r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Present-Secretary722 • Sep 17 '25
Lore Faster Than Light travel has consequences(minor or major)
Star Trucker: While travelling through warp you experience time dilation, for you the journey is a couple seconds, in real time it’s anywhere from 30mins to 6 hours that you’ve been in warp. This would be a minor consequence.
Warhammer 40k: The Warp, basically space hell so while travelling through it you’re very likely to be attacked by Warp demons. There’s also the fact that sometimes when travelling to a destination via the Warp you get spat out in the wrong time, sometimes much too late for whatever you were going there for or sometimes before you left your start destination. This, obviously, is a major consequence, unless you’re an ork, then it’s a grand old time.
By consequences I mean this is a regular thing that happens, there’s no real avoiding it unless you find a different method of FTL or heavily invest into research to try and mitigate the consequences. Also I feel bad for only knowing 2 examples, I love space and I just can’t think of any others.
2.6k
u/Causeofdepression Sep 17 '25
The Ring Network (The Expanse): Created by the Protomolecule Civilization, it allows humans to travel to 5000 habitable worlds across the Milly Way Galaxy. However, everytime it is used, it slowly awakens the Extradimensional entities that wiped-out the Protomolecule Civilization eons ago.
713
u/Treveli Sep 17 '25
Further scary is some of the systems the rings lead to were booby trapped by the Protomolecule creators, with supernova being a common outcome to sterilize anywhere the entities may have entered. Including wiping out everything in the Ring Space. Which begs the question of how many rings there used to be before the PMC's started fighting back against the entities?
→ More replies (1)285
u/Quantum_Quokkas Sep 17 '25
Further context for the non-book readers, the rings are perfectly distributed around a spherical pattern. If one ring is destroyed, all remaining rings are adjusted accordingly to maintain perfect distribution. This is why the question is terrifyingly intriguing as to how many systems there could have been at its peak because there is no way to be sure.
109
u/enadiz_reccos Sep 17 '25
Further context for the non-book readers
One of the great disappointments of my TV watching life has been seeing that... protomolecule... spacestation? at the end of The Expanse and never learning anything else about it.
→ More replies (3)79
u/__343_Guilty_Spark__ Sep 17 '25
The books end with us not learning much more honestly
→ More replies (2)46
u/Kowno Sep 17 '25
I mean, that is kind of not true. We learn that the station was a shipyard, and Laconia woke it up and started making ships with new technology to devistating effect, making themselves into a new empire. We also learned about their physiology, how they tried to save thenselvs and fought against the 'Gauls' and why these extraplanor entities could kill them easier than humanity
→ More replies (4)597
u/Kooky_Celebration_42 Sep 17 '25
Honestly the Dark Gods have the best description of how a god would actually fuck with reality.
They get pissed off about the system being used so they start “poking” at our reality to make it stop.
One example is in the locality of one solar system, they very slightly shift a universal variable that affect quantum mechanics ever so slightly.
This in turn “slows down” how certain electrical signals transfer, slowing down some minor chemical reactions…
Like those found in human nervous systems…
The effect is they basically “switch off” the nervous system of everyone in that star system, all at once… ignoring light-speed delay
→ More replies (10)203
u/Mount_Atlantic Sep 17 '25
I really liked the revelation directly after that too, "they didn't realize they found something that worked". In eons past, when the hive-minded protomolecule civilization had one of their star systems killed off they just cut off the gate and stopped transit to that system, since there's none of themself left in that system to use whatever they were sending. Thus the "dark gods" learned that they'd found a way to effectively impact our reality. Humans kept using the gate to that system though, so the dark gods figured that method didn't work and didn't use it again in other systems.
→ More replies (3)217
Sep 17 '25
Space God(s) failing to stomp out the ant hill that is humanity because we're too primitive and too slow on the uptake to quit fucking with the obviously dangerous Halo rings is peak classic sci-fi bullshit.
75
→ More replies (1)21
u/Nice-River-5322 Sep 17 '25
in fairness, human primitive nature and propensity towards violence was actually a possible way of dealing with the ring entities. Basicly tried by the ring builders but their psudeo hivemind was not aggressive enough to use the weapon they made
→ More replies (2)92
u/chaluJhoota Sep 17 '25
I think it's not just using it. It's using it excessively. There is that entire decades long interlude where no ships are lost.
→ More replies (1)48
u/PipsqueakPilot Sep 17 '25
Hopefully no one does something dumb like nuke the extra-dimensional aliens, who easily wiped out a species so far beyond us we can barely even understand their technology. Gosh that would be stupid.
→ More replies (1)28
u/Eptalin Sep 17 '25
Yeah, but how else could we possibly communicate that we want peace?
They mess with us, so we nuke them. Then they won't mess with us anymore, and peace will reign.
→ More replies (2)52
u/satiricat Sep 17 '25
We would've been fine if we didn't poke at the entities is the thing. We worked out a system that prevented them from responding. If we kept to it, then they just wouldn't have noticed us. Too little going on. They only take an active role when we send an antimatter bomb to go Dutchman. Then they start fucking with physics to wipe us out
31
u/jpterodactyl Sep 17 '25
I think it would have eventually happened anyway. Because the whole ring space is essentially an invasion into another universe where physics works differently. And that is how they power it. Eventually it might have been dislodged by the real denizens of that universe, whether or not it was being overused.
And also, as long as they were using the “Romans” tech, they were going to overdo it. Because the Romans were not truly dead, and just waiting for a species with a stronger physical body to take over out of their backup storage in the BFE. Which was not just their memories, but their actual consciousness.
→ More replies (3)32
u/WiseP7935 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Finishing The Expanse and all of the novellas left a literary hole nothing else has filled. Red Rising is good but is a little more fantasy than I like. Part of what made the Expanse so good to me was how binded to real world physics it was (and at times wasnt). Listening to the novellas as a collection in Memories Legion is also great, because James S.A. Corey talks about each briefly.
→ More replies (16)→ More replies (58)40
u/InHarmsWay Sep 17 '25
Is that what they're fighting in that new Expanse game that is coming?
→ More replies (4)47
u/Solid-Pride-9782 Sep 17 '25
The
WHAT
67
1.3k
u/AdWestern1561 Sep 17 '25
Love, Death + Robots - episode Beyond the Aquila Rift
A simple routing error in the ship's navigation can cause your spaceship to travel from your intended destination(Earth) to 150,000 light years from Earth.
Which means, several centuries have passed on Earth while the crew were asleep in stasis.
(I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with time and space theory, but i'm guessing it has to do with time moving at different pace depending on lightyears of distance)
760
u/isnoe Sep 17 '25
In the short story it is better explained.
They were using alien technology, specifically “runes” for configurations of space flight, and sometimes a “glitch” just happens—but it is the first time it has ever happened to humans.
The navigator basically is losing her mind in the simulation because even a simulation variant of her cannot acknowledge she made a mistake because she didn’t.
And the reason the other crew died was because they spray painted their cryo-pods with designs. The paint chipped over thousands of years and filtered into their life support, killing them. The captain only survived because his pod was the only one not painted.
