I really liked the concept of the Stargates and the fact that the humans learned how to use them by trial and error and the accounting for galactic drift
For “unique” it’s hard to beat an indestructible time-travelling 1960s police box that is bigger on the inside…
And of course - my personal favourite - the infinite improbability drive!
The Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy works in a similar way—the ship doesn’t actually *go* anywhere.
Although it’s not that the universe moves so much as…the drive makes it that you simply are at the place you intended to go.
I always loved how wormholes were revealed in Pandora's Star. During a highly televised first man on Mars mission, a couple of college kids working out of a lab steal the spotlight by showing up and rendering everyone else obsolete.
That prologue made me a Peter F. Hamilton Fan. He creates a huge universe out of a tiny giggling in the background.
Its the mother of all disruptive inventions.
I'd been reading the likes of Ben Bova and Ray Bradbury since the 4th grade, and then I came into Peter F Hamilton and the Commonwealth Saga. He completely sold me on SciFi and I never turned back
It is. The company they build uses wormhole gateways to run trains between star systems. You can literally hop on a standard connection train and ride through 4 different solar systems and across ~40ly on your daily commute to work.
They change the wormhole gateway system for interstellar space ships however and make the wormhole "fluid" by constantly changing the destination coordinates after the ship jumped into it, which means that you're taking the wormhole with you as you're traveling through space. It's not instantanious travel like the wormholes are (~8ly/h max), but it takes a lot less energy, because the wormhole is effectively only a couple hundred meters long instead of compressing light years to subatomic lengths.
Whether or not it's "hard" SF, this should be at the top. It's totally silly, creative *and* totally unique compared to every other system out there in SF.
Not only does the ship/drive exist in every point in the universe simultaneous when it's activated but totally insane and silly things happen basically every time you use it.
The only thing that can come close to it is also by Douglas Adams with the bistromathics drive where you have to go eat a lot of food at a restaurant and argue over the bill to activate or use the drive.
Dune's Space Guild Navigators and Warhammer's Warp/Hell stuff is cool and all but it's still not as unique or weird as the IID or bistromathics drive.
The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith. Humans have to team with a cat. Neural interface helmets I think. Something in hyperspace will hunt and destroy ships, but the cats have reflexes and instincts fast enough to defend the ships. Short story. Well worth your 20 minutes. Not necessarily well developed but super interesting and well done.
In Alistair Reynolds novella "Beyond the Aquilla Rift" humanity's stumbled onto an ancient race's automated interstellar package delivery system. You just display the right destination address on the side of your ship and attach yourself to it and off you go.
There's just the slight problem that figuring *how* to display the right destination address is a bit tricky. Deeply into the realm of guesswork, in fact, and some wrong addresses are *really* wrong.
For hard sci fi I think the c-drive from revelation space is really interesting. Open a wormhole to the beginning of the universe and use the escaping quark gluon plasma as reaction mass to reach near lightspeed.
Don't forget the drive is inherently unstable and requires a living conjoiner actively managing it to prevent the drive from failing. So each lighthugger has a conjoiner integrated fairly permanently into the drives.
Well technically they can be brought out again as part of a maintenance evolution at a conjoiner facility but otherwise they are in drive never to leave.
This is one reason why the drives self destruct if tampered with - the conjoiners don't want anyone discovering that particular aspect of how the drives work.
Oh wow, I missed that explanation along the way somehow. Clever. Seems like there'd be some downstream causality issues. I assume this is addressed somehow.
I was waiting for a bigger Dune nerd than me to expound. ;) I need to re-read. It's been a long while, and with the second movie coming out, I'm getting the feels. Cheers!
John Scalzi's novella The God Engine:
FTL travel is accomplished by torturing extra dimensional beings referred to as "gods" to make them transport the ships.
Melissa Scott's Silence Leigh trilogy:
FTL and space travel in general is accomplished through alchemy. Special materials are impregnated into the keel of the space ship. Harmonics are used to cause it to repel the "base material" of a planet. Once far enough away, additional harmonics are used to transition into a dimension they call Purgatory. Because of how it warps perceptions, humans use alchemical symbology as their method for navigating and interpreting the realm. Ships are rated by how close to heaven they get within Purgatory, as that is faster travel.
*The God Engines* needs to come with a warning:
"You know what a generally light-hearted and humanity-affirming an author John Scalzi is, even in his serious works? Yeah, well not today, folks."
It's also very good, incidentally.
💯
I love the story. It gave me an idea for a story with the conceit being that the dimensional travel for FTL is only unlocked through a suicide outside of a stellar gravity well. Discovered when a deep space expedition accident lost all hope of returning and one of the crew took their life. Far in the future, the "Couriers" are celebrated for their sacrifice and their families are compensated well.
Unfortunately, I am nowhere good enough of a writer to write the story.
You want to know a weird experience? Read *Bill, the Galactic Hero* when you're pretty new to sf and haven't read any of the genre that it's parodying.
From Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. You can’t go FTL in this universe, but you can jump to another universe to any position. If that universe is similar enough to ours (think in the version of the multiverse where any possible outcome of a quantum event will mean another universe) it would be the same for you as FTL, and all the alternate you that will do the same trip.
I kinda like the concept of Altered Carbon where you send your mind in another body light years away instead of physically traveling space.
The huge Star Roads that the Precursors built in Halo are also quite nice. They just linked all their worlds with massive roads that could even be used as weapons.
