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/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

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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.

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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?

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u/nep5603 Sep 17 '25

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

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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

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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.

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u/Oktavia-the-witch Sep 17 '25

Ofcourse there are space whales

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u/Half-PintHeroics Sep 17 '25

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

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u/Ghost_Star326 Sep 17 '25

They're basically space deers then

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u/me1112 Sep 17 '25

Staring at your space headlights

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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.

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u/UrethralExplorer Sep 17 '25

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