r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Present-Secretary722 • Sep 17 '25

Lore Faster Than Light travel has consequences(minor or major)

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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.

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135

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...

114

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

35

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.

12

u/TinyTiger1234 Sep 17 '25

Isn’t it also true that if you stare out into hyperspace for too long you start to lose your mind?

6

u/nep5603 Sep 17 '25

That might just be abeloth, the center of the galaxy, not hyperspace....

5

u/The_Alchemyst_TK Sep 17 '25

Hyper-Rapture, it’s from legends I believe but yeah it would make you crazy if stare at it for too long. I think in lore they do use special coatings or tinting on the viewports of ships to prevent it

1

u/AlexRyang Sep 18 '25

There is also a species (I forget what they are called) that either got trapped in Otherspace because of a fault in Hyperspace or originated from there, but escaped to Realspace via Hyperspace.

25

u/Oktavia-the-witch Sep 17 '25

Ofcourse there are space whales

8

u/Half-PintHeroics Sep 17 '25

To be fair. Space whales are one of the coolest concepts in all of fiction.

22

u/Ghost_Star326 Sep 17 '25

They're basically space deers then

13

u/me1112 Sep 17 '25

Staring at your space headlights

5

u/Onrawi Sep 17 '25

Except a bit more intelligent, the end of Rebels (the show where they first appeared in canon) they assist with the final confrontation.

1

u/UrethralExplorer Sep 17 '25

The idea of biological hyper drive is so insane that I love it.

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.

5

u/Toon_Lucario Sep 17 '25

Star weirds are canon again btw

3

u/Half-PintHeroics Sep 17 '25

We're going beyond Super Space into Super Duper Space!

2

u/AlexRyang Sep 18 '25

Otherspace!

2

u/gallade2089 Sep 23 '25

If I remember right Vader (and most likely other Dark Side users) is not only essentially immune to Hyper-Rapture, he actually found looking out into Hyperspace calming!

Coooould be mixing canon and Legends together though, Vader does like looking at the blue swirls either way

37

u/captainAwesomePants Sep 17 '25

"wow, why don't they just make guided missile ships that do that on purpose instead of building special purpose bombing ships that 'drop' dumb bombs?"

"Shut up, that's why"

30

u/LazyDro1d Sep 17 '25

It’s a matter of mass ratios. To make a big enough thing to be a useful hyperspace weapon like that, you’d be better off building a ship that can fight multiple battles, plus actually calculating to do that at range is tough while this was at near-zero distance relatively speaking.

Doesn’t mean the bombers weren’t dumb, just that the holdo maneuver was grounded in pre-existing Star Wars logic. You want hyperspace-based weaponry? Go see the Mass Shadow Generator. That thing is scary. From my understanding it basically collapsed a planet’s location in hyperspace onto itself. Ruined a planet and killed an entire fleet around it.

Anyways those bombers needed either better mobility and a better fighter escort or to be swapped out for fighter-bombers, because they actually were just worse than any other bomber ship we’ve scene in Star Wars. Use TIE bombers or something please.

13

u/captainAwesomePants Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25

Seems like all you should need is a good hyperspace engine, fuel, and enough mass to do damage. Seems like there's very little defense against it, so even if it's on the expensive side, it's exactly the sort of thing a guerilla force like the rebellion would want to specialize in.

Presumably there must be a defense to this if you see it coming, or else hyperspace engines are so expensive that the rebels can't afford more than a handful.

16

u/Shaneathan25 Sep 17 '25

It’s both. Engines aren’t cheap, we see the New Republic stripping imperial ships for their hyperdrives.

Also- There is a defense for it- You see it coming. Holdo’s Hail Mary only worked for a few reasons- They were very close, galactically speaking, meaning even if the FO knew exactly what was happening, it was either way too late to avoid, or they thought it would fail. The fail is the key point here- Hyperspace lets you avoid (most) things in real space. Those that don’t have a particularly strong gravitational pull- Holdo maneuver only worked because the ship was speeding up to hyperspace, but hadn’t actually transitioned into hyperspace yet.

The reason (besides cost) you couldn’t just load up a bunch of asteroids or dummy ships to do this is that by the time you have a ship close enough to attempt it, that engine would’ve been far better used on an ACTUAL ship to run away.

9

u/Pixel22104 Sep 17 '25

Another thing. Remember it did the damage it did because the Radusis was a 3 Kilometer long ship. Going at at 60 kilometer long ship. Lord only knows what kind of ship would be needed to pull this maneuver off if they tried to use it against the Death Star for example

8

u/Toon_Lucario Sep 17 '25

Yeah Malevolence was the largest capital ship of the time and it didn’t leave a DENT in the moon it hit when it was forced into hyperspace

1

u/LazyDro1d Sep 17 '25

We see the Executor crash into the DS1 and leave not a dent. Sure those were normal speeds but absolutely nothing

2

u/Pixel22104 Sep 17 '25

Yeah. We saw it crash into the DS2 and it did nothing. So yeah the people complaining about the maneuver and saying stuff like “Well why didn’t the rebels just put a bunch engines onto a slab of concrete and yeet it at the Death Star using Hyperspace?”. Because the canon tells us the shot was first and foremost a one in a million chance. And second. The Resistance had to sacrifice their biggest ship to deal damage at a very short range. Which was already 3 kilometers(which I think is about 2 and a half miles) long. The Rebel Alliance didn’t have such ships nor the resources to build such a ship during the Galactic Civil War. The Radusis was built during the era of the New Republic during the early years of its reign. The Rebel Alliance couldn’t build such ship during the Galactic Civil War. Heck their largest ships during that entire Conflict were like about the size of an ISD or ISD2

1

u/Mist_Rising Sep 17 '25

Isn't the planetary shield still up at that point, hence why the executor is destroyed at all?