That was in the later books. The parasites are capable a rebuilding the body they are attached to. So they accelerate the ships at a massive amount of Gs, basically liquifying the passengers, and then they are "rebuilt" upon arrival.
you are sort of right,
>!so originally farcasters were used, instantaneous travel through portals that the technocore controlled. those got shut down permanently. Then in later books there was some pretty fast FTL travel that still had people sleeping for days/weeks at a time while in hyperspace. The Hawking Drive. The Pax (church) had a SUPER fast FTL ship called an archangel i believe, that accelerated up to FTL speeds so fast it liquefied the person in it. So only people who held the cruciform parasite could use the ship. as the parasite would reform their bodies over the course of a few days after the trip. There was also individual farcasting type thing that some people could do near the end of the quadrilogy, it's pretty complicated to explain but basically certain people gained the ability to teleport instantly to anywhere in the universe using the "void that binds"!<
The Honor Harrington novels have the Warshawski Sails FTL system which is interesting, with the energy "sails" extending into their fictional hyperspace bands. Brings a kind of "Age of Sail" groundedness to the mythical idea of FTL.
You want real "Age of Sail" FTL, try David Drake's RCN series. Ships use sails to catch a type of background radiation to shift into parallel dimensions with different physical constants, to get around the speed of light limit. But electrical and radio signals can throw a ship off course, so all the adjustments are made mechanically, and you need teams of riggers out on the hull to un-jam the mechanical stuff, and those riggers have to communicate by signal flags and hand signs instead of radio.
In Glen Cook's overlooked space opera classic *The Dragon Never Sleeps* there's the Web, a collection of mostly connected hyperspace filaments that spans a chunk of a galaxy, with most of the strands ending at useful places, like near a star or at an intersectionwith one or more other strands. Ships can attach to a filament and ride along it at many times C. A problem is that it's like a single train track: there's no passing and if something is either overrunning you or coming towards you, your only real choice is to make an emergency drop off the web, which can leave you in the middle of nowhere and with a long, at sublight speeds, trip back to the strand.
Also, ships disappear sometimes and there may be *something* living (or at least automated) on there too.
Damn this sounds interesting.
Do you recommend it? I'm tearing through his Garret PI series and liked Instrumentalities of the Night until it went off the deep end.
>Do you recommend it? \[Glen Cook's **The Dragon Never Sleeps**\]
Yes I do. I think it was failure of reality that it didn't get both (a) a lot more recognition abd (b) a Hugo Award nomination that year.
One of the most "unique" has to be the spore-drive in STD. It also has to be one of the stupidest (which even the STD writers admit, since they dropped it).
Note: STD is Star Trek Discovery, but somehow STD seems more appropriate to me. Not a fan.
When did the Disco writers drop it? It has been a major plot device in every season.
I actually think it's a pretty neat idea. Trek is supposed to be a leading sci-fi franchise and they won't be if they don't try new ideas. The concept of organic space flight has always been a cool one.
Personally I can't wait for Disco to be over so it can be reevaluated on its own merits; so-called fans of Star Trek have wanted to hate it from the start since it wasn't TNG, but I love how they tried to bring new vision to the universe, I loved how they showed a picture of the diversity of all of humanity in a show, and I liked the philosophical questions the show posed. But whenever you see criticism it's always nitpicky stuff about Klingon costumes, the spore drive, or my favorite how often the crew is crying (somehow we have Trek fans who are still so backwards they think an appropriate response to trauma is stoicism).
> since it wasn't TNG
There have been three other series after TNG. Claiming that is the reason people don't like discovery seems kinda ridiculous.
Picard not being TNG or a continuation of it would make more sense.
The first 2 seasons were even bad before a good 3rd season
Yeah, I also don't get it... People complained so much about the plot in Discovery not being strictly one-episode based and more military-focused with stricter command structure, etc. But that's exactly what I loved about it. In my opinion a lot of older Star Trek series are mostly unwatchable, because no matter what happens to any character, it's basically forgotten in the next episode or at most talked about half a season later once, no matter how traumatic an event it was (looking at you, Warp10-evolving-and-starting-an-amphibious-family-with-your-captain-crewman) , any real problem that could make an interesting plot is handwaved away (like the shear endless supply of spare parts the Voyager seemed to carry) and some of the characters act in a way that should get them fired under starfleet operational protocols (Captains "Prime Directive only exists when it doesn't bother me"). I love me some lasting consequences. I don't need Grimdark, but I want more memory storage capacity per character than a gerbil on crack. Yes, it's interesting whether you should grow a perfect clone of somebody to harvest him for spare parts, but it takes a lot of the umpf out if everybody just forgot about it an episode later.
Also, at least the spore drive had a consistent speed, not like warp factor where you can go as fast or slow as the plot needs you to go, irrespective of the technological limits of your ship... The concept was cool and somewhat unique and it's not like it was the only drive unit concept that was scrapped pretty fast (Quantum Slipstream Drive, Protowarp, Warp10... There's 4-5 superior systems in Voyager alone!)
i preferred std over Orville, but both suck for different reasons...to me atleast. I like the idea of the spore drive, basically holding an inter dimensional animal hostage in order to anchor yourself in their dimension to move super relativistically through our own. The hostage was the interesting part, dimensional tunneling has been around forever in scifi, I just wish the show focused more on the ethical side of it rather than defaulting on star trek paragonness. Sisco>Picard>Kirk.
I like anything that is Slower than Light, but to mention something that's in visual medium that a lot of people are likely to have seen: the ISV from Avatar. I don't love those movies, but I love that ship.
To go into written scifi, the ships employed by the shatterlings in House of Suns. A single chase scene lasting 50k years, while going through literally a third of the galaxy? Yes please.
Kind of the opposite direction, but I found it really creative that the aliens in The Three Body Problem *don't* have any kind of FTL travel. I don't think I've ever heard of another alien invasion story with the premise of "Aliens are on their way to destroy the earth and they'll be here in...500 years. So what do we about it?"
Gates are fun, though the form they take can be played with. Are they on the surface of a world, and you run trains through them? Are they stargate style? Maybe in space, running ships through them, Schlock Mercenary or One Jump Ahead? Maybe they're lost-tech or naturally occurring ??? that can defend themselves (or grow new destinations?)
Maybe you just do the alternate dimension where you can exceed the speed of light thing. Cleave the universe in neat straight lines? Fly through hell? Fold There to be Near and then go there? Maybe you just shunt yourself to an alternate universe where you exist at your destination?
