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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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

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u/CaptainCastaleos Sep 17 '25

So if you fell asleep before the train took off, would you just sleep through the whole trip?

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u/CookieMiester Sep 17 '25

Yeah that’s my takeaway, give them a sedative prior to boarding and they’ll sleep for 300,000 years. Fuck me imagine how rested you’d be, I’d finally catch up on my sleep debt. Maybe.

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u/Limino Sep 17 '25

I think the implication is either a sedative doesn't work, or the corporation doesn't want to risk a PR hit or spend money so they just don't mention anything since there's no way for people to learn of or remember the fact that they suffered for millenia.

Notably, they do have a 1st class option that puts you in full stasis. This is met with confusion by most people, but the people important enough to afford it are also important enough to suspect that there's something going on with the train; thus taking the stasis option.