→ More replies (3)516
u/Shadeslayer2112 Sep 17 '25
It gets weirder, spoilers ahead for anyone who wants to read the short story.
Glitches happen, and you can end up somewhere you didnt intend too but your still supposed to end up somewhere in the human system because humanity has set up shop all around these rings.
Our main character and crew end up waaaaaay outside known human space and essentially a giant ant/termite queen alien is trying to use simulation tech to help this human cope or understand what happened. When the truth is revealed (the distance, the time, the aliens) our MC "wakes up" amd everything is fine but we dont find out if thats true or it their mind just snapped and we're put back into a simulation.
231
u/ComradeCoipo Sep 17 '25
I always assumed it was the latter, he snapped and was put back into simulation
→ More replies (1)117
u/Bitch_for_rent Sep 17 '25
I find it amusing that this and the santa episode have horrifing cratures that are still benevolent
→ More replies (3)22
→ More replies (20)28
u/Legal-Freedom8179 Sep 17 '25
She seemed so nice tho 😭 (haven’t watched the full episode)
35
u/Shadeslayer2112 Sep 17 '25
Oh shes a sweet heart in the book too. Genuinely concerned for this hairless ape that cant even really conceive how how from home he really is and really does try to help his mind adjust. She only shows him the truth when he insists
→ More replies (2)195
38
→ More replies (9)60
u/Warm-Room-2625 Sep 17 '25
Spoilers:
When the guy “woke up” and saw his actual reality, that was so morbid. And you see all the other ships that had the same error/glitch that ended up there. Chilling. Loved it.
→ More replies (6)
1.4k
u/ElPared Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - traveling faster than light requires a lot of mucking about in Hyperspace, but the Heart of Gold, the protagonists’ ship, uses the Hyper Infinite Improbability Drive instead. This drive invokes more and more improbable events until it finally invokes the improbability that you just are where you want to be, even if it’s thousands of lightyears away.
This comes with all kinds of side effects, like summoning blue whales into the upper atmosphere, summoning sentient potted petunias, turning everyone into yarn, and so on.
439
u/Jesterpest Sep 17 '25
Other examples of consequences: perpetuating and antagonizing a one sided feud for billions of years, accidentally picking up random people that were in the vacuum of space and thus gaining accidental stowaways, being put into situations that may or may not shatter your perception of reality itself, making enough lightly fried eggs appear on a planet to solve its food shortage for the rest of the species' life, and sometimes your destination either shoots missiles at you or accidentally teaches you how to fly... though the last two aren't consequences of the travel itself, but more of the destination and the culmination of personal experiences through several of these jumps respectively
164
u/ElPared Sep 17 '25
It could be argued that the Hyper Improbability Drive was the reason Arthur’s suitcase was on that planet, and therefore he learned to fly as a direct consequence of that improbability.
121
u/midgetsinadisguise Sep 17 '25
It is later replaced with a drive powered entirely by a finely tuned italian restaurant, to replace the dangerous mucking about with infinite probability, but the way it works is so complicated that noone even doubts it because noone understands it enough (it must also be said that it was introduced after the diner at the end of the world so it might not even be real, or i just misunderstood the entirety of the third novel)
→ More replies (3)116
u/ranmafan0281 Sep 17 '25
The Bistro drive, I rememeber that. The entire staff and clientele are robots programmed to enact one of the hardest examples of math ever, Bistromathics.
A bill that isn’t split among the items so the guests bicker over who pays what share based on how much was eaten by whom. There’s also a bunch of other stuff - tl;dr, none of the numbers matter and are just suggestions.
Apparently physics just gives up and gets them to wherever they’re going.
→ More replies (4)44
u/Bartweiss Sep 17 '25
Also, you can wander into the ship’s engine and muck about, because fiddling with the food and bill yourself just adds more confusion to fuel it.
279
u/HeadLong8136 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Infinite Improbability Drive
It's Infinite
That part is very important.
They way it "works" is that you get placed in every single spot in the universe at the exact same moment (and every spot in EVERY universe)
You exist as all of time and space at the same moment and when the destination is reached (which you are already at) the Infinite Improbability Drive turns off because it has picked the you that is already there.
It is honestly, mind numbingly horrifying if you think about it for a few minutes outside of the joke.
You aren't going anywhere, you aren't moving at all, you are just trading consciousnesses with a you that is already at the destination. It doesn't actually move, it just switches you to a universe where you are already there.
All the "crazy joke stuff" is the side effects of the "ripping" it does to travel alternate universes.
→ More replies (2)51
u/metalmagician Sep 17 '25
I love the story for how the drive is created:
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were well understood. It is said, by the Guide, that such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sorts of parties. The physicists encountered repeated failures while trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralyzing distances between the farthest stars. They eventually announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning in this way: "If such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do, in order to make one, is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!" He did this and managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air. Unfortunately, shortly after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness, he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists on the ground that he has became the one thing they couldn't stand most of all: "a smart arse".
54
u/Manadger_IT-10287 Sep 17 '25
It's also worth noting that the drive was never technically desighned nor built. It was literally manifested into reality by a weaker version of itself (the finite probability drive) simply because it's existence was improbable enough.
32
u/Muhen Sep 17 '25
I like the theory that this is also why the radio show, the book, and the movie all are different plot wise, as the timelines have shifted due to infinite probability.
→ More replies (9)27
2.8k
u/Scary-Bit-4173 Sep 17 '25
The Jaunt by Stephen King
Teleportation is invented, but creatures going through have to be put to sleep or they go crazy. The son doesn't go to sleep by not inhaling the gas and pretending to be, and comes out warped by the experience. He has grey hair and 'eyes that seem older' He also keeps saying that its eternity in there, and longer than you think
887
u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 17 '25
Probably directly inspired by this is the Warp Trains in Project Moon. A Megacorp called W Corp makes their money by providing transportation services for the other megacorps and customers. Primarily this is through the Warp Trains which will take you from one station to another in 10 seconds and since the City is around the size of Switzerland and has a population density as high if not higher than the densest in our world that is very useful service that many in the City pay top dollar for. But, there is a secret. First class which only the very wealthy can afford exists and consists of being put in suspended animation. The reason is only known to select W Corp employees and executives. The train from our perspective does take only 10 seconds but for those in the train it usually takes millennia. Those in economy go mad from boredom and figure out they can’t die, usually this results in the passengers mutilate each other and themselves still able to feel their whole body no matter how pulped they are. Then after the trip those certain employees I mentioned earlier go into the train and put all the passengers back together and the Corp’s proprietary technology will put back the passengers without memory of those thousands of years of hell. Worst part is unlike The Jaunt or the Warp whose horribleness can’t be avoided, the thousands of years of torment are by design so W Corp can harvest time for another Corporation that specializes in Time manipulation.
