Favorite type of FTL?

[SirNitram]

I want a realspace FTL drive, just because of the tunnel of blue-shading-to-red you'd get.

[Stark]

No really, that's spacefold from Macross, and is functionally the same as option 2: you appear to disappear and reappear somewhere else.

PS, if you're folding space 'properly' (like 'proper' hyperspace) there won't BE a tunnel (or at least an incredibly short one), because both points will coexist briefly. That you honestly think spacefolding involves hell because Event Horizon said so is mindboggling. If you're folding space why would it involve a 'corridor, and interim space between two separate points'? Folding space should simply make the distance shorter (or nigh-nonexistent). This isn't a corridor.

Oh wait, I think FS2 subspace travel, and even though it's EXACTLY LIKE OPTION 2 I will insist it's different. At least that actually DOES have a tunnel, but you're still just disappearing and reappearing elsewhere. Were the 'go fast, jump, travel in other dimension' OP options too hard for anyone else?

[18-Till-I-Die]

I dont think it has anything to do with Hell, it's just that Event Horizon is the only movie where space-folding was actually adressed in any appreciable way, and not mentioning that aspect of the plot might confuse some people as to what Event Horizon is since it's (from what i know) a fairly obscure movie. It bombed like incredible, so i dont know if anyone even heard of it. I saw it on some movie channel while i was waiting for a quasi-porn movie (Return to Savage Beach...yes that's the title) to come on afterwards, so i figured it's fairly unknown.

In most fiction it's depicted as, visually, like a tunnel which is the easiest way to describe it as the "actual" effect would be probably impossible to visualize. In "reality" (yeah right...i wish) it'd most likely be pretty much instantaneous and invisible. Lensmen hyper-tubes re closer to what a "real" space-fold would be like, but even then it's not exact.

Yeah i guess it falls under number two then. The vote choices are rather strangely vague though, i see no reason for other as, like you and others have mentioned, most FTL falls under either one or two.

[Stark]

Yeah, he used common versions instead of descriptions.

Even Event Horizon showed that spacefold theory simply folds space moves to a distant location without traversing the intervening space. If they'd known that there was magic and madness involved (the apparent intermidiary stage), they might have gone back to the drawing board. You honestly seem to be holding to the 'spacefold = stargate tunnel' idea simply because that's what it is in Lensman.

[Howedar]

nBSG jump drives are fun, but I like the fixed jump-point system, since that nicely creates terrain in space.

Agreed. I intuitively like the idea of control of space being meaningful, and that's only really possible in space if there is some kind of worth to given points.

[Elessar]

Oh wait, I think FS2 subspace travel, and even though it's EXACTLY LIKE OPTION 2 I will insist it's different. At least that actually DOES have a tunnel, but you're still just disappearing and reappearing elsewhere. Were the 'go fast, jump, travel in other dimension' OP options too hard for anyone else?

I remember being blown away in FS1 when apparently, you could actually engage the Lucifier in the middle of jumping. Up until that moment, I had thought the wormholes were basically instantaneous.

I'm sticking with the wormhole style FTL though, because FS really showed all the cool 'chokepoint' style actions that could be made in such a world. There's... too much freedom with other types, whereas a "last-ditch hold specific star system before shit hits the fan" scenario is really great story material.

[Stark]

I prefer FS2-style 'natural' points to B5-style 'artificial' points. Having a 'jump network' is cool, but the addition of mysterious aliens that build gates everywhere is silly. The FS idea of 'node stability' easily allows the existence of dangerous exploration or unknown/infrequented areas.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Yeah, he used common versions instead of descriptions.

Even Event Horizon showed that spacefold theory simply folds space moves to a distant location without traversing the intervening space. If they'd known that there was magic and madness involved (the apparent intermidiary stage), they might have gone back to the drawing board. You honestly seem to be holding to the 'spacefold = stargate tunnel' idea simply because that's what it is in Lensman.

Actually yeah i know it wouldnt look like anykind of "tunnel", but thats just how most shows visualize such an effect. I doubt, as i said, it'd be possible to visualize such a thing for real, it'd probably look like the ship is there...now it's gone...at the same time it's WAAAAY over there with no discernable flash or any kind of images we usually associate with FTL in scifi. It wouldnt "woosh off" like a Warp drive or a Hyperdrive.

