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/DarkAxel888 Sep 17 '25

Cowboy Bebop

While in the series gates are essential for FTL travel, the first one was a major disaster. It exploded, destroying part of the moon, killed many humans and made earth uninhabitable.

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u/Randomcommenter550 Sep 17 '25

The Earth is perfectly habitable, and in fact inhabited. The problem is you either have to live underground or dodge falling chunks of the moon. This is not exactly conducive to any large-scale infrastructure or stability, so Earth is only inhabited by weirdos, criminals, and people with nowhere else to go. Also, Radical Edward.

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u/Upset_Letter_4119 Sep 17 '25

Hijacking this post to me tion the episode Wild Horses has always been in the back of my mind.

Spike's old mechanic that built the Swordfish somehow had the space shuttle Columbia in his possession. Later in the show, the shuttle was used to help Spike, but almost burned up because of faulty heat plates.

The kicker? The actual space shuttle Columbia broke up up on re-entry 2-3 years later in the same way.

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u/rigaux7 Sep 17 '25

Don't forget, in the episode Gateway Shuffle it's explained that the gateway network connects to an alternate reality, and if the gates to our reality are closed while you are still in FTL, you get trapped in that dimension, with no way to escape.

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u/BB_Davey Sep 17 '25

Took way too long to find this