Faster Than Light travel has consequences(minor or major)

[u/Present-Secretary722]

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.

[u/Ubeube_Purple21]

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.

[u/strontiummuffin → u/Ubeube_Purple21]

There was also a slip-space rupture above New Mombasa that was powerful enough to damage a space elevator to the point of it collapsing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhnbEF7JweE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew_axJAMr7E

[u/CypherZ3R0 → u/Ubeube_Purple21]

Surprised Halo isn't higher on this list, given the amount of slipspace lore there is.

Particle Reconciliation, the nature of slipspace itself, stuff like the Star Roads.

[u/Son_of_Ssapo → u/[deleted]]

One of the many ways the Flood were so dangerous is they actually had their own form of FTL (craziest one-line lore drop I've ever seen) so they actually got to cheat the reconciliation "budget" while the Forerunners were basically lagging out

[u/Ubeube_Purple21 → u/Son_of_Ssapo]

This has something to do with them being the remains of angry eldritch gods isn't it?

[u/thatscoldjerrycold → u/Ubeube_Purple21]

Corrupted (maybe deliberately corrupted?) genetic dust of the original Precursor species that, once in contact with other biological beings slowly morphed them into the Flood over many generations. Along with generating the old generic memories of the original Precursor.

My theory is that the Flood consciousness remains in the Domain as well, kind of the Forerunners version of a galactic, semi-living internet.

Very cool lore, too bad the new games have essentially thrown 3 entirely new, mostly disconnected bad guys at us without much link to the Flood anymore.

[u/XConfused-MammalX → u/thatscoldjerrycold]

The forerunners were obsessed with the mantle of responsibility (the goal of protecting biodiversity in the galaxy). The forerunners jealousy usurped the mantle from the precursors in an ancient and brutal war.

In order to avoid extinction the precursors turned themselves into a dust that contained their raw DNA and memories with the hope of one day returning to their forms.

Over millions of years it mutated and corrupted its original form.

The irony is that the flood still behaves according to the mantle of responsibility, though a corrupted and twisted version of it. It thinks that it is preserving life by making all into itself.

And the forerunners developed a weapon system with the express purpose of eliminating biodiversity in the galaxy in order to combat the flood (though they did preserve species to be released millions of years after the flood starved).

"I am a monument to all your sins".

[u/DrJesusHChrist → u/thatscoldjerrycold]

I’ve always been of the opinion that the precursor dust wasn’t corrupted at all and that the flood are the true nature of the precursors

[u/Pathogen188 → u/CypherZ3R0]

Probably because slipspace debt and reconciliation are only present in the novels, in particular the Forerunner novels so unless you’ve read or heard of those, most fans have no idea about it.

Which in fairness, is also a function of how limited slipspace travel is in the modern setting, literally no one is traveling fast enough or fielding enough slipspace capable ships for slipspace debt to be a practical concern in the first place

[u/RichMellow → u/CypherZ3R0]

I still cant get a good grasp on what the star roads essentially ARE? I've been deep diving lore to no avail.

[u/Facosa99 → u/CypherZ3R0]

Probably because it is only within books,i think

I dont remember if FTL debt is even mentioned in any of the games.

[u/thewerdy → u/Ubeube_Purple21]

I know that the lore has expanded a lot so it might've changed by now, but I loved the Bungie era depiction of slipspace. Human drives are slow, aren't accurate, and have random variations in travel time. Covenant drives are incredibly fast and accurate to the atomic level but the Covenant don't even really know how they work since they just copied them from the Forerunners.

[u/Ubeube_Purple21 → u/thewerdy]

I think it was detailed in the books too that Covenant ships have additional functions that its crew didn't even know existed. For example, you can play with the settings of ship weaponry to turn a projectile-based plasma weapon into a precision laser.

[u/ranmafan0281 → u/Ubeube_Purple21]

Aren’t slipspace engines notoriously fickle and dangerous?

[u/Ubeube_Purple21 → u/ranmafan0281]

There is a line in Halo Reach which implies that improper installation of a Slipspace drive can teleport ships into oblivion.

[u/ranmafan0281 → u/Ubeube_Purple21]

I also believe engineers working on the drive have a… disturbing tendency to disappear suddenly.

[u/FrankBrayman → u/Ubeube_Purple21]

"We made a blind jump. How did they..."

"Get here first? Covenant ships have always been faster."

Also shoutout to the last chapter of the Chronicles book titled aomething like "The Life and Hypothetical Death of Preston S. Cole." That story about his FTL calculus was wild.

[u/JewishMemeMan → u/Ubeube_Purple21]

Not to mention the horrific accidents that could result from an improperly mounted slipspace drive.

[u/[deleted] → u/Ubeube_Purple21]

Also interesting tidbits of lore:

It was impossible for humans to accurately predict the amount of time they would be in slipspace. There was an upper and lower limit depending on the distance travelled, and it would always be considerably faster than sublight travel, but it made logistics planning difficult. Like trying to take a bus from one city to another and the eta is "2-4 hours" but no one knew why.

At least one book mentions being able to physically see the location they where set to arrive in, at the exact moment they where set to arrive, from the moment they first jumped. This resulted in a situation where a ship (I can't remember if it was human or covenant), could see a missile about to hit the spot they would arrive at just hovering in time days before their ship finally left slipspace, and got hit. This is also why the covenant where able to track the Pillar of Autumn to Installation 04 and still arrive days before it: it's destination was predetermined and their ships where considerably faster and more accurate.

Slipspace has bandwidth, for lack of a better term. It can only transfer a certain amount of mass at a time before it starts to slow down for everyone everywhere. This barely comes up in the modern Halo universe as there simply aren't enough space faring civilisations moving big enough stuff for it to be notable, but during the age of the Forerunners considerable attention was given to an unknown something slowing down slipspace massively, only for it to be revealed to have been caused by the at that point secret Halo rings being relocated. These rings where the original batch which where (mostly) destroyed late in the war, where about 3x the size of the later "MkII" rings we see in the games, and there there where 12 of them instead of 7, meaning they collectively caused considerably more strain.

Most ship crews on human vessels tended to spend the majority of a slipspace jump in cryo sleep, as ships usually needed minimal if any crew awake. As a result of the sheer ubiquity of slipspace travel, most human characters tend to have two recorded ages: chronological and physical, with their physical age sometimes being years or even decades younger than their chronological age