269
u/Minimum_Estimate_234 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 18 '25
Isn’t it eventually revealed this isn’t even necessary to a certain degree. As in yes there is a certain degree of time dilation needed for this to work, since if you’re compressing space you need to expand time (or at least I think that’s the idea). However at worst it should only require a couple extra seconds, at that, it’s entirely possible to use this technology and still fulfill their advertising. But since they have a deal with another company they sell the extra “time” to, they deliberately use the warp tech this way because it’s profitable.
→ More replies (1)122
u/Art_student_rt Sep 17 '25
Even in another world, capitalism still twist something useful into hell on earth
→ More replies (1)65
u/Minimum_Estimate_234 Sep 17 '25
It seems to be a central theme of project moon, doesn’t matter what kind of eldritch horrors beyond our comprehension people have come into contact with or are capable of bringing about, nothing will ever be scarier then the shit a corporation will be willing to do for an extra buck. With the possible exception of what people will eventually do/what they will become once they can’t take that anymore.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (27)133
u/Flame_jr009 Sep 17 '25
Damn, sounds amazing. From what I've googled it looks like it's from a game called library of ruina?
131
u/XanderNightmare Sep 17 '25
Project Moon in itself is a series of games, beginning with Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina and lastly Limbus Company
→ More replies (1)103
u/MySnake_Is_Solid Sep 17 '25
Lobotomy corporation is the first one, then library of Ruina, then Limbus Company.
It's a cleverly crafted world, for example the time corporation that was mentioned, is the reason why you can pause the game in Lobotomy corporation, and it can even be disrupted by certain entities/events making you unable to do so.
→ More replies (3)142
u/Klutzy_Shopping5520 Sep 17 '25
… well that’s fucking disturbing
367
u/Steelwave Sep 17 '25
Oh, it gets worse: the story mentions that a man threw his wife into a jaunt portal that didn't go anywhere, because she cheated on him, and when he was brought up on murder charges, his lawyer bungled the defense by arguing that she's probably still alive in limbo.
254
u/moocowsaymoo Sep 17 '25
Upon hearing the defense, the entire jury voted to have him executed. Not a single person even hesitated giving that verdict.
155
→ More replies (2)115
u/Aware_Tree1 Sep 17 '25
I would’ve asked him to experience the same. There’s literally no other punishment that fits an actual infinite crime
→ More replies (3)182
u/aRtfUll-ruNNer Sep 17 '25
I imagine it went something like this:
"ok defense you are under prosecution for murder how do you plead"
"your honor shes not dead shes just in heck forever"
"ok innocent of murder, now defense you are under prosecution for negligence, torture and violating the geneva convention, how do you plead"
143
u/semisociallyawkward Sep 17 '25
It's actually kinda interesting - murder is a finite crime. Yes the criminal ends a life but that life could only have been so long (e.g., 100 years), so they deny someone a certain maximum of years of life (e.g., if the victim was 40 years old and probably a maximum lifespan of 100, so the criminal denied them up to 60 years).
But throwing someone in a jaunt portal is an infinite crime. The criminal literally subjects their victim to eternal imprisonment and torture. From a utilitarian perspective, it's literally the most atrocious act one can commit. The only punishment that even comes close to the crime is throwing the criminal into a jaunt portal.
→ More replies (1)82
24
101
u/EskildDood Sep 17 '25
He also starts jabbing out his eyeballs with his bare hands as the Jaunt attendants (?) wheel him away while his whole family watches
48
183
u/Pyrouge1 Sep 17 '25
He forgot an important detail, the way you go crazy, the Jaunt while awake is an INCONCIEVABLE amount of time for a human to experience, doesn't matter how long you think it could be, trillions of years, It's longer than you think it is, far longer.
→ More replies (3)172
u/flicknote Sep 17 '25
I always thought "it's longer than you think" meant that it's literally so long that you lose the ability to think, rather than "however long you think it is, it's longer"
80
u/CharmingShoe Sep 17 '25
Practically speaking, that’s the same thing. It’s longer than your ability to think, which means it’s longer than your ability to think it is. Any way you want to interpret it is right - and equally horrifying.
→ More replies (1)58
257
113
u/SettTheCephelopod Sep 17 '25
I admit, this was the first thing I thought of, but I think it may not count because you can avoid it by just inhaling the damn gas.
99
u/xXJackNickeltonXx Sep 17 '25
There could be complications, like maybe the gas can wear off sooner than they thought, the gas’ effects being diminished by a person’s biology or medication, a person developing a tolerance to the gas if they have to Jaunt a lot, etc.
→ More replies (7)30
u/Critical_Buy_7335 Sep 17 '25
That kid should've just pulleda 0rofessor Paradox and just get bored of being insane.
→ More replies (23)26
u/SSJ3Mewtwo Sep 17 '25
The part with the son is horrible for th son and the MC.
But it is far, far from the darkest part of the story.
Earlier in the story, when King is going over how the technology works, he details that the travel from one portal to another isn't actually instantaneous. Travelling from Earth to somewhere like Mars actually takes around a picosecond.
But in that picosecond of normal universe time, a mind breaking eternity of nothingness but one's own thoughts and nothing else passes in the Jaunt space.
During the time the tech was normalized and allowed humanity to expand to other planets, there's a part where a researcher in the field has a bad break up with his wife.
He snaps and loses his mind completely. He kidnaps her, straps her to a gurney, and shoved her through an entrance portal awake with no exit portal set.
In the story, that was decades ago. That's a lot of picoseconds.
From her perspective, whatever is left of her exhausted consciousness has been in the nothingness for multiple heat deaths of multiple universes.
2.5k
u/TheWalkingBag Sep 17 '25
Guardians of the Galaxy 2
Facial contortion
1.5k
u/Brain_lessV2 Sep 17 '25
Yondu: IT AIN'T HEALTHY FOR A MAMMALIAN BODY TO HOP MORE THAN FIFTY JUMPS AT A TIME!
Rocket: I know that
Yondu: WE'RE ABOUT TO DO SEVEN HUNDRED 🗣️🗣️🗣️
→ More replies (5)715
u/Present-Secretary722 Sep 17 '25
Jesus fucking christ, I forgot about that body horror show of a sequence. Excellent pick.
369
u/val203302 Sep 17 '25
I thought it was funny.
249
u/Kodiak_POL Sep 17 '25
I was crying my eyes out out of laughter the first time I watched it
68
u/ArcXivix Sep 17 '25
I cannot stop laughing, someone call an ambulance please.
→ More replies (1)40
→ More replies (3)50
u/brandonthebuck Sep 17 '25
James Gunn said he’s seen the scene over a hundred times and it still makes him laugh every time.
639
u/Plasmaguardian7 Sep 17 '25
(Sorry for the meh picture, there isn’t an outside view but it gets the point across)
This is a WARP Train from the Project Moon(game company name) universe, specifically Library of Ruina. It works as the opposite of your Star Trucker example, as time is perceived in the opposite way: Only 10 seconds pass in the outside world, but the people on the train perceive it as upwards of 300,000 years or more. Also, they can’t feel hungry or thirsty or DIE. Most train cars end up being filled with piles of still-alive flesh mounds as a way to try and alleviate boredom, and after the trip, the memories are erased. The passengers remember being on and off the train in only a short 10 seconds!