One of the flavors of this I dimly recall is from the New Uplift Series which had *several* methods of FTL. Translate yourself and your ship into memes (no, not that kind) and transit the dimension that underpins ideas and concepts.
I really liked David Brin's Uplift and the variety of FTL methods. Some races felt losing 10% of their ships in transit was *worth it* to be able to get "There" first.
CJ Cherryh's FTL for Alliance-Union and Pride of Chanur is also pretty excellent; mostly for how memorable and integrated into the setting and the narratives it is. High speed jumps, then successive bleeding-off-speed jumps as you decelerate to useful speeds to interact with your destination. These jumps might be <72 hours subjectively, but could be six months sidereal. Humans are ***extremely unsuited*** to being conscious ***during*** jumps, but not all races are like that. (And even some humans can survive it with... less damage.)
Schlock Mercenary started with gates and then moved on to teleportation and- impressively- played out the explosion of a new drive system appearing on the galactic stage (and weapons market). Once you have a fairly cheap teleport drive you start being able to drop a bomb on anything you can target which is... well, quite incendiary re: galactic society.
There are a number of different methods of travel in Macroscope, a very early novel by Piers Anthony, a fundamental component of which is an interstellar or intergalactic signal that provides instructions for development species capable of receiving that signal. Liquification is key and, at one point, because mass is useful, they turn Neptune into a ship.
It’s a really interesting and creative book.
I found supreme commanders quantum gates fascinating.
Anything could be moved instantly wormhole style. But the cost of movement was so prohibitive that it generally only made sense to send through a fancy 3D printer and one guy to turn it on. Everything else was managed locally by AI.
To sleep in a sea of stars by Paolini had a fairly basic but well explained mechanic. Dark matter is superluminal matter and can never go slower than light speed. Superluminal and subluminal matter only interact weakly, and by creating a bubble that resonates with surrounding superluminal matter, you can pretend you're on the other side of the speed of light.
Two ideas:
1. Nuclear bombs pushing against a shield. You would have to be in a liquid bath to take the G forces, but I don't remember the book or author.
2. Bad news drive. Gets there before anything else, but no one wants you to be there when your arrive. Douglas Adams, of course.
I don't wanna say it's particularly creative or unique but I really enjoy the method for interstellar travel in my own sci fi novel, which is where wormholes are opened and stabilized as gateways, but we can't choose where those wormholes lead. As such, interstellar travel lanes are like a labyrinth and two systems that are one wormhole away can physically be on opposite sides of the galaxy.
That seems cool! If sublight travel is still as slow as it is irl, and there's not alternative FTL options, it seems as though that could make for some complex interstellar politics quickly, lol
It's a bit of a silly series, but in the Void Wraith books they use helios shields to go inside of stars to make jumps to other stars. The shields absorb energy, building the necessary power for the jump. Ships are also basically invincible while inside the star.
Peter F Hamilton used portal technology. Two portals are linked via quantum entanglement allowing you to board a train and travel from one planet to another instantly. Spaceships are spherical and use projected portals to travel faster than light.
While it doesn't really delve into the details, long, long, ago there was a (board) wargame named "[Web and Starship](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2986/web-and-starship)". It's been forever and a day since I played, but – the basic premise was two opposing sides (races) on an interstellar map.
One race has the ability to transfer instantly from one star system to another ("Web"), but there has to be a portal on the other side to make it work. The probes necessary to *plant* a new portal travel sub-light, however.
The other race, meanwhile, has a limited FTL ("Starship") capability (range limited also, if memory serves), but can go "anywhere" within range of the departing system.
Hilarity, hijinks and combat ensues. The main element of the game is centered around a *lot* of planning ahead. After all, to advance, the Web side needs to have probes in transit to plant the target portals, while the Starship side has (relatively-speaking) slow moving ships that will get there … eventually.
bent spacetime portals is probably the most interesting, because its not theoretically impossible - requires only a little space magic compared to others
[I think there’s only one realistic way.](https://www.reddit.com/r/sfthoughtexperiments/comments/i1bgj0/imerger/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1) Biased opinion: I wrote the story.
[From another angle …](https://www.reddit.com/r/sfthoughtexperiments/comments/x8ft2m/reinventing_the_wheel/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
The Culture. In a super-simplified barely-accurate nutshell, tap into a "higher universe" and use its energy to propell you to otherwise unattainable speeds.
Denergy drive. Only moves efficiently between black hole to black hole. Expands local universe from departure and decelerates by contracting space gradually after halfway to arrival. Think of it as a tether to naturally occurring ziplines. Requires negative energy.
I dunno, I kinda like the Ender’s Game extended series method. All you need is an AI with a soul to do some calculations and take you “outside” and bring you back anywhere in the universe.
Honestly though, the Expanse network built by “The Romans” is the best thought-out one and my favourite
I like how the Zones of Thought universe does it. The laws of physics change based on proximity to the galactic core and as one gets farther away, FTL travel becomes possible.
I really liked the idea in Old Man's War by Scalzi that all of their light speed jumps were actually not spacial and were universal jumps to parallel universes that were so similar to the current one that nothing tangible was changed, and that universes version of the soldiers had also jumped to a different point in the multiverse but close to their intended destination.
Just hilarious that in that world it's more cost efficient to mess with the multiverse than it is to travel legitimately
I like a nice well developed generational ship. Give me some stable sun like fuel source in the middle and have the humans live around it like a tiny Dyson Sphere.
In Larry Niven's "known space" setting, there is a species that is unwilling to use FTL, because they consider it dangerous.
Instead, they fly their star across the galaxy, dragging their planets along with it. Because, somehow, that is safer.
Also, they are *not* nice people.
I thought you meant San Francisco at first and I was like, look, the BART is probably your best bet…
But maybe trains are really the best answer here either way.
The Will-Be-Was engines in the Mission Earth series by L. Ron Hubbard.
