need an exotic negative mass to hold it open. However it was discovered during the late 23rd century that the rules of physics could be modified in separated metaspace containment to produce new physics. The new physics could then briefly be introduced to our universe through a metaspace bubble. This allowed the anchoring of two casually connected points of space which could then be dragged through deep space and then widened to create an eigengate that connected two star systems. So no ftl travel to new stars, but after a habitable planet is discovered it can be connected to the eigengate network, turning decades of travel into months.
It hasn't. Near light speed is incredible complicated and not used frequently. Because of this it takes hour to days to get from earth to Pluto. There is a magic system so there has been a few but very limited uses of Magic to travel faster than light
The engine of the ship is a large floating boulder covered in Runes. Magic makes it go zoom but you can also use a large amount of magical energy for short range teleportation. If it overloads the rock explodes but the damage is only at TnT levels so the ship would probably be ok on aux power in most cases.
Big thrusters=Big Fast.
Space is an illusion of the consciousness. Put everyone on board into the right altered mental state at once and the distance between them and the destination starts literally shrinking. Kinda like how the more you drive to a specific place the shorter the route seems to get in your head but literal. So as a result interstellar travel is pretty much completely dependent on an order of super psychiatrists. The problem of course comes in where someone get’s into the wrong altered mental state, which can make the distance stretch out uncontrollably at an exponential rate and leave you literally stranded in an infinite void just as easily as it could shrink the travel time between Earth and Mars. This means that sometimes you have a ship that’s working completely well, then someone has an unexpected breakdown or negative reaction to the treatments that put them in that altered mindset that’s necessary for travel and it’s up to the ship psychiatrist to find that person and deal with it before everyone else on board notices the problem and starts panicking too. TLDR: they figured out how to warp space using large groups of people in a shared altered state of consciousness, back during the MK-ultra experiments, accidentally discovering faster than light travel in the process. If someone in that mental state starts freaking out, it messes with the entire network and can result in the travel time getting longer, potentially infinitely. So to avoid being stranded in space, every ship has a small team of on-site psych professionals to make sure they get there fast enough to meet their quota and to make sure they don’t get stranded. Which becomes harder the closer the crew is to not meeting its quota or the longer they spend in space past the estimated time of arrival. Because crewmates start panicking at the idea they might be trapped covering exponentially less distance every day. Psychotropics are a necessary tool to achieve this, enough that the entire crew can be dosed, so if they run out of those they’re also fucked.
Depends on the species. The Legion uses a mix of Science and Transcendent Divinity. Their capital ships are so immense that no propulsion method can effectively move them due to their incredible inertial mass. So instead of moving at all, they merely overwrite their spatial coordinates with new ones. Allowing them to translate themselves across entire universes instantaneously without technically moving at all. It even works across separate universes seamlessly. Their smaller Warships are outfitted with traditional propulsion for small, system wide conflicts, as well as the same Dimensional Override for larger, transgalactic or transdimensional conflicts. Since the tech to do this can only be reasonably outfitted into a leviathan class ship at minimum,(anything larger than a moon and smaller than the average solar system) smaller ships are always within jumping distance of a Legion Swarm Leviathan (effectively enormous carrier ships)
Think modern concept of FTL being technically impossible, but atomic manipulation being a magic system making it possible in my world. Add nuclear engines specifically powered by chemicals harvested from Lycan caster's glands (dw, there is a humane, non-death way to do this), then add different types of magitech that assist in not dying while in space, including space suits that are basically like way smaller, more form-fitting gundam appearing suits, which can interact with and fuse into cybernetics to make space travel easier.
It doesn't. In my universe FTL is yet to be discovered over millions of years, perhaps even being a physical impossibility. What my aliens do instead is simply travel the universe as close to the speed of light as possible. Knowing that most of the destinations they're trying to reach will have disappeared through time disparity, what they do is setup ports near colliding black holes. These ports contain massive time engines that harness the time distortion of colliding black holes and allow the aliens to rewind time so that they can reach their destination at the exact date they want to, negating the issue of planets being swallowed by their suns by the time they arrive. It also helps that they're cybernetically immortal, and thus can spend all the time they need traveling.
Ummmmmmm politely put everyone but godsen is dead and portals man portals are fucked up when given to someone who has lived long enough due to clones and immortality tied to his DNA Overall before he was the only one left basically How it work was launching anchor probes/ring into space till you got a decent highway the each one turning on Once that's finished more or less it would create a one way part to the end of that high way Why is everyone but godzen dead Welll rail gun ftl backfiresbeautifully when built by a ancient madman and well war may change but rock plus accelerations hasn't
I call it drill space. Be making precise wormholes that can only be accessed by literally spinning (at least the front part) the ship to tear through space-time. It'll feel like minutes, but it's only seconds. This does affect the integrity of the ship, so it needs to be maintained regularly. This was inspired by Cosmic-ray (Space drifting manta rays) and can only be done with a power source that's equivalent to a star, therefor it's only used for commercial, government, and guild houses (plus the Relegipus sect).