Event Horizon's "Hell" was a total rip off of 40K Immaterium though, that was what really struck me about that movie. They even had the British dude turn into a "Chaos Daemon" at the end and start looking like Pinhead. It's the cloest we'll everget to a real 40K movie though, unfortunately. "It's a realm of pure chaos!" i mean could they have been more heavy handed, i was waiting for the Black guy to say "Oh Holy Throne, save us!" or something.


Back on topic...
Something that i realized could fit in the Other category.

There was something i read somewhere, i forget, a story where the FTL they used was outrageously complex. Would you slog around with FTL if you could accomplish time travel?

This ship goes to the destination over thousands of years at lightspeed, the crew is frozen. Then they use a time machine to travel to that exact point in space, but thousands of years back so they arrive the second they left.

The huge number of causality paradoxes that would happen here boggle the mind. The fact they somehow managed time travel, yet something as "simple" (comparatively) as a more traditional FTL was out of their reach also stretches SOD. It's like if the Time Lords had a TARDIS but somehow only used generation ships to get where they were going for some unstated reason.

[Catman]

So you chose the most 'realistic' (ho ho) type in a poll about handwavium science fiction? You, sir, fail the thread.

Bah, well I don't think it's less realistic than somehow going faster than light in the universe.

Meh, it's usually "Magical Bullshit" anyway. I understood that part.

But I can seriously imagine humans developing a Jumpdrive someday, although likely several centuries from now, before Warp engines.

[Stark]

Why? FTL is impossible. What makes 'jumpdrives' less magical than 'warp engines'?

PS 18, Sam Neill ain't British. The Doctor was British, and Stark was probably British, but Sam Neill ain't British. His character was even Australian!

[Catman]

I think that something could probably create a wormhole, but that if it were so, it would probably be thousands of years even before we accomplished it.

It doesn't sound like just moving in the normal universe, only at FTL.

[Stark]

You DO know what happens to things that pass through wormholes, right? Or are you jumping straight into 'oh yeah it's a directable, artificial wormhole that allows safe travel through the power of MAGIC' as a realistic drive option? If you're going to break science to get that to work, why is that any better than breaking science to travel through hell or tachyon conversion or whatever?

Just note, 'I think', 'probably', and 'doesn't sound' are NOT good things to say when you're defending a position.

[Catman]

I didn't say how it could be a non-magical thing.

And I don't know how you could develop artificial wormholes, so I can't tell you, really, if it's possible, although if it is, none of us will be able to understand some of how such a drive may work.

But yeah, in fiction, without the understanding of how to create a wormhole, it's magic shit too.

If anyone can really develop an interstellar drive, I really don't think that it'll be stuff that any 20th or 21st century human will understand or "predict" in their writing.

And "I think" simply acknowledges that a thing that I am trying to describe isn't the kind of thing that you can easily figure out, and in the case of interstellar drives, I will likely be wrong about what is possible or realistic, but I obviously won't be able to go anywhere and confirm what I think.

So, yeah, for fictional drives, it's breaking science. Not a real drive that
creates wormholes, it that is ever going to be discovered someday.

I will likely never know, either way what happens.

[Stark]

So after all that why do you describe wormholes as 'more realistic'? Realism /= 'maybe it might happen through magic and you can't predict it'.

Nothing irritates me more than people using stupid claims of 'realism' to buttress their preferences.

[Catman]

Nah, I just wasn't thinking about what a wormhole drive could actually accomplish.

That and the fact that I was obsessed with how much more impossible Warp Drives seem.

Fine, fictional wormhole drives are also bullshit. But I never considered that, which is why I made those realism claims.

Oops.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Nothing irritates me more than people using stupid claims of 'realism' to buttress their preferences.

Hence why I said "elegance" in reference to the space folding in Dune.

[Covenant]

Nothing irritates me more than people using stupid claims of 'realism' to buttress their preferences.

Hence why I said "elegance" in reference to the space folding in Dune.

Realism is elegent. I suppose it's the difference between a stupid claim and an understandable claim, but I prefer more 'realistic' FTL devices, merely because it damages the realism of everything else less. If ships can travel at a billion kilometers per second, it raises a lot of questions, like... how do you engage an enemy like that? Can you deploy projectiles at that speed? What happens if it runs through a planet?