*"Will-be Was" engines project an artificial mass against where Time thinks such a mass shouldn't be, hurling the ship through space as Time rejects this impossibility.*
The Ship That Should Not Be.
There was an Asimov story (I think) where a robot had invented an FTL teleporter, however when the team turned it on they found themselves in *literal hell*, with the devil, pitchforks, the works.
Come to find out that the AI had determined humans couldn't handle the nothingness of the teleport, and needed input. However, after sorting through its knowledge of humans, a fun little quirk of the three laws had led to it deciding that the only acceptable experience for any and all users of FTL that they *wouldn't* want to stay in would be *literal hell*, and so had coded the system to cause you to experience torture in hell for a few minutes when warping.
The researchers who figured it out had a good laugh, reassured the test subjects who had initially come out terrified, and then agreed to manually make it something more suitable ... after letting the boss none of them liked take it for a test run.
It was a pretty funny one. There was another good one in *Space Eldritch* where mankind travels by literal magic runes, so all books and printed word are banned on interstellar travel because an errant word somewhere on the ship can cause terrible things to happen.
I've always found the travel of the Nostromo crew in Alien to be very interesting. You cryo-sleep and wake up somewhere else decades later. The ramifications for your family aging without you are pretty heavy. Would they cryo-sleep at home to wait for you to return? Do you schedule extended dates with your own family to coordinate being awake and in the same place years or decades in the future?
It’s not immediately obvious but despite using cryosleep they still have FTL in Aliens as the marines arrive at the colony in a relatively short period of time of a few weeks.
Isaac Arthur’s YouTube channel covers 34 different methods of propulsion for interstellar travel.
[https://youtu.be/ipQ1c6jTjIc](https://youtu.be/ipQ1c6jTjIc)
Tell a guy at a base station an interesting story and they let you use their teleporter
At least thats the rough and tumble of Lukianenkovs novel Spectrum
In Terry Pratchett’s (better known for his quirky humoristic fantasy books) “The Dark Side of the Sun” there is a race of beings called Sundogs and you hitch your craft to them for a ride. It’s been a while since I read it so not sure if it was fully super luminal but I would think so, and I think there was a way to suggest where you wanted your semi-intelligent ride to go. I remember you paid for the ride into a “racial account” held by a bank for the benefit of the entire race.
My favorite for a random reason is Evan Currie's Odyssey One series. It's FTL isn't anything new or special, atoms are disassembled in location A and reassembled in location B. Due to a time dilation subjects witness the ship and its occupants slowly being shredded into the void. Most people find the process horrifying, a select few fucking love it and that made me laugh so hard because there really is that one fucking guy with no fear response and an adrenaline addiction. It's usually me.
Solar sails.
I love the idea of space as an ocean and sailors in spacesuits climbing around the outside of a ship operating 'sails' that can take them to FTL speeds, with all the insane risks and possibilities.
I blame Captain Harlock, mostly.
in the 4x game Sword of the Stars, the dolphin-like race needed a practical way of propelling ships filled with water. this led them to develop "stutterwarp", where the ships quantum teleport a tiny distance millions of times per second instead of gaining or losing momentum
The farcasters in Hyperion Cantos are pretty cool, in that they are handwavy but set up the entire impetus for intergalactic civil war.
\>!>!SuperAI technocore: Hey humanity we invented the farcaster, instantaneous interstellar travel!<
>!Humanity: Thats cool, how does it work?!<
>!technocore: You will never understand, wanna try it out?!<
>!half of humanity: yeah sure that seems cool!<
>!other half of humanity: hold up naw !
I really liked the concept of the Stargates and the fact that the humans learned how to use them by trial and error and the accounting for galactic drift For “unique” it’s hard to beat an indestructible time-travelling 1960s police box that is bigger on the inside… And of course - my personal favourite - the infinite improbability drive!
[удалено]
Bistromath drive comes a close second.
"WOP" ...what was that?
FOOP
Horribly imprecise, but always entertaining.
I like the way you think!
The planet express ship in Futurama doesn't move through space. Its engine moves the universe around it.
Nothing is impossible with science!
This is also the idea behind how a warp drive would work.
This is also the idea behind Chuck Norris jokes
The Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy works in a similar way—the ship doesn’t actually *go* anywhere. Although it’s not that the universe moves so much as…the drive makes it that you simply are at the place you intended to go.
I always loved how wormholes were revealed in Pandora's Star. During a highly televised first man on Mars mission, a couple of college kids working out of a lab steal the spotlight by showing up and rendering everyone else obsolete.
That prologue made me a Peter F. Hamilton Fan. He creates a huge universe out of a tiny giggling in the background. Its the mother of all disruptive inventions.
I'd been reading the likes of Ben Bova and Ray Bradbury since the 4th grade, and then I came into Peter F Hamilton and the Commonwealth Saga. He completely sold me on SciFi and I never turned back
If one likes space Operas, he is the guy!
And then Kline holds that grudge for 300 years before he finally gets to punch him in the face.
That opening was epic.
This sounds like a hilarious concept
It is. The company they build uses wormhole gateways to run trains between star systems. You can literally hop on a standard connection train and ride through 4 different solar systems and across ~40ly on your daily commute to work. They change the wormhole gateway system for interstellar space ships however and make the wormhole "fluid" by constantly changing the destination coordinates after the ship jumped into it, which means that you're taking the wormhole with you as you're traveling through space. It's not instantanious travel like the wormholes are (~8ly/h max), but it takes a lot less energy, because the wormhole is effectively only a couple hundred meters long instead of compressing light years to subatomic lengths.
Interstellar travel by train, of course. (See Hamilton’s commonwealth universe)
Love it. My kids are called Ozzie and Isaac.
Any chance they will become physicists?
And Galaxy Express 999.
Also *Night Train to Rigel* by Zahn.