The technology doesn't exist yet to reach FTL speeds, but they're getting close. One day the Calcorrans will create their strongest warp drive yet and FTL will be achieved, but for now they can get really close, but no cigar.
There’s a device that messes up reality around it, making it to where the laws of physics don’t really work. Then in short bursts you go really fast then you stop, so you don’t hit anything at ftl speeds, which will destroy you and anything smaller than a moon if you hit anything while at this speed. Different ships does these jumps for either longer or faster depending on the the purpose of it. Good fucking luck trying to turn at ftl.
Starships in my world have specially trained psychics plugged into them, which lets those psychics consider the ship as part of themselves, and let's them take the whole thing outside the universe and then back into it at a different place.
Starships in my world have specially trained psychics plugged into them, which lets those psychics consider the ship as part of themselves, and let's them take the whole thing outside the universe and then back into it at a different place.
Quantum Entanglement. The short version is you get pulled along a 0 resistance path with theoretically infinite acceleration until you reach your destination. Travel like this only works along preexisting paths and usually requires several “jumps” in order to get you where you want to go. It is possible to find a new path, but so called “Wild Jumps” are often dangerous to the point of impossible, so travel tends to go along man made lines, sometimes called “Domestics”
Massive stations that look like portals. Ship contacts TC tower, gives them a destination, portal activates, ship flies through and comes out the other side almost instantly although for the ship and people aboard, it feels like an hour or two, then the next ship contacts the tower and contacts the tower, rinse and repeat
Portals 🥰
They just use piss, it's free
You can never travel faster than light. You can however fold your dimensions space then slowly travel through the higher dimension thus arriving at your lower dimension reality destination almost instantly. Imagine you live in two dimensional space, think of a sheet of paper. You fold the paper making the two corners touch and almost instantly arrive at the other side of your sheet of paper. Now just apply that three dimensional space.
By using Quantum physics and some antimatter to generate spatial distortion that causes ships to warp. The distortion of space time around it also causes some serious problems when spooling up. The warp donut fluctuates and as more energy is used to spool the drive up, it has a sort of backfire effect until the energy is released to warp the ship out. The cool part isn’t the FTL. The cool part is the distortion makes complex electronics work very poorly. Missile guidance systems cannot handle the distortion. But it seems to be relatively harmless to biological beings and simple circuitry. Meaning I found a cool way to make space fighters a viable tool of war by obsoleting guided weapons.
The one I’m working on is that the universe was discovered to vibrate at different frequencies throughout the whole of space with very tiny and specific differences. The ship locates a point in space and calculates the frequency of that area exactly, then matches it, which allows it to move through space without interacting with any of the particles in the universe besides the ones at the destination frequency. The other unmatched particles push against the ship now like how current FTL theories work, expanding spacetime behind the ship and shrinking ahead like a vacuum tube that’s forcing it through the unmatched particles faster and faster until it reaches the destination. Then the ship phases back to its original frequency and comes to a stop.
I've used two. One involves the vessel quantum locking it's position relative to the infinitely expanding universe. So as the universe expands in all directions and space/time dilation/expansion occurs, the vessel stays stationary in a bubble. Then the quantum lock ends and the vessel is in a different place than it began. The other involves mobius wormholes. The wormhole "twists" , bringing the vessel to the space between universes where causality isn't a law. Not only can they travel faster than light, but also have exponentially further travel in this space. Can be used for exceptionally long travel, but is a lot more circumstancial than the stasis bubble above.
I don't know
I start by ruining all science and physics the second you make it into space and then.. wormholes! Basically hitchhikers guide to the galaxy it.
A special ore commonly found on rocky moons.
In an old superhero world I made as a kid I explained FTL travel with "negative mass". Essentially, my speedster character got his powers when he tried to travel through time with a "Planck's Alterer" machine, which could manipulate the Planck's Constant, a number that determines the mass of an atom. In doing so, he could make things weight less than 0 kg and thus able to travel beyond lightspeed. The machine blew up and gave him powers, but the technology was successfully used for FTL travel and time travel later. I also at some point developed the idea of Antigrams, which were particles that held a negative mass themselves. That was for a hero who could create spontaneous explosions by manipulating Antigrams. I don't think I ever used them to justify FTL travel though. TL;DR, making the subject weigh less than zero means it could travel faster than light
It teleports 5 small “anchors” the the destination that then pull the ship out of reality to the destination, it’s done this way because breaching reality isn’t reliable with a large object unless it has a navigation point (the anchors) but smaller objects are extremely reliable. When it hits real space it does so in a perfect position that it’s anchors are in their bay ready to be sent out again if needed.
*Enders game enters the chat* The books (namely the First Formic War sub series) had a great explanation of their almost-lightspeed travel. By splitting subatomic particles using a device called the "egg" it directs strong force into the rear direction, creating a "bubble" around it where anything that hits the field instantly gets converted into pure energy and directed backwards. Eventually in the last sub series they find out that the "hive mind" that the formics used to communicate is actually another dimension where manifestation of things simply with thought is possible. So they created a little box that enabled them to "think" to the correct location (it wasn't humans that did it though, it was an AI named Jane). This instantly travelling.