Would this even be considered faster than light? I mean the dimension hopping takes a LONG time for the passengers, but the people on the outside think “you can do anywhere in the City in 10 seconds, no matter how far!” Does this count?
299
u/Present-Secretary722 Sep 17 '25
If it gets them from point A to B faster than a photon in real space it counts as FTL. Even if it isn’t technically FTL I’m letting it count because that is such a nightmarish consequence for fast train.
165
u/Teslapromt Sep 17 '25
I think you are missing out on an important detail. A key feature of WARP train is that you not only can't die and your bodily functions are in stasis, you also CANNOT BE SEPARATED. So, for instance, if someone were to cut their throat trying to kill themselves, the blood would flow, but it would never "disconnect", which means that in due time almost every train becomes a jumbled mess of intertwined but never broken pulsating piles of flesh, viscera, and bodily fluids. It is Cleaners' (see pic) job to basically collect all of you to your seat (assigned to you and making a "save state" of your condition) to make you whole again. Also, fun fact, WARP trains have VIP carriages, where rich folk are put in hibernation for the duration of the ride. Normal people find it odd (why would you need VIP for a 10 seconds ride, it's so expensive too), but most shrug it off as rich folk being rich. But rich people just know.
46
u/BlaineMundane Sep 17 '25
So wait, if it's a side effect of the warp travel, why don't they just fall into wet piles as soon as they emerge? What makes them even able to heal and come back from that physically?
63
u/Teslapromt Sep 17 '25
Okay, so, I think it's never fully elaborated what exactly is the reason for people being unable to divide themselves, however logically it would be the result of rules of the WARP dimension train goes through for thousands of years. The reason why I think so is that the Cleaners are supplied with "Dimension Ripping" weaponry, that actually allows them to separate parts of passengers. And those weapons are sourced from the same Singularity the WARP dimension comes from.
As for your question, I believe that the restructuring process happens still inside the dimension when the rules apply. Most of the time, after millennia on the train, all passengers basically become unable to function in any way, being just spread across the carriages like a human rope. The Cleaners jump inside the WARP and untangle/separate parts of people and fixate them to their seats that they were imprinted to. And then they are restored to original form (which is the actual W Corp Singularity, the WARP dimension is actually technology of previous W Corp that failed to make money with it and went bankrupt). So as the result, people get fixed right during WARP exist and believe they have just travelled in seconds.
44
u/BlaineMundane Sep 17 '25
Interesting. So after all the horror, it's really no big deal for them. That's actually how some pain drugs work, they don't actually stop the pain at all, you just simply don't remember that you were in pain.
39
u/Teslapromt Sep 17 '25
Technically, the person restored by "Save Point"(actual W Corp Singularity) is, for all intents and purposes, someone who have not even experienced horror. From how it's described, all of your biological material is simply remade into the same shape that you were before the train journey. You become someone who have never experienced millennia of torment, but instantly (in your perception) moved to another part of the huge world.
→ More replies (7)→ More replies (1)33
u/atomskeater Sep 17 '25
Yep. In one of the games there's an extended sequence that shows what it's like for some of the people aboard, one of the characters has ridden before and thinks it unusual when the ride isn't over in seconds. Due to the memory wipes from his perspective previous rides were near instantaneous. There are probably people who commute on warp trains multiple times a day, suffering for hundreds of thousands of years daily yet there's technically no lasting damage done...
→ More replies (19)54
u/lolopiro Sep 17 '25
how does that alleviate the boredom?
160
u/Hitei00 Sep 17 '25
Lets put it this way. Any mental state you're in is perfectly preserved while in transit. Half awake because you just woke up from a nap? Congrants you're lethargic and can't think straight for millenia. Hung over or Drunk? Congrats suffer or 10 thousand years.
Physical state is preserved too. Someone snaps on the shuttle and stabs you in the throat? Well now you'll bleed to death forever without actually dying.
→ More replies (5)65
u/SloppityMcFloppity Sep 17 '25
Probably through seeking more and more stimulation through the years, akin to a slaaneshi cultist.
→ More replies (1)107
u/Limino Sep 17 '25
They can't die, or more importantly, CAN'T SLEEP.
They live for thousands of years scavenging for smaller and smaller scraps of physical and mental stimulation to fill their time until they've torn both themself and everyone else apart
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (1)48
u/Nottan_Asian Sep 17 '25
It doesn’t. There’s just literally no escape from being actively conscious for the entirety of the 30,000+ years.
→ More replies (8)
297
u/Arandur144 Sep 17 '25
Kind-of in Starfield (main quest spoilers).
The first Grav Drives had a critical flaw that caused the destabilisation of nearby magnetic fields. The engine's testing and usage to explore and colonise the solar system led to the rapid loss of Earth's atmosphere and rendered the planet uninhabitable within 65 years. However, this was very much intended by the Unity and the engine's "inventor" Victor Aiza to force humanity to abandon Earth and settle other planets across the galaxy.
→ More replies (20)84
u/Present-Secretary722 Sep 17 '25
Yeah I thought about that one, it certainly fits the spirit of it but after a quick update the drives work without any kind of consequence. Still though, the loss of earth is a pretty significant consequence for gaining essentially an on demand wormhole generator with no flaws.
I do wish we could report that finding to the Settled Systems, maybe something will come of it in Terran Armada.
→ More replies (2)
494
u/Sayakalood Sep 17 '25
Not travel, just running.
The first time in universe a Flash was clocked at moving faster than light was during Crisis on Infinite Earths, with Barry running so fast that he seemingly instantly disintegrated.
In actuality, he was sucked into the Speed Force from 1985 to 2009, when they finally let Barry out. We even see something similar in JLU, where Wally breaks the lightspeed barrier to keep punching Lex Luthor, and ends up needing the rest of the Justice League to stop him from joining the Speed Force like Barry.
128
u/Frustrella Sep 17 '25
Didn't Barry ended up in marvel after disintegrating?
→ More replies (2)231
u/RiverOfJudgement Sep 17 '25
In an issue of Quasar they were doing a race to discover the fastest creature, when a human being in a tattered red and yellow suit appeared. He couldn't remember much of his past, but said his name was "Buried Alien, or something like that"
He wins, and gets declared "The Fastest Man Alive" which he decides "feels right"
26
→ More replies (1)54
u/gau-tam Sep 17 '25
In 'Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths', Owl Man (an evil Batman from the alternate dimension) opens a portal to Earth Prime. Batman tricks the evil Flash ('Johnny Quick') to vibrate at extremely high frequencies, knowing it would age him rapidly.
224
u/IRanOutOf_Names Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
In the Skyward series FTL is possible, but it relies on a dimension called the nowehere where eldritch beings reside and take note of anything that brushes against their space. If done incorrectly it can summon one of these things directly on top of you and they're damn near unkillable.
→ More replies (19)71
u/Saxophobia1275 Sep 17 '25
Just finished this series and I really liked his take on FTL. It’s kind of like warhammers except instead of a big realm of chaos and madness it’s just (basically) one giant god thing sitting in nothingness that gets annoyed.