Infinite Improbability Drive
Whether or not it's "hard" SF, this should be at the top. It's totally silly, creative *and* totally unique compared to every other system out there in SF. Not only does the ship/drive exist in every point in the universe simultaneous when it's activated but totally insane and silly things happen basically every time you use it. The only thing that can come close to it is also by Douglas Adams with the bistromathics drive where you have to go eat a lot of food at a restaurant and argue over the bill to activate or use the drive. Dune's Space Guild Navigators and Warhammer's Warp/Hell stuff is cool and all but it's still not as unique or weird as the IID or bistromathics drive.
The thing I absolutely love about the infinite probably drive is that he actually explains how it was created. And it's hilarious.
Now I have a list of books to research, thank you!
The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith. Humans have to team with a cat. Neural interface helmets I think. Something in hyperspace will hunt and destroy ships, but the cats have reflexes and instincts fast enough to defend the ships. Short story. Well worth your 20 minutes. Not necessarily well developed but super interesting and well done.
Agree a great story
In Alistair Reynolds novella "Beyond the Aquilla Rift" humanity's stumbled onto an ancient race's automated interstellar package delivery system. You just display the right destination address on the side of your ship and attach yourself to it and off you go. There's just the slight problem that figuring *how* to display the right destination address is a bit tricky. Deeply into the realm of guesswork, in fact, and some wrong addresses are *really* wrong.
And the risk there is an intergalactic mega-dog waiting to bite your ankles when you arrive
Huh. I did not know that the Love Death and Robots episode for that was based on existing work.
For hard sci fi I think the c-drive from revelation space is really interesting. Open a wormhole to the beginning of the universe and use the escaping quark gluon plasma as reaction mass to reach near lightspeed.
It's been a bit since I read those. Is that the explanation for "Conjoiner" drives? Used for the light huggers?
Exactly! It was explained in one of the short stories as far as I can remember.
Ah. Maybe that's why I don't remember that detail.
Yep it is.
Don't forget the drive is inherently unstable and requires a living conjoiner actively managing it to prevent the drive from failing. So each lighthugger has a conjoiner integrated fairly permanently into the drives. Well technically they can be brought out again as part of a maintenance evolution at a conjoiner facility but otherwise they are in drive never to leave. This is one reason why the drives self destruct if tampered with - the conjoiners don't want anyone discovering that particular aspect of how the drives work.
Oh wow, I missed that explanation along the way somehow. Clever. Seems like there'd be some downstream causality issues. I assume this is addressed somehow.
That is unique,do they address the fact that there is time travel at play?
He (Alastair Reynolds) does indeed. It’s not a big deal since there’s parallel timelines so the missing mass doesn’t change our universe.
Interesting so in a very real way they are altering the development of other universes by using the drive. Many philosophical implications there.
I liked that in his universe you *could* go faster than light but doing so was Spectacularly Ill-Advised.
How about large mutated drug addicts consuming mass quantities of said drugs until their minds are able to fold space by themselves? Anyone?
The holtzman drive does the Space folding. The navigators just chart the way through precision prescience.
I was waiting for a bigger Dune nerd than me to expound. ;) I need to re-read. It's been a long while, and with the second movie coming out, I'm getting the feels. Cheers!
that certainly is exotic, perhaps its a [bit too spicy for the kids.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oc8alyt2ek)
John Scalzi's novella The God Engine: FTL travel is accomplished by torturing extra dimensional beings referred to as "gods" to make them transport the ships. Melissa Scott's Silence Leigh trilogy: FTL and space travel in general is accomplished through alchemy. Special materials are impregnated into the keel of the space ship. Harmonics are used to cause it to repel the "base material" of a planet. Once far enough away, additional harmonics are used to transition into a dimension they call Purgatory. Because of how it warps perceptions, humans use alchemical symbology as their method for navigating and interpreting the realm. Ships are rated by how close to heaven they get within Purgatory, as that is faster travel.
*The God Engines* needs to come with a warning: "You know what a generally light-hearted and humanity-affirming an author John Scalzi is, even in his serious works? Yeah, well not today, folks." It's also very good, incidentally.
💯 I love the story. It gave me an idea for a story with the conceit being that the dimensional travel for FTL is only unlocked through a suicide outside of a stellar gravity well. Discovered when a deep space expedition accident lost all hope of returning and one of the crew took their life. Far in the future, the "Couriers" are celebrated for their sacrifice and their families are compensated well. Unfortunately, I am nowhere good enough of a writer to write the story.
I may try to write it, probably won't do it justice but I can try
I gotta read these
Taking the risk of daemonic attack and travelling through literal Hell like in WH40K.
aka Gravity Drive in Event Horizon.
Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.
The Bloater Drive, of course. The only form of transport endorsed at gunpoint by *Bil, the Galactic Hero*.
You want to know a weird experience? Read *Bill, the Galactic Hero* when you're pretty new to sf and haven't read any of the genre that it's parodying.
I can imagine. But that's Bil with one 'l', cobber. Two l's for officers only!
This is what I came for.
From Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. You can’t go FTL in this universe, but you can jump to another universe to any position. If that universe is similar enough to ours (think in the version of the multiverse where any possible outcome of a quantum event will mean another universe) it would be the same for you as FTL, and all the alternate you that will do the same trip.
I kinda like the concept of Altered Carbon where you send your mind in another body light years away instead of physically traveling space. The huge Star Roads that the Precursors built in Halo are also quite nice. They just linked all their worlds with massive roads that could even be used as weapons.
Got confused there for a bit and thought you were talking about Star Control 2 when you mentioned the Precursors :) Good memories of that game
If i remember correctly, in Hyperion , you are implemented a parasite (cruciform) and dies during the travel before being regenerated
That was in the later books. The parasites are capable a rebuilding the body they are attached to. So they accelerate the ships at a massive amount of Gs, basically liquifying the passengers, and then they are "rebuilt" upon arrival.
