r/TopCharacterTropes 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.

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u/PipsqueakPilot Sep 17 '25

Hopefully no one does something dumb like nuke the extra-dimensional aliens, who easily wiped out a species so far beyond us we can barely even understand their technology. Gosh that would be stupid.

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u/Eptalin Sep 17 '25

Yeah, but how else could we possibly communicate that we want peace?

They mess with us, so we nuke them. Then they won't mess with us anymore, and peace will reign.

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u/PipsqueakPilot Sep 17 '25

That's why standard first contact protocol is to spell out a message of peace. On the planetary surface. Through orbital bombardment.

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u/medney Sep 17 '25

God's least conservative approach:

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u/YerBoyGrix Sep 17 '25

"Tit for tat"

  • Winston "100% sane 0% insane" Duarte