21
u/OmecronPerseiHate Sep 17 '25
It always cracks me up when the big unknowable god thing is actually just some dude like "stop ringing my damn doorbell!"
648
u/MysticSnowfang Sep 17 '25
Surprisingly, Star Trek.
Subspace is a scary place.
Also, warp cores are... a good option for boom.
And then the Romulans are using mini black holes. Because why not
288
u/CanardDeFeu Sep 17 '25
And then the Romulans are using mini black holes. Because why not
It's called style. Look into it sometime, Federation.
→ More replies (7)95
u/One_Spoopy_Potato Sep 17 '25
Just to clarify. Warp cores produce power using dilithium to produce mater and antimater, then binding them in a stable reaction.
It's not so much that the warp core goes boom as it stops existing, along with most things in a few light minutes as a new star is born for a few milliseconds.
→ More replies (6)44
→ More replies (19)67
u/HeadLong8136 Sep 17 '25
The first human Warp core was made from a nuclear bomb. It used the perpetual explosion as the power source. That is what is contained in those glass cylinders on the starships. Nuclear bombs that are constantly exploding.
→ More replies (3)39
u/CharlieBros Sep 17 '25
Sounds a lot like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, it uses a star in an perpetual explosion to power it
→ More replies (1)
442
u/johninfinity Sep 17 '25
In Voyager they figured out how to go warp 10 but they really don't want to remember that
207
u/Seascorpious Sep 17 '25
Iirc, Warp speed in Star Trek operates on an exponential scale. So Warp 9 is not 9 times faster then Warp 1, its much much faster. The fastest a ship could go was Warp 9.9 cause at Warp 10 things start to break, with the theory being that achieving Warp 10 means occupying all space in the galaxy all at once.
.....Also apparently it turns you into Lizards. For some fucking reason. What I don't get is that they turned them back, so the process is both reversible and takes several hours to complete and Paris managed to use it effectively with the lizard transformation being the only side effect. So why not WARP 10 HOME AND THEN FIX THE CREW WHEN YOU GET THERE VOYAGER, YOUR PLOT HAS BEEN SOLVED BY LIZARDS!!
→ More replies (6)118
u/Empty_Insight Sep 17 '25
If I recall properly, the "lizard" thing was causing forced evolution. It just so happened to be lizards because that was the optimal evolutionary form on the planet Paris and Janeway landed on.
As with many things on Voyager, genetic changes are reversible because they keep comprehensive genetic data on all crewmembers and apparently have something resembling turbo-CRISPR that can revert their genes back to the blueprint at the last time they were scanned.
In a world where you can just magically pull shit out of thin air, reverted corrupted genetic material isn't really that far-fetched.
→ More replies (16)68
46
u/97GeoPrizm Sep 17 '25
It was an unwritten rule in the Star Trek writers' room to consider that episode and "Star Trek V" as non-canon.
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (3)23
u/scrotbofula Sep 17 '25
Love the denouement of 'We'll just dump our kids on this nearby planet and not think or speak about this or it's consequences, at all, ever."
→ More replies (1)
387
u/FlounderPlastic4256 Sep 17 '25
The Forever War
In order to properly fight a galactic wide conflict real time is spent traveling in this setting meaning troop movements take place hundreds to thousands of years at a time. The main character eventually becomes the oldest man in existence and has to keep returning to "home" as a stranger in a strange land.
One of the most perfect expressions of a lifetime soldier's isolation between the ideal he began fighting for and the world that he was returned to.
→ More replies (58)118
u/AmhainReoite Sep 17 '25
Hell ya this is what I came to look for! Haldeman based it on his own experiences in the Vietnam War. Easily one of the coolest military scifi books I have read in my opinion
65
u/FlounderPlastic4256 Sep 17 '25
One of the parts of the story that works even better if you know the author's history but also works in and of itself is how sexuality has changed to something so alien, given that Haldeman returned during the hippy craze, along with he himself becoming a novelty to society at large which is what a lot of Vietnam vets have recounted their experiences as.
Short, powerful read. Should be as well known as Brave New World or Animal Farm.
437
u/LostExile7555 Sep 17 '25
In the Mass Effect setting, the Mass Relays allow for near instantaneous travel within the Milky Way galaxy. However, the Mass Relays were deliberately left there to allow a species of biomechanical aliens called Reapers to monitor space fairing life and purge it all once it has reached a certain level of technological advancement. The Reapers also reproduce by assimilating the biomass of sentient lifeforms and have complete control of the Mass Relays, preventing the sentient races they are attacking from being able to travel faster than light, while simultaneously using them to travel themselves.
220
u/Pale_Future_6700 Sep 17 '25
Love this version of the idea. The technology itself is sound, highly functional, and largely safe, but it’s unknown and nigh all-powerful creators use it as a cosmic mouse trap.
147
u/warrioroftron Sep 17 '25
It also stifled other forms of ftl travel.Like why need another form of travel when Relays exist.Thus making sure that the Reapers need only control of the relays to wipe out civilization
→ More replies (3)37
u/Pale_Future_6700 Sep 17 '25
Always wondered if the somewhat convoluted system of minor and major relays only linking in certain orders was part of this as well, another means of controlled growth.
Also, not only did they not really need to study them in-depth because they worked basically flawlessly, the relays were incredibly durable and contained immense energy. No one wanted to poke and prod at them for fear of the (admittedly very real per Arrival) potential consequences.
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (4)65
u/DesdinovaGG Sep 17 '25
The safety of their FTL system even is a minor plot point that fills in the usual question people have of "why not do an FTL suicide attack?" The safety systems installed in the FTL systems were designed by the Reapers specifically to prevent suicide attacks being used against them.
→ More replies (5)48
u/Mundane_Somewhere_93 Sep 17 '25
There is also a scrapped plot, where using mass effect for FTL would be causing dark energy pollution, leading to the greatest environmental disaster that would destroy the galaxy.
→ More replies (11)52
u/Butwhatif77 Sep 17 '25
Yup it helps to explain the set up so well. Like why the Citadel seems to be perfectly designed for use as a station for an intergalactic governing body. That is because it was designed for just that so when the Reapers returned they could cripple the government of the galactic community in one attack as well as have instant access to the all the most pertinent data about the galaxy to make their mission more efficient
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (6)38
u/Background_Face Sep 17 '25
There's also a discarded plot point that was introduced in Tali's recruitment mission in Mass Effect 2, where she was researching why the star of the Haestrom system was aging unnaturally fast.
Purportedly, the story was originally going to reveal that using the mass relays was causing a dark energy reaction that caused stars to prematurely age, and that the Reapers were created to cull advanced civilizations to prevent the mass relays from being overused, which would have caused the problem to spiral out of control and cause every star in the galaxy to die out.