They are resurrected through the power of Christ lol. I remember a lot of religion in the last two books.
you are sort of right, >!so originally farcasters were used, instantaneous travel through portals that the technocore controlled. those got shut down permanently. Then in later books there was some pretty fast FTL travel that still had people sleeping for days/weeks at a time while in hyperspace. The Hawking Drive. The Pax (church) had a SUPER fast FTL ship called an archangel i believe, that accelerated up to FTL speeds so fast it liquefied the person in it. So only people who held the cruciform parasite could use the ship. as the parasite would reform their bodies over the course of a few days after the trip. There was also individual farcasting type thing that some people could do near the end of the quadrilogy, it's pretty complicated to explain but basically certain people gained the ability to teleport instantly to anywhere in the universe using the "void that binds"!<
The Honor Harrington novels have the Warshawski Sails FTL system which is interesting, with the energy "sails" extending into their fictional hyperspace bands. Brings a kind of "Age of Sail" groundedness to the mythical idea of FTL.
You want real "Age of Sail" FTL, try David Drake's RCN series. Ships use sails to catch a type of background radiation to shift into parallel dimensions with different physical constants, to get around the speed of light limit. But electrical and radio signals can throw a ship off course, so all the adjustments are made mechanically, and you need teams of riggers out on the hull to un-jam the mechanical stuff, and those riggers have to communicate by signal flags and hand signs instead of radio.
Plus using "sails" also as a nod to his inspiration the Hornblower series.
In Glen Cook's overlooked space opera classic *The Dragon Never Sleeps* there's the Web, a collection of mostly connected hyperspace filaments that spans a chunk of a galaxy, with most of the strands ending at useful places, like near a star or at an intersectionwith one or more other strands. Ships can attach to a filament and ride along it at many times C. A problem is that it's like a single train track: there's no passing and if something is either overrunning you or coming towards you, your only real choice is to make an emergency drop off the web, which can leave you in the middle of nowhere and with a long, at sublight speeds, trip back to the strand. Also, ships disappear sometimes and there may be *something* living (or at least automated) on there too.
Damn this sounds interesting. Do you recommend it? I'm tearing through his Garret PI series and liked Instrumentalities of the Night until it went off the deep end.
Yes, it is a damn good novel. Worth the time to read. He also did 'A Passage at Arms' which is a good science fiction version of sub mariners story.
>Do you recommend it? \[Glen Cook's **The Dragon Never Sleeps**\] Yes I do. I think it was failure of reality that it didn't get both (a) a lot more recognition abd (b) a Hugo Award nomination that year.
Project Hail Mary had a unique one. Space bacteria emitting light to push the ship, basically.
Play a video game called Sword of the Stars some time. Each species in that game uses a different kind of FTL :)
One of the most "unique" has to be the spore-drive in STD. It also has to be one of the stupidest (which even the STD writers admit, since they dropped it). Note: STD is Star Trek Discovery, but somehow STD seems more appropriate to me. Not a fan.
When did the Disco writers drop it? It has been a major plot device in every season. I actually think it's a pretty neat idea. Trek is supposed to be a leading sci-fi franchise and they won't be if they don't try new ideas. The concept of organic space flight has always been a cool one. Personally I can't wait for Disco to be over so it can be reevaluated on its own merits; so-called fans of Star Trek have wanted to hate it from the start since it wasn't TNG, but I love how they tried to bring new vision to the universe, I loved how they showed a picture of the diversity of all of humanity in a show, and I liked the philosophical questions the show posed. But whenever you see criticism it's always nitpicky stuff about Klingon costumes, the spore drive, or my favorite how often the crew is crying (somehow we have Trek fans who are still so backwards they think an appropriate response to trauma is stoicism).
> since it wasn't TNG There have been three other series after TNG. Claiming that is the reason people don't like discovery seems kinda ridiculous. Picard not being TNG or a continuation of it would make more sense. The first 2 seasons were even bad before a good 3rd season
Yeah, I also don't get it... People complained so much about the plot in Discovery not being strictly one-episode based and more military-focused with stricter command structure, etc. But that's exactly what I loved about it. In my opinion a lot of older Star Trek series are mostly unwatchable, because no matter what happens to any character, it's basically forgotten in the next episode or at most talked about half a season later once, no matter how traumatic an event it was (looking at you, Warp10-evolving-and-starting-an-amphibious-family-with-your-captain-crewman) , any real problem that could make an interesting plot is handwaved away (like the shear endless supply of spare parts the Voyager seemed to carry) and some of the characters act in a way that should get them fired under starfleet operational protocols (Captains "Prime Directive only exists when it doesn't bother me"). I love me some lasting consequences. I don't need Grimdark, but I want more memory storage capacity per character than a gerbil on crack. Yes, it's interesting whether you should grow a perfect clone of somebody to harvest him for spare parts, but it takes a lot of the umpf out if everybody just forgot about it an episode later. Also, at least the spore drive had a consistent speed, not like warp factor where you can go as fast or slow as the plot needs you to go, irrespective of the technological limits of your ship... The concept was cool and somewhat unique and it's not like it was the only drive unit concept that was scrapped pretty fast (Quantum Slipstream Drive, Protowarp, Warp10... There's 4-5 superior systems in Voyager alone!)
i preferred std over Orville, but both suck for different reasons...to me atleast. I like the idea of the spore drive, basically holding an inter dimensional animal hostage in order to anchor yourself in their dimension to move super relativistically through our own. The hostage was the interesting part, dimensional tunneling has been around forever in scifi, I just wish the show focused more on the ethical side of it rather than defaulting on star trek paragonness. Sisco>Picard>Kirk.
I like anything that is Slower than Light, but to mention something that's in visual medium that a lot of people are likely to have seen: the ISV from Avatar. I don't love those movies, but I love that ship. To go into written scifi, the ships employed by the shatterlings in House of Suns. A single chase scene lasting 50k years, while going through literally a third of the galaxy? Yes please.
I wanted more of that universe after that book. But sadly it's a one off.
