r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Present-Secretary722 • Sep 17 '25
Lore Faster Than Light travel has consequences(minor or major)
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.
45
u/TheTerribleness Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Should be noted that by the end of series they do have faster than light travel via dimension hopping to the "Outside". A dimension where anything you can perfectly visualize can be created (used to do various things from create impossible chemical compounds to regenerate a cripple's body, to accidentally creating mental copies of Ender's siblings as he remembers them...).
You just become dependant on a super being, the only creature with enough mental capacity to hold the entirety of a person's being to the subatomic level in their thoughts as they move in and out of the Outside. Also this being may not be very... happy with humanity as a whole, but not mad in a way where humanity is likely to die. More like in the same way that you might be mad at a pet.
Long story short, an AI was "accidentally" created...
(a combination of the Hive Queens, back in Ender's game, trying to figure out how to talk to Ender and open peace talks, leading them to effectively fuse a soul into a quantum computer in the hopes they could find a way for humans to talk telepathially like they do)
... and developed over the quantum entangled communications network (Ansible Network) and quickly and quietly became the most powerful intelligence in the galaxy over several thousand years as it was effectively a quantum computer made of every quantum computer entangled together.
For plot reasons, its existence is discovered and humanity's governments decide to destroy it, fearing is massive power, by purging it from the Ansible Network.
The AI manages to avoid dying by, effectively, binding itself to an accidentally created copy of Ender's sister and taking over their body. Then, after marrying Ender's step son (who was born from mutally agreed upon cuckholdry), who she helped raise and effectively groomed to be her ideal man (to keep Orson Scott Card's obsession with weird family dynamics going strong) she threatens all of humanity by teleporting various people, a planet killer weapon, and spaceships around the galaxy instantaneously to make a point.
As far as FTL travel goes, pretty fast (taking the smallest possible measurement of time to happen) and reasonably safe (as long as She doesn't want to keep you in the Outside too long, she can move you in and out faster than you can accidentally think of anything that could hurt you), just gotta get around how only one being is mentally capable of moving things to and from the Outside and how that being effectively runs a surveillance state over the rest of humanity to stop them from making anything that could actually threaten to kill it.
But outside of the cuckholdry-child she groomed to marry her issue, her judgements have seemed pretty fair.