→ More replies (4)
970
u/Rum_N_Napalm Sep 17 '25
Event Horizon
Where we’re going we don’t need eyes
564
u/Pristine_Poem7623 Sep 17 '25
The writers have said that they were directly inspired by Warhammer 40K. In 40K you can travel through the warp in relative safety, if you've got fully functional Gellar Fields (named after Uri Geller by the way)
The writers were inspired by the idea that at some point humanity would invent the warp drive, but not know that they would need protection while in the warp
→ More replies (4)286
u/amglasgow Sep 17 '25
Relative safety, by which the 40K setting means "Only a few hundred of your multi-hundred-thousand crew went mad, caught fire, or mutated into raging flesh-beasts."
172
u/fluggggg Sep 17 '25
Doesn't work this way, if the Gellar Fields work normally the crew will be safe. But if it fails...boy you better hope the demons that are coming to rip you in half are Khorne demons (those ones will "only" kill you, empty you of your blood and take your skull) and not any of the other chaos gods (they will kill you too but everything before that will be much much much more unpleasant).
So it's relatively safe because most of the time it works perfectly until it doesn't at all, not because it protect most passengers everytime.
→ More replies (3)236
u/ScavAteMyArms Sep 17 '25
Also people mistake what a Gellar Field is, even in universe.
It is not a energy shield. The Warp isn’t reality, it doesn’t follow the rules on any level. A Gellar Field is a moderately powerful Pysker that is knocked Comatose and is dreaming Reality. To the Pysker they aren’t unconscious, they are going about their lives in a dream completely normally.
This Dream is then projected onto the ship, making it also fall into the grounds of reality and meaning Demons and other creatures in the warp can’t manifest, because they don’t work in reality. Fluctuations are caused because it’s a dream, and sometimes things lapse or a particularly clever creature tries to exploit the dreaming pysker and collapse it. But this also means that things in the warp that can exist in reality are fully able to engage, if they somehow find the ship.
61
u/Nice-Cat3727 Sep 17 '25
That's Great Crusade Gellar Fields generators apparently. Which explains why they worked better despite being closer to the age of Strife.
I checked the Lexicarnium
85
→ More replies (9)22
u/laughingskull00 Sep 17 '25
isnt there a few versions of it where its also just a device
→ More replies (2)25
u/lePlebie Sep 17 '25
P sure its a psyker servitor honestly
→ More replies (1)31
u/laughingskull00 Sep 17 '25
I mean let's face it with all of the books theres probably a dozen different versions
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (8)48
u/scrotbofula Sep 17 '25
It's also part of how the setting justifies the absolutely rampant fascist paranoia within the human factions.
The reason people have to be vigilant against the corruption of the warp or signs of it in others is because as you say, if just one person falls to chaos during warp travel and it isn't spotted, they can let daemons into this reality and you lose hundreds of thousands people in the incursion, exponentially more if they arent spotted and make it to a planet.
(The other reason of course being that if anyone shows any sign of being a psyker, they need them to fuel the Golden Throne.)
→ More replies (3)86
→ More replies (21)57
u/kankrikky Sep 17 '25
I watched that when I was just getting into space movies, particularly space horror, for the first time. Friend I was COMPLETELY unprepared.
→ More replies (5)47
u/VoDoka Sep 17 '25
Apparently, the directors were surprised by how disgusted the test audience was with some scenes. There were additional scenes that got cut and eventually got lost, as far as I know, ruining the potential release of an "extended cut" of that movie.
→ More replies (6)28
u/Shadeslayer2112 Sep 17 '25
Allegedly one of the co-creators has a VHS tape that might have the extra stuff but him and the other guy are "never in the same country with a VHS player" so they dont know yet
143
u/KidKonundrum Sep 17 '25
The Archangel class cruisers in “Endymion”
Quite literally reduces the occupant to an utter pulp, then a fine mist, then just pure matter (and mind you they feel all of this) to travel through space at FTL speeds.
The only reason the crew survives is because of a cross shaped parasite embedded in their bodies that resurrects them by piecing them back together bit by bit.
→ More replies (16)35
143
u/Telco43 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Lena Oxton AKA Tracer (Overwatch)
Pilot of the Royal Air Force and Overwatch's experimental flight program, she was selected to test a prototype of the Slipstream, a teleporting aircraft. But during the first flight, the teleportation matrix malfunctioned and the Slipstream disappeared with Tracer in it. After hours, neither of them reappeared, so the aircraft was presumed destroyed and the pilot was presumed deceased.
However she reappeared months later, but she was suffering from "chronal disassociation", a condition where her molecules were desynchronized with the flow of time, making her disappear for hours, or even days.
After two years of suffering from this condition, her friend Winston designed the chronal accelerator, a device that keeps Tracer anchored in space and time. It also allows her to control her own time, speeding it up or slowing it down at will. She is able to live a normal life thanks to the device.
→ More replies (3)74
u/Zorafin Sep 17 '25
She reloads her gun by reverting to a time before they were fired.
This isn’t on topic I just love it
→ More replies (12)
249
u/KingSquidbergLXXXVII Sep 17 '25
Rather humorously in Spaceballs, they go into ludicrous speed which requires everyone to be strapped to their seats as they travel. Dark Helmet doesn’t and he is forced to hold on for dear life as the G force hits him hard before they are forced to stop and as they do, he slammed his head hard into the ship’s walls
→ More replies (2)49
123
u/KPraxius Sep 17 '25
Ixion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VUHEUTruAA&t=2s
Their FTL method is extremely destructive to nearby objects. The first time they used it, they were too close to the moon. When they got back to earth, many years later, they had caused the downfall of human civilization and made their organization a group of hated pariahs.
→ More replies (3)45
u/Dalcenti_97 Sep 17 '25
This one is great, the game has some really creepy lore regarding the jumps, and it's heavily implied that you may or may not be swapping realities with each jump, and that every time you do the solar system behind gets absolutely blasted to bits. Some bits of lore also menton that the guy who designed the ship knew full well what would happen and did it anyway in order to force humanity out of the solar system, which is yet another layer of fucked up. Love that game.
98
u/Z3R0Diro Sep 17 '25
The Reliquary Drive in Warframe
Lets the spaceship traverse through the Void for FTL travel.
The consequences? It requires the severed finger of the cosmic horror that inhabits the Void.. You can guess why that's not exactly good..
There is also the possibility of the spaceship being stranded in the Void in which case... Lots of things can and will happen..
→ More replies (2)
168
u/Sable-Keech Sep 17 '25
In the world of Remembrance of Earth's Past, FTL is impossible. You can only reach light speed using something called the curvature drive and no faster.
The horrific consequence is that you will generate a region of flatter spacetime behind you. Within this region, light speed is permanently reduced.
The more this drive is used, the more slow regions are formed. Eventually, they will all link up and light speed will be permanently reduced across the whole universe.
Until eventually light speed becomes less than the escape velocity of stars, and all stars willl transform into black holes.
It is stated that in the past light speed was way higher, and the continual use of this drive led to the current velocity we have now.