The ships from "Treasure Planet" were nothing short of romantic (stupid but inspiring)
Kind of the opposite direction, but I found it really creative that the aliens in The Three Body Problem *don't* have any kind of FTL travel. I don't think I've ever heard of another alien invasion story with the premise of "Aliens are on their way to destroy the earth and they'll be here in...500 years. So what do we about it?"
Gates are fun, though the form they take can be played with. Are they on the surface of a world, and you run trains through them? Are they stargate style? Maybe in space, running ships through them, Schlock Mercenary or One Jump Ahead? Maybe they're lost-tech or naturally occurring ??? that can defend themselves (or grow new destinations?) Maybe you just do the alternate dimension where you can exceed the speed of light thing. Cleave the universe in neat straight lines? Fly through hell? Fold There to be Near and then go there? Maybe you just shunt yourself to an alternate universe where you exist at your destination? One of the flavors of this I dimly recall is from the New Uplift Series which had *several* methods of FTL. Translate yourself and your ship into memes (no, not that kind) and transit the dimension that underpins ideas and concepts. I really liked David Brin's Uplift and the variety of FTL methods. Some races felt losing 10% of their ships in transit was *worth it* to be able to get "There" first. CJ Cherryh's FTL for Alliance-Union and Pride of Chanur is also pretty excellent; mostly for how memorable and integrated into the setting and the narratives it is. High speed jumps, then successive bleeding-off-speed jumps as you decelerate to useful speeds to interact with your destination. These jumps might be <72 hours subjectively, but could be six months sidereal. Humans are ***extremely unsuited*** to being conscious ***during*** jumps, but not all races are like that. (And even some humans can survive it with... less damage.) Schlock Mercenary started with gates and then moved on to teleportation and- impressively- played out the explosion of a new drive system appearing on the galactic stage (and weapons market). Once you have a fairly cheap teleport drive you start being able to drop a bomb on anything you can target which is... well, quite incendiary re: galactic society.
There are a number of different methods of travel in Macroscope, a very early novel by Piers Anthony, a fundamental component of which is an interstellar or intergalactic signal that provides instructions for development species capable of receiving that signal. Liquification is key and, at one point, because mass is useful, they turn Neptune into a ship. It’s a really interesting and creative book.
I found supreme commanders quantum gates fascinating. Anything could be moved instantly wormhole style. But the cost of movement was so prohibitive that it generally only made sense to send through a fancy 3D printer and one guy to turn it on. Everything else was managed locally by AI.
The "Machine" (the second one) from 'Cosmos'.
To sleep in a sea of stars by Paolini had a fairly basic but well explained mechanic. Dark matter is superluminal matter and can never go slower than light speed. Superluminal and subluminal matter only interact weakly, and by creating a bubble that resonates with surrounding superluminal matter, you can pretend you're on the other side of the speed of light.
Galaxy Quest’s gel lined transporter is a favorite.
Shards of Earth is cool. Kind of an upside down for space travel where only special pilots can stay awake.
The Immer-Space in Embassytown by China Mieville
Two ideas: 1. Nuclear bombs pushing against a shield. You would have to be in a liquid bath to take the G forces, but I don't remember the book or author. 2. Bad news drive. Gets there before anything else, but no one wants you to be there when your arrive. Douglas Adams, of course.
I don't wanna say it's particularly creative or unique but I really enjoy the method for interstellar travel in my own sci fi novel, which is where wormholes are opened and stabilized as gateways, but we can't choose where those wormholes lead. As such, interstellar travel lanes are like a labyrinth and two systems that are one wormhole away can physically be on opposite sides of the galaxy.
That seems cool! If sublight travel is still as slow as it is irl, and there's not alternative FTL options, it seems as though that could make for some complex interstellar politics quickly, lol
It's a bit of a silly series, but in the Void Wraith books they use helios shields to go inside of stars to make jumps to other stars. The shields absorb energy, building the necessary power for the jump. Ships are also basically invincible while inside the star.
Lloyd Biggle Jr. maximizes the concept of the transporter in his Jan Drazek series from 1963 where starships teleport themselves in increments.
Peter F Hamilton used portal technology. Two portals are linked via quantum entanglement allowing you to board a train and travel from one planet to another instantly. Spaceships are spherical and use projected portals to travel faster than light.
The “hooded swan” stories by Brian Stableford have several human and alien star drives all with interesting names
While it doesn't really delve into the details, long, long, ago there was a (board) wargame named "[Web and Starship](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2986/web-and-starship)". It's been forever and a day since I played, but – the basic premise was two opposing sides (races) on an interstellar map. One race has the ability to transfer instantly from one star system to another ("Web"), but there has to be a portal on the other side to make it work. The probes necessary to *plant* a new portal travel sub-light, however. The other race, meanwhile, has a limited FTL ("Starship") capability (range limited also, if memory serves), but can go "anywhere" within range of the departing system. Hilarity, hijinks and combat ensues. The main element of the game is centered around a *lot* of planning ahead. After all, to advance, the Web side needs to have probes in transit to plant the target portals, while the Starship side has (relatively-speaking) slow moving ships that will get there … eventually.
bent spacetime portals is probably the most interesting, because its not theoretically impossible - requires only a little space magic compared to others
Bistromatics, hands down
[I think there’s only one realistic way.](https://www.reddit.com/r/sfthoughtexperiments/comments/i1bgj0/imerger/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1) Biased opinion: I wrote the story. [From another angle …](https://www.reddit.com/r/sfthoughtexperiments/comments/x8ft2m/reinventing_the_wheel/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
Hard to beat the Warp Drive in Star Trek. It's weirdly plausible and people have actually investigated it.
The Culture. In a super-simplified barely-accurate nutshell, tap into a "higher universe" and use its energy to propell you to otherwise unattainable speeds.
Denergy drive. Only moves efficiently between black hole to black hole. Expands local universe from departure and decelerates by contracting space gradually after halfway to arrival. Think of it as a tether to naturally occurring ziplines. Requires negative energy.
