Warp drives: The ship doesn't move fast, but shortens the distance it has to travel by forcing space itself to move.One of the best known "jump drive" regimes is Dune.
TALES OF WIND STARTRAIL SERIES
(Indeed, jump drives might be called "fold drives" to reinforce the idea.) Jump drives tend to be the fastest FTL drive, but occasionally there are limitations - most often, they're range-limited, so you'd need to make a series of jumps to go longer distances, perhaps requiring recalibration between jumps. A common analogy is with a piece of paper if you have to draw a line from one dot to the other, the best way is to fold the paper so that the dots are right on top of each other. This is often accomplished by changing space itself - instead of moving faster than light, it reduces the distance that must be travelled.
This allows the ship to circumvent the limitations of physics by moving to a place where physics no longer applies, at least in a way that we know it. Hyperdrives: The ship leaves local space and enters Another Dimension where it can go faster.FTL drives tend to fall into these categories: This is incredibly useful in building the viewer's Willing Suspension of Disbelief, because even though FTL travel is theoretically impossible, as long as the story sticks to the conventions, the audience will know what to expect.įTL travel requires an "FTL drive", a device of some sort that holds the laws of physics in abeyance and, when activated, allows a ship to travel faster than light.
But interestingly, faster than light travel has developed a set of wide-ranging conventions that writers repeatedly use, essentially allowing several broad categories of technology with their own capabilities and limitations. It can fall on just about any sci-fi setting - either a well thought out device that uses as much of modern science as possible, or something that Runs on Nonsensoleum but gets the characters from Point A to Point B. Writers resolve this problem by creating a system of some kind that allows for travel faster than the speed of light. There's a whole bunch of stuff about this on the analysis page, but trust us - it's not likely to happen. The problem is that as far as present-day science is concerned, going faster than - or even just as fast as - the speed of light is, for all human intents and purposes, impossible. Thus, in order for the protagonists to be able to plausibly visit a new Planet of Hats every week, they need to travel through space at speeds faster than that of light itself. Other planetary systems are so far away from us that it takes even the fastest thing in the universe - light itself - years, decades, or millenia to reach them. Nowadays, we know that the rest of our solar system is almost certainly devoid of other life forms - so we've got to go outside the system.Īnd that's where the "space is honking big" part comes in. This has been an issue for writers since The '50s or so before then you could get away with having your aliens come from Neptune without totally losing the audience. Faster-Than-Light Travel is a staple of Space Opera that allows an "out" to the unfortunate fact that space is honking big, making it impossible (within physics as we understand it now) to get anywhere remotely interesting within the average lifetime of a civilization.
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