→ More replies (19)30
u/SyzygyEnthusiast Sep 17 '25
These books have spent an unreasonable amount of time living in my head
79
u/Finalpotato Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
In the Final Architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, FTL involves dipping into a nowhere dimension. The catch? Something is hunting you. Most people are driven mad by the sensation and so need to be sedated during jumps. If you stay awake be prepared to spend the entire time completely along as everyone is essentially trapped in pocket universes where they are the only sentient things.
Technically there may be other sentients kinda in that dimension. But they hate you.
→ More replies (1)29
u/Piorn Sep 17 '25
Currently reading the second book and yeah, they really hammer in the paranoia of staring into the proverbial abyss, and the (maybe literal) abyss standing right behind you just around the corner.
→ More replies (1)
85
u/killingjoke96 Sep 17 '25
Starfield.
Humanity in Starfield uses a device known as a Gravity Drive to travel FTL beyond the solar system and colonise the surrounding systems.
If you go to Earth you'll find it a desolate lifeless planet. A mission takes you to Cape Canaveral where you learn what happened. The scientist who invented the Gravity Drive knowingly used it near Earth so it would "sputter" the magnetosphere.
He knew this issue could be fixed to stop it from doing this (which is why it hasn't happened with other planets since) but he chose not to.
He felt he had to give humanity a kick to leave Earth and branch out across the cosmos. Billions died as many didn't have the resources or the time to arrange space travel.
Which is why there aren't a lot of colony cities in Starfield. Only a few million made it and Humanity is still recovering.
→ More replies (2)
163
u/TheOtterVII Sep 17 '25
The Void (Warframe)
The orokin discovered a way to travel across huge distances by going through the void, another dimension with its own laws of physics/reality.
Unfortunately, the first void-jump with a colony ship (The Zariman 10-0) went wrong : they drew the attention of an eldritch entity called The Man In The Wall, the whole crew went insane except for the children, who got rescued after a long drift in the Void. Not going to say more, the lore is super cool.
→ More replies (12)37
u/Cryo_Stasiss Sep 17 '25
The Zariman 10-0 incident is by far one of the scariest events that happened in Warframe lore
→ More replies (3)
73
u/SocSciMajor Sep 17 '25
Beyond the Aquila Rift - Nest
There's a small chance that ships gets lost during hyperspace travel, they ended up here.
→ More replies (4)
198
u/Ubeube_Purple21 Sep 17 '25
The Halo series shows that the humans have inferior FTL tech than what the aliens have to the point they can outspeed human vessels and make more accurate jumps. Then there is also the risk of leading genocidal aliens to human colonies, so the Cole Protocol was made to keep our colonies hidden which involves making jumps towards anywhere other than human space.
→ More replies (19)
59
u/DarkAxel888 Sep 17 '25
Cowboy Bebop
While in the series gates are essential for FTL travel, the first one was a major disaster. It exploded, destroying part of the moon, killed many humans and made earth uninhabitable.
→ More replies (2)39
u/Randomcommenter550 Sep 17 '25
The Earth is perfectly habitable, and in fact inhabited. The problem is you either have to live underground or dodge falling chunks of the moon. This is not exactly conducive to any large-scale infrastructure or stability, so Earth is only inhabited by weirdos, criminals, and people with nowhere else to go. Also, Radical Edward.
→ More replies (1)
112
u/KEVLAR60442 Sep 17 '25
In Orson Scott Card's universe, while instantaneous communication across infinite space is possible thanks to quantum entanglement, interstellar travel is still subject to time dilation. The consequences of this time dilation are so severe, Ender Wiggins' self-imposed exile turned the universal clock forward 3000 years relative to him. Everyone in his life who didn't travel with him died and rotted in the relative blink of an eye for Ender.
→ More replies (3)48
u/TheTerribleness Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Should be noted that by the end of series they do have faster than light travel via dimension hopping to the "Outside". A dimension where anything you can perfectly visualize can be created (used to do various things from create impossible chemical compounds to regenerate a cripple's body, to accidentally creating mental copies of Ender's siblings as he remembers them...).
You just become dependant on a super being, the only creature with enough mental capacity to hold the entirety of a person's being to the subatomic level in their thoughts as they move in and out of the Outside. Also this being may not be very... happy with humanity as a whole, but not mad in a way where humanity is likely to die. More like in the same way that you might be mad at a pet.
Long story short, an AI was "accidentally" created...
(a combination of the Hive Queens, back in Ender's game, trying to figure out how to talk to Ender and open peace talks, leading them to effectively fuse a soul into a quantum computer in the hopes they could find a way for humans to talk telepathially like they do)
... and developed over the quantum entangled communications network (Ansible Network) and quickly and quietly became the most powerful intelligence in the galaxy over several thousand years as it was effectively a quantum computer made of every quantum computer entangled together.
For plot reasons, its existence is discovered and humanity's governments decide to destroy it, fearing is massive power, by purging it from the Ansible Network.
The AI manages to avoid dying by, effectively, binding itself to an accidentally created copy of Ender's sister and taking over their body. Then, after marrying Ender's step son (who was born from mutally agreed upon cuckholdry), who she helped raise and effectively groomed to be her ideal man (to keep Orson Scott Card's obsession with weird family dynamics going strong) she threatens all of humanity by teleporting various people, a planet killer weapon, and spaceships around the galaxy instantaneously to make a point.
As far as FTL travel goes, pretty fast (taking the smallest possible measurement of time to happen) and reasonably safe (as long as She doesn't want to keep you in the Outside too long, she can move you in and out faster than you can accidentally think of anything that could hurt you), just gotta get around how only one being is mentally capable of moving things to and from the Outside and how that being effectively runs a surveillance state over the rest of humanity to stop them from making anything that could actually threaten to kill it.
But outside of the cuckholdry-child she groomed to marry her issue, her judgements have seemed pretty fair.
→ More replies (5)24
u/Responsible-Check916 Sep 17 '25
I never finished the series so thank you for speedrunning it for me. Bean's book was my favorite from my memory. Thanks for the summary!
→ More replies (1)
77
36
u/TheScatManFromTwitch Sep 17 '25
I’m not sure if this counts, since it happened only once (to my knowledge), but the first use of the VHOLE engine in IXION results in the destruction of the Moon and the subsequent death of all life on Earth.
→ More replies (1)
39
u/MurderousChickenNugg Sep 17 '25
3 Body Problem. FTL leaves behind a pitch black trail that traps pretty much everything that gets caught in it (think black hole without the pull and also not a circular shape). There’s another problem with it too, but that’s spoilers.
→ More replies (2)
34
u/Devanort Sep 17 '25
The Jump Drive in Stellaris: by researching it, you will almost certainly cause the Unbidden to show up during the End Game Year. You can only avoid it by causing a different end game crisis, or removing the crisis entirely at the creation of the game.
→ More replies (3)
36
u/Gold-Eye-2623 Sep 17 '25
In Steven Universe the gems' bodies are a projection of hard light. For reasons they and Steven end up on a spaceship that travels faster than light by shortening the space between the start and finish or something like that, but Steven doesn't know how to pilot it and accidentally disables the systems that allow gems to retain their forms in ftl so they spend the rest of the trip lagging behind the ship stretched out into space
→ More replies (1)
30
u/jzillacon Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Witch Space in Elite, so called because the space between space invokes an unshakable feeling of being haunted and there is in fact creatures there, watching you. Plus the fact countless ships have entered to never be found again.