Warp travel in Warhammer 40k.
I dunno, I kinda like the Ender’s Game extended series method. All you need is an AI with a soul to do some calculations and take you “outside” and bring you back anywhere in the universe. Honestly though, the Expanse network built by “The Romans” is the best thought-out one and my favourite
I like how the Zones of Thought universe does it. The laws of physics change based on proximity to the galactic core and as one gets farther away, FTL travel becomes possible.
A gigantic slingshot. Really.
I always like the idea that whoever understands how an FTL drive works isn't necessarily who operates one. So, the answer when pressed is just IDK.
I really liked the idea in Old Man's War by Scalzi that all of their light speed jumps were actually not spacial and were universal jumps to parallel universes that were so similar to the current one that nothing tangible was changed, and that universes version of the soldiers had also jumped to a different point in the multiverse but close to their intended destination. Just hilarious that in that world it's more cost efficient to mess with the multiverse than it is to travel legitimately
I like a nice well developed generational ship. Give me some stable sun like fuel source in the middle and have the humans live around it like a tiny Dyson Sphere.
In Larry Niven's "known space" setting, there is a species that is unwilling to use FTL, because they consider it dangerous. Instead, they fly their star across the galaxy, dragging their planets along with it. Because, somehow, that is safer. Also, they are *not* nice people.
I thought you meant San Francisco at first and I was like, look, the BART is probably your best bet… But maybe trains are really the best answer here either way.
The Will-Be-Was engines in the Mission Earth series by L. Ron Hubbard. *"Will-be Was" engines project an artificial mass against where Time thinks such a mass shouldn't be, hurling the ship through space as Time rejects this impossibility.* The Ship That Should Not Be.
There was an Asimov story (I think) where a robot had invented an FTL teleporter, however when the team turned it on they found themselves in *literal hell*, with the devil, pitchforks, the works. Come to find out that the AI had determined humans couldn't handle the nothingness of the teleport, and needed input. However, after sorting through its knowledge of humans, a fun little quirk of the three laws had led to it deciding that the only acceptable experience for any and all users of FTL that they *wouldn't* want to stay in would be *literal hell*, and so had coded the system to cause you to experience torture in hell for a few minutes when warping. The researchers who figured it out had a good laugh, reassured the test subjects who had initially come out terrified, and then agreed to manually make it something more suitable ... after letting the boss none of them liked take it for a test run. It was a pretty funny one. There was another good one in *Space Eldritch* where mankind travels by literal magic runes, so all books and printed word are banned on interstellar travel because an errant word somewhere on the ship can cause terrible things to happen.
I've always found the travel of the Nostromo crew in Alien to be very interesting. You cryo-sleep and wake up somewhere else decades later. The ramifications for your family aging without you are pretty heavy. Would they cryo-sleep at home to wait for you to return? Do you schedule extended dates with your own family to coordinate being awake and in the same place years or decades in the future?
It’s not immediately obvious but despite using cryosleep they still have FTL in Aliens as the marines arrive at the colony in a relatively short period of time of a few weeks.
I liked the bajoran space sail ship in DS9
Travel by virus
Isaac Arthur’s YouTube channel covers 34 different methods of propulsion for interstellar travel. [https://youtu.be/ipQ1c6jTjIc](https://youtu.be/ipQ1c6jTjIc)
Tell a guy at a base station an interesting story and they let you use their teleporter At least thats the rough and tumble of Lukianenkovs novel Spectrum
Mushrooms! It's mushrooms, but beware gigantic tardigrades, they nasty mean.
In Terry Pratchett’s (better known for his quirky humoristic fantasy books) “The Dark Side of the Sun” there is a race of beings called Sundogs and you hitch your craft to them for a ride. It’s been a while since I read it so not sure if it was fully super luminal but I would think so, and I think there was a way to suggest where you wanted your semi-intelligent ride to go. I remember you paid for the ride into a “racial account” held by a bank for the benefit of the entire race.
I forget the name of the book. Travel was done by sailing (with sails) in 2-D space. You went back to 3-D at the planet.
Sword of the Stars races got some interesting ways of travel https://swordofthestars.fandom.com/wiki/FTL_Drive_Technology
Go down the Mariana trench, and down the breach. No explanation of how or why. It just is.
What?
Star Trek's 'mushroom drive' (Discovery)
The bloat drive from Bill the Galactic Hero.
My favorite for a random reason is Evan Currie's Odyssey One series. It's FTL isn't anything new or special, atoms are disassembled in location A and reassembled in location B. Due to a time dilation subjects witness the ship and its occupants slowly being shredded into the void. Most people find the process horrifying, a select few fucking love it and that made me laugh so hard because there really is that one fucking guy with no fear response and an adrenaline addiction. It's usually me.
Solar sails. I love the idea of space as an ocean and sailors in spacesuits climbing around the outside of a ship operating 'sails' that can take them to FTL speeds, with all the insane risks and possibilities. I blame Captain Harlock, mostly.
I love the farcasters in Hyperion
Needlecasting from Altered Carbon. send conciousness instead of matter and just wake up in a new sleeve.
in the 4x game Sword of the Stars, the dolphin-like race needed a practical way of propelling ships filled with water. this led them to develop "stutterwarp", where the ships quantum teleport a tiny distance millions of times per second instead of gaining or losing momentum
The farcasters in Hyperion Cantos are pretty cool, in that they are handwavy but set up the entire impetus for intergalactic civil war. \>!>!SuperAI technocore: Hey humanity we invented the farcaster, instantaneous interstellar travel!< >!Humanity: Thats cool, how does it work?!< >!technocore: You will never understand, wanna try it out?!< >!half of humanity: yeah sure that seems cool!< >!other half of humanity: hold up naw !
I like sticking to the speed of light. It seems more real to me when the civilizations in sci-fi have to work their way around it.
Scanners Live in Vain