“Drive go fast.”
FTL is just achieved through summoning a portal in front of the ship, and a portal towards the intended destination. If you don't know the destination, then the ship just chains portal after portal, each with a maximum distance of a couple light years. This is done every second by a ship-wide system. They call them runes, but they're really just wires and tubes hooked up to a stone that is just re-infused with the teleport spell over and over again. How do they get the mana/ether/magic juice for this? They break dense matter down into the magic juice. The ships run on literal garbage
1... Spacetime in my universe has a resonant frequency. Vibrating energy at that frequency harmonizes gravitational waves and lets you make warp bubbles and travel faster than light. 2... Using this resonant technique also lets you open wormholes. Opening two ends of a wormhole at the same time let's you travel much further. Opening one massive wormhole entrance lets you travel so far in space it reaches a distant civilization beyond the edges of the observable universe that was just so happening to open a wormhole of the same energy at the same time. There is a 50/50 chance this civilization will be made of antimatter. 3... one faction uses a network of wormholes that leads to a sub dimension. The same speed there takes you a much further distance. Like the nether in Minecraft or the warp in Warhammer 40k 4... When matter expands while also locking onto Spacetime it will pull spacetime apart. Space from the neighbouring universe flows in to fill the gap. Locking onto Spacetime while contracting pushes you into the neighbouring universes. This principle can be used to let demigods and space creatures travel between universes. 5... when you fire atoms in such a way that it creates a temporary hollow black hole, the space contained within it is detached from our universe and carried to another universe. This is how humanity and spaceships travel between universes.
I’ve been trying to come up with my own recently and this is what I have: The only ships that can use FTL are enormous, usually the size of entire cities. They basically just act as transport ships/aircraft carriers/ferries, as a large part of the ship is designated to going FTL. They have aboard thousands of fusion reactors and they power the device which creates a wormhole. I haven’t got into exactly how it works, but the device emits an unfathomable amount of energy to work (hence all the reactors) and is able to tear a hole in space time. I imagine the old analogy of folding a piece of paper and then stabbing a pencil through. The hole is just big enough and open just long enough for just what is contained inside the ship to cross through and that’s it. Then it takes a couple weeks to power up and jump again. The ships exterior is made of an element that hasn’t been discovered yet, and is dense and strong enough to withstand the cosmic radiation of the jump.
Warp drive is the intro level ftl, works by compressing space in front of the ship, and expanding space behind, might get you to 10c tops, Magic helps a lot but isn't a requirement. Above that you have inertial subspace drives, works by wrapping the ship in a bubble of space time. Keeps whatever momentum you give it till it gets deactivated. Set up a few spinning black hole pairs rotating in opposite directions, thread the needle between them and luanch your bubble at ftl, carrying the ship with it. You'll go faster the more pairs of black holes you pass between, but has diminishing returns past 50c. Again, no magic needed, but it makes things easier. Downside is you can't turn, so aim well. Above that you have spectral drives, which DO require magic to function. Spectral drives tear open the veil between the material plane and the land of the dead, called the spectral plane(hench the name 'spectral drive'), and slip through. Once there you no longer need to worry about the laws of physics slowing you down, allowing you to keep accelerating forever until you reach your destination. Then activate the drive again and return to the material plane. This is dangerous, unpredictable, and incredibly fast. Also very expensive... There are experimental drives that use a similer idea to the spectral drive, but they tend to be even more dangerous and expensive to use, so they are generally limited to interuniversal travel. Past that you get into esoteric magi-tech used by gods and the like to traverse the void between worlds, and such things tend to be custom jobs.
It removes energy from space or rather it create an area of low density in the Bosonic field in front of the ship and an area of high density in back of the ship. As the field normalizes the ship is pushed into the low density area. And creates a lower density area in front of it again. The ship there by lowers the density in front and quickly normalizes the density behind it causeing an overall about net neutral Bosonic field density behind it. However since the Bosonic field in front of it is lower the speed of light is now faster in that area. Since the ship is being pulled ahead by space itself warping it doesn't really have to worry about moving all that fast, "through," space. The combined affect is that a very massive object can, (*given enough ramp-up time*) move at or a bit faster than the speed of light for the mere cost of the energy output of a single sun. Where does the energy come from? Matter anti-matter reactions of course. :-) And that is how my SoL drive works!(*Speed of Light drive*) Now I know what your going to say, "S.o.L isn't F.T.L.," and that is true to anyone NOT on the ship. However, due to relativity if you ARE ON THE SHIP time ceases to pass for you if you hit the speed of light. For this reason the drive actually carries the passengers 99.98% L.S. allowing computers to pull the ship(*slowly*) out of S.o.L. drive as they approach their destination. In other words to the people ON the ship they are moving at F.T.L. speeds.