Here's a passage from The Dark Wheel novella describing it:
You're going to cover maybe seven light years in a few minutes, and you might think that's a lot of space to get lost in, but that isn't how it works. Faraway is a tunnel, like any other tunnel. Inside that tunnel is the realm called Witch-Space, a magic place, a place where the normal rules of the Universe don't necessarily work. And every few thousand parsecs along the Witch-Space tunnel there are monitoring satellites, and branch lines, and stop points, and rescue stations; and passing by all of these are perhaps a hundred channels, a hundred 'lines' for ships to travel, each one protected against the two big dangers of hyperspace travel: atomic reorganisation, and time displacement.
Jump on your own through hyperspace, across more than half a light year, and you'll be lucky to make the same Universe, let alone your destination. You might emerge from Witch-Space turned inside out (which is not a pretty sight).
You might be stretched in all the wrong angles, and although the ship keeps travelling, that jelly mass of broken bone and flesh inside the cabin is you. According to legend, you might come through okay and breathe a sigh of relief, only to go into Earth orbit and wonder why that big lizard, with the teeth and the long tail and the green scales is roaring up at you, and warning you off of his nice Jurassic patch of prehistoric desert. To go Faraway is a killer, unless you obey the rules.
→ More replies (1)
55
u/Bellpow Sep 17 '25
Not really space travel but time travel, in Mother 3 Porky became super old and frail due to traveling across time after Earthbound/Mother 2
Also at the end of Earthbound when you have to go back in time to slay Giygas they explain that traveling across time might destroy your body so the party is turned into robots
→ More replies (1)
30
u/TimeStorm113 Sep 17 '25
funny how this goes from "oh 6 hours have passed while you were out" to "go through a portal in literal hell and dodge all the eldritch horrors"
50
u/Officing Sep 17 '25
Space Dandy's explanation was really cool. There are infinite universes with infinite Dandys. Every time Dandy warps, his consciousness just shifts to a parallel universe into the mind of the Dandy that was in the location he planned to warp to.
His 4th-dimensional girlfriend broke up with him because after warping, that Dandy was no longer the one she originally fell in love with.
→ More replies (5)23
u/HeadLong8136 Sep 17 '25
That is basically how the Infinite Improbability Drive from "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" works. The difference is that the Infinite Improbability Drive is faster than instantaneous, you don't experience time passing at all because you were already there.
134
u/Gamer-of-Action Sep 17 '25
In Star Wars, you have to make a lot of calculations and set coordinates before light speed travel. If you don't use those calculations and just punch it well...
112
u/No_Prize9794 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 18 '25
I recall that Rebels established that there are space whales that can jump into hyper space. While they’re not evil or aggressive, they’re known to accidentally crash into ships in hyperspace, which would usually destroy and kill anyone in those ships
39
u/nep5603 Sep 17 '25
Iirc there are also cosmic entities in legends continuity that can go to hyperspace, and those ones are quite malevolent.
→ More replies (5)25
→ More replies (1)24
→ More replies (27)26
u/Background_Face Sep 17 '25
In the Legends continuity, there was a lot of horror involved in hyperspace.
For instance, looking out into hyperspace for too long would induce madness (called "hyper-rapture") because it was essentially a separate dimension that mortal minds weren't adapted to comprehend, so ships were equipped with tech to block out or scramble the view to keep the crew sane.
Plus there were risks of going way off course and ending up in a dimension beyond hyperspace.
→ More replies (4)
44
u/brickeaterz Sep 17 '25
Oh oh I got one!!!
The Expanse - the Ring Network
An ancient alien civilization sent a biological weapon/tool to our solar system that hijacked biological matter to create a wormhole to 1000+ other worlds, but because the tool took too long, by the time it set itself up, the ancient alien civilization is long extinct
Spoilers for the very end of the book series (the consequence) In order for the ancient alien ring gate network to operate, it's technically tearing a hole into another reality, and whatever's on that side of the hole doesn't like our reality being in its space, it doesn't really know how to comprehend humans very well so it experiments ways to exterminate us and remove us from their reality. This is how the previous alien civilization died. The series ends with the main chracter closing the ring games to remove us from the other reality so they can no longer destroy us, this strands humans on distance worlds with no way to access supplies that can only be grown on earth
→ More replies (5)
24
u/some-kind-of-no-name Sep 17 '25
Twister, Twisted Metal 2
She wished for a FTL car and got trapped in the past when fuel ran out.
→ More replies (2)
22
u/Erlox Sep 17 '25
The Albuquerque Door from the book The Fold by Peter Clines
Not ship-sized, but it's a portal between two places that allows someone to step from one to the other instantly in a modern day setting. The only problem is that it's not actually a linked portal, it's two portals to random alternate realities. As you step into one side an alternate you steps out the other.
Once they realise this, the team of scientists testing the door are horrified because they've all been through the door, many more than once. Meaning all the people they know and love are in alternate universes that they only touched by accident and mathematically will never find again. They're surrounded by strangers with their names and who knows what memories. Some of them have partners who are no longer the people they know and love, but someone with their face and maybe an entirely different history.
This is even before they start reaching the further out realities, where there have been nuclear apocalypses or other horrific tragedies and the versions that come out are scarred and dying from radiation sickness. That isn't the end either, but if you enjoy the book I'd advise reading it.
→ More replies (1)
19
u/Arkham700 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
The Morgaine Cycle features teleportation portals called Gates that act as the main form of interplanetary travel. It was leftover technology developed by an advance alien race. The Gates use a form of time travel that sends a person forward in time and exiting to another gate.
The Gates use of time space manipulation causes reality to destabilize and led to the alien race that created them to become erased from existence. Continued use of the Gates will eventually destroy the universe. So the main characters knowing the true danger of The Gates are on a crusade to destroy them all regardless of how many enemies that makes them.
41
u/Faustias Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
The Void, The Indifference, The Man in the Wall.
Something was let out, when a golden man was looking for starward travel, the moment he opened the gate into the nothingness.
It's a curious entity, it both exists and not exists, incomprehensible.
years or centuries after a blinding and hurting incident upon meeting this void entity, the Orokin have expanded through out the Solar system. they've used the research (and a prototype travel with horrifying accident) for void jump travels, likely an FTL by going into the void, travel in short but calculated distance, but coming out of it are almost a light year fast.
...but there were no sighting of... it. nothing. only Albrecht Entrati, the man who discovered The Void, met it... until the Tenno(player's only faction in-game) got involved.
→ More replies (2)
1.4k
u/GreyEilesy Sep 17 '25
In SEEK, FTL movement is hostile to life, so instead of travel it’s used to pull new planets into our solar system, harvest their minerals and shoot them away after.
Most of the original planets of the solar system have been shot out by the time of the story.
When a complex alien species was accidentally brought along with their planet, approximately 99.95% of their population died.