I voted for The Warp though, so I'm happy to throw reality out the window when it's faced with an extremely useful story device. I like FTLs to be internally consistant with the story and relative level of technology in the media, and explore the implications of that technology. I dislike Star Trek 'warp' stuff, because it's never consistantly displayed.

[Xon]

Revelation-space FTL, because every time you chance going faster than c you risk retroactively annihilating yourself from existance.

Is that the old "relativity, casualty, FTL, pick two" argument?

Revelation-space is doesnt really explain it's physics enough to determine this. I think it goes for you dont really get any of the 3 has hard fast constants.

There is casualty on the local scale, but the series has (sending messages back to change history, paradoxes do not occur)time travel and all the human drives work by sending a micro-scale wormhole back to moments after the bigbang to scope up thruster output. Oh and there is FTL, which is described as controlling multi-dimensional fields who's complexity varies expontintially from the atomic scale up (anything large than a few dozen atoms is asking for you to lose control, and that is bad).

We arent shown anything which violates relativity either, possibly the free energy which results in a complete mastery of inertia would count.

[Dahak]

Hyperspace like in Honorverse or B5 is very nice. It looks so much better
And as freaky drive, I like the Bell-Contiuum-"Drive", where you don't actually move or jump, but tell the universe where you are

[18-Till-I-Die]

The Bleed from the Wildstorm universe, used by interdimensional starships like the Authority's favorite buddy The Carrier, is in appearance identical to B5 Hyperspace but much cooler.

It lets you travel though space, time and various dimensions. Of course, like B5 Hyperspace, it's entirely possible to get lost and go wildly off course.

That and you need either vast superpowers (like Ion or Captain Atom) or a city-sized starship with a baby universe for a reactor to get to it...so it's not, like, across the street. Though, actually, as i understand it the Bleed exists all around us in another plane of existance so, it also kind of is across the street.

[kinnison]

I have three, one of which is theoretically possible in the real universe. That one is the Tipler machine (T-machine) from Poul Anderson's Avatar - basically a neutronium cylinder rotating at near lightspeed, which distorts spacetime in such a way that you can go anywhere and anywhen, if you know the route. This was based on a paper by - guess who?

The next one is the Bergenholm inertialess drive.

But my favourite is the Infinite Improbability Drive - which actually has some basis in theory as well. Treating the ship and everyone in it as a single quantum particle, there is some possibility that it could make an instantaneous quantum jump to the other side of the universe. The probability is vanishingly small of course - but what was that drive called again?

[Stormin]

Back on topic...
Something that i realized could fit in the Other category.

There was something i read somewhere, i forget, a story where the FTL they used was outrageously complex. Would you slog around with FTL if you could accomplish time travel?

This ship goes to the destination over thousands of years at lightspeed, the crew is frozen. Then they use a time machine to travel to that exact point in space, but thousands of years back so they arrive the second they left.

The huge number of causality paradoxes that would happen here boggle the mind. The fact they somehow managed time travel, yet something as "simple" (comparatively) as a more traditional FTL was out of their reach also stretches SOD. It's like if the Time Lords had a TARDIS but somehow only used generation ships to get where they were going for some unstated reason.

Could you mean the method from the Chronicles of Solace, where ships will move at STL speeds to a wormhole that will drop them back in time at the half way point of the trip?
A 100 year trip has a wormhole at 50 years out that will drop the ship 100 years in the past so that, even though the ship is 100 years older, the trip only took a few months.

[Nyrath]

SF author Geoffrey Landis has catagorized almost forty different types of FTL drives found in various SF novels here:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket ... stardrives

[Nyrath]

I have three, one of which is theoretically possible in the real universe. That one is the Tipler machine (T-machine) from Poul Anderson's Avatar - basically a neutronium cylinder rotating at near lightspeed, which distorts spacetime in such a way that you can go anywhere and anywhen, if you know the route. This was based on a paper by - guess who?

That is because the Tipler machine is a time travel machine, and according to Einstein's relativity a time machine is synonymous with an FTL drive.

[Nyrath]

To weigh in on the realism thing: all FTL is impossible. Deal with it.

Poppycock!

Of course FTL is possible. All you have to do is either somehow discredit a scientific theory that has been tested with an accuracy of fourteen decimal places, or destroy the entire foundation of the scientific method.

How to do this? Er, ah, ummmm, well, how about I leave that as an exercise for the reader, while I make my escape.