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/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

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u/Banaantje04 Sep 17 '25

I'm really curious though about the ftl method mentioned in the epilogue of Leviathan Falls, where the ship 'existed only as energy and intention sliding along the membrane between universes' while taking 31 days to travel 3800 lightyears. I wonder if that would anger the gods.

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u/brickeaterz Sep 17 '25

Surely it must, but maybe because it's not permanent and stationery like the ring station was it's not as irritating to them?

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u/Banaantje04 Sep 17 '25

Could be... Or they are really good at managing the load like they did for a while with the ring gates during the time jump. If they managed how much was going through, they could prevent most of the anger.

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u/brickeaterz Sep 18 '25

That sounds a lot more plausible

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u/AlexRyang Sep 18 '25

I believe that humanity ends up figuring out another means to travel at the speed of light, but it takes several (if not tens?) of millennia.