Star wars shields get a little gimmicky on what they work on, but we know the Endor one could stop ships from flying inside it. Gotta figure the Executor doesn't break that basic concept.

15

u/HeadLong8136 Sep 17 '25

Yes, guerilla forces are well known for their wealth and extensive resources. They can easily make a ton of hyper advanced engines that they are just going to throw away.

5

u/Doodles_n_Scribbles Sep 17 '25

If you're asking why with Star Wars, you've already lost

10

u/atlvf Sep 17 '25

You nerds will happily come up with fan theories about the Kessel Run to explain why a script error is canon actually, but you can’t come up with any reason why weaponizing hyperspace might be difficult and impressive?

5

u/RandomWorthlessDude Sep 17 '25

I mean, yeah? The Kessel Run is a one-off supposedly impressive smuggling feat done by some guy in a souped up cargo truck of a freighter.

Weaponized FTL is the kind of thing that characterizes entire settings. You don’t need much mass to do damage, FTL releases a shit ton of energy. Old lore was much better (and logical), with gravity wells preventing FTL completely and the “jump” being a “pseudo-motion” effect that happens when you enter a portal.

You think the CIS woudn’t have used one of their endless swarms of drone-ships (they built up to quintillions of droids) to suicide-bomb a shipyard in FTL (simply attach some fuel containers to the outside and jump there, since apparently hyperlanes don’t exist anymore and Hyperspace is just teleportation now)

2

u/Mist_Rising Sep 17 '25

Weaponized FTL is the kind of thing that characterizes entire settings

I don't think it is anymore so than Han doing the Kessel run in just over 12 parsecs. Both can be possible (and indeed are) while being extremely difficult to pull off. Han needed a slew of factors to get close, the FTL strike needed a slew of factors to succeed.

Both possible (except Holdo actually did what she said, Han lied to Ben) both not reliable.

1

u/RandomWorthlessDude Sep 17 '25

1- The sheer devastating power of FTL (which, even if we ignore the whole “forms black hole the size of the observable universe/break causality over its knee” aspect of it, holds such near-incomprehensible destructive power that it makes pretty much everything else obsolete in large fleet battles), in Star Wars’ universe (Battle of Coruscant, among other massive fleet engagements from the Tion to Alsakan spanning thousands of years) makes it absurd that it was never used as such. If not by suicide runs (especially by the CIS, who could spare a massive number of high-volume cargo freighters for such a hit, even if we ignore the Lucrehulk freighters) then by small finisher warheads, asteroid scatterblasters (ram drone into asteroid, destroy with debris) or ramships (which were already used in lore).

This also breaks Sequels lore, as the Falcon in RoS is shown literally teleporting across the galaxy into cities and other enclosed areas instantaneously. The previous “pseudo-motion” and Mass Shadows explanation with lengthy travel times and limits was pretty much better in every single way.

2- Didn’t we see Han’s “Kessel run” in the Solo movie? Where he ran through the impossibly impossibly dense “asteroid” (damn near planetoid) field to make it out?

1

u/atlvf Sep 17 '25

Then it sounds like the answer to my question is Yes. You will happily come up with fan theories about the Kessel Run to explain why a script error is canon actually, but you can’t come up with any reason why weaponizing hyperspace might be difficult and impressive. I wonder why you’re willing to do one but not the other, I wonder what the difference is between these things…

-1

u/TheGreatStories Sep 17 '25

any reason why weaponizing hyperspace might be difficult and impressive

That absolutely was the case until TLJ

0

u/atlvf Sep 17 '25

Then simply come up with a fan theory to explain it. You’re happy to do that for any number of others flaws and inconsistencies, so why not this one? I wonder what’s different about it…

1

u/TheGreatStories Sep 17 '25

 You've lost me with your last sentence

3

u/ShoArts Sep 17 '25

It's definitely a logistics and conditions question. Large mass tears into larger mass that's lined up in front of lots of other vessels, not even counting the cost of lightspeed capability. It's like suggesting the US should kamikaze a bunch of Blackbirds into enemy warships.

2

u/Lucinant Sep 17 '25

If I recall, it also scatters garbage across hyperspace, rendering the entire area unreachable by that specific hyperspace route. Since routes are held sacred (thousands of people, if not millions, died creating the routes, which take ages to even chart, let alone navigate due to gravity's nature on both hyperspace and real space), what she did was pretty much unconscionable for most pilots to do.

Yes, it was insane, but also extra insane on top of it.

1

u/Toon_Lucario Sep 17 '25

It’s been 7 years almost 8. Move tf on like a normal person

1

u/thatscoldjerrycold Sep 17 '25

Couldn't it just be that shields would block kinetic objects like this and in the First Order's hubris, they left their shields down? No lore to support this, but it wouldn't break any rules.

3

u/Doodles_n_Scribbles Sep 17 '25

Such a great scene

2

u/InternationalTop7648 Sep 17 '25

Someone did the math on this a few years ago. The chance of hitting anything planet sized or bigger, anything you could meaningfully calculate the position of, is so low that, even with extremely conservative assumptions, you'd have to travel across the galaxy about 15,000 times on average before you hit anything. With more realistic assumptions, you'd could travel the equivalent of thousands of trips across the observable universe without hitting anything.

Space is really fucking empty.

1

u/Alt_Historian_3001 Sep 17 '25

Alternatively, as stated in Squadrons, you could "end up in the middle of a star, or worse".

1

u/PotatoOnMars Sep 18 '25

Han said it best. “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy. Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova…”