@@TheTrueAdept I coulda sworn it was also a rule in Mongoose Traveller, but I do recall one of them added injuries in character creation that was a little spicy
Playing Rogue Trader. Felt that. (I actually really like the way navigator points work, where you can pay points to make paths safer, or forge shortcuts at the cost of extra energy. Makes it extra dramatic when a slightly-spoilery-bad-dude attack is happening and you have to just put all of your points into tearing hell one more hole just to get there on time.)
The fun thing with the Stargates, is that the "rules" were presented from the human perspective, things the Humans had figured out through experimentation but their understanding was never complete. IE, the 31 minute rule was just a limit of how long the SGC has been able to keep a gate open with their limited understanding and systems. Longest time group A has been able to keep the mechanism running, doesn't mean the mechanism can't go longer with greater understanding of how it works or sufficient power supply.
@@zeux5583 One of those moments its like 'oh it can be held open for longer, just need to connect to a black hole, easy. Why is the gate throwing a bunch of angry looking messages we can't decipher at us? Crap now how do we force close it?"
38 minutes. I always liked that about Stargate. With regular power, you get 38 minutes. Give or take a few quantum hand-Waves that Carter could tell you about. But if you dump enough power into it, it can stay open longer. Maybe indefinitely. Who knows! Humans sure don't. But we'd like to find out! Black holes, zero-point energy modules, who knows what else!
One thing that always bugged me about Stargate is that they kept saying that you can't go back through an incoming wormhole but they never established (in universe) why that is or how they know that.
@@Canadamus_Primeit may be based on the black hole-white hole model of wormholes. In a wormhole, blacholes would be the part you can enter and white holes where you exit.
@@dark_ops1651 Stargate did SO WELL with worldbuilding that it's kind of hard. Although I thought Andromeda deserved a nod with its Slipstream drive: The FTL corridors have branching paths and a sentient being (usually) knows where and when to turn. An AI can't do it, so you need a pilot. And because Slipstream is not really well understood, you don't need to explain it any more than that. Also you can go places you shouldn't be able to get to and … we even learn that you can arrive later than you expected or even I suspect earlier than you left.
@1reefshark basically. My ttrpg setting, Blood and Satellites, uses what they call Slip Gates to warp between solar systems and shit, but they can only jump so far at once before the gates become unstable. Multiple jumps have to be made if you wanna go across an entire galaxy, and the ships have to "cool down" between jumps or else the Ether Normalizing Field around the ship breaks down and fuckery can happen. Ships don't have their own slip drives and instead have to deploy a Slip Gate in orbit because they've seen what happens when teleportation goes wrong, so each gate opening is practically it's own ceremony with how much precision and care is put into opening each one.
Yeah, I think that's actually one of the best justifications for space fighters (or Expanse style Sufficiently Maneuverable Corvettes) - any ship with a warp drive is far too valuable to ever risk in combat, so they just show up, deploy some smaller ships, and then either retreat to hyperspace until the battle is over or just stay on the very, very backlines of combat.
My favorite is probably in J.S. Morin's Black Ocean series: literal wizards. As in, your "hyperdrive" is a dude named "Mordecai the Brown" with a pointy hat and a staff and everything. This adds extra fun points because electronics can and will malfunction, in the presence of sufficiently potent magic.
@@the_senate8050 The series, broadly speaking, is a rehash of Firefly; which makes it a little divisive. Some might find that familiar and comfy, others might see it as a cheap imposter. I like it well enough though, and it's probably the best bang-for-buck on Audible, at 1 credit for something like 65 hours of audiobook.
@@the_senate8050 The series, broadly speaking, is a rehash of Firefly, which makes it somewhat divisive. Some will see it as familiar and comfy, while others will see it as a cheap imitation. I like it well enough though, the audiobooks, specifically, which are available as a huge bundle deal
Starship's Mage, unsurprisingly, does something similar (but without the "magic breaks the computers" bit). The "FTL system" is a specially-trained Jump Mage teleporting the ship up to a light year at a time, with the usual teleportation spell being amplified by a massive array of runes called a Jump Matrix etched throughout the entire ship. Apparently the spell really knocks the caster on their ass, though. It's likened to having run an entire marathon in an instant. Between that and the risk of thaumic burnout (which is apparently *not* a pretty sight) civilian Jump Mages are expected to only use the spell once every eight hours, and even the Royal Martian Navy's training can only get that down to about six hours, but RMN ships tend to have a lot more jump-trained mages on board so with proper personnel cycling they can make pretty good time to their destination.
The game "Sword of the Stars" has multiple methods of FTL. Each race you play as has their own method, or some variation of another. One tunnels through natural corridors. Another creates their own temporary tunnels. Another usees bog standard warp. Another uses a form of teleportation. Another uses a combination of STL and Jump gates. And so on. It's certainly one to represent a variety of these methods.
@@aurongrande6141 my favorite drive type here is the Morrigi Flock drive. The more ships in the formation the faster it goes. Some other FTL varieties from other media. The Farscape starburst. Super Dimensional Fortress Macross space fold system. Psionically empowered teleportation seen in Anne Macaffrey's Tower and Hive series.
@@mrbluebell2735 I prefer the Liir's Flicker Drive. Using micro teleportation to move around and negate inertia. Even having a chance for weapon fire to pass through and miss.
That's the best thing about Sword of the Stars. Different drives mean different play styles. Hiver jumpgates are slow to set up but allow instant movement, meaning you can transfer a lot of reinforcements to a system with an approaching enemy fleet. Liir stutter warp gets faster the further you are from a gravity well, which means it's better to intercept enemies in deep space than to fight near one of your planets. Human node drive is fast, but dependant on naturally occurring node lines that can force you to take indirect routes. For hivers and humans, even a system without any habitable planets can be important. Hivers want to deploy their jumpgates as widely as possible, and humans might station tankers or refineries along node routes and allow their ships to refuel between turns.
@@darthquigley A rare pain for the Humans is the VN Planet Killer. I've had one of those take out a planet at a choke point for node lines, in effect cutting my empire in half.
Stellaris also used to have this. You could choose between warp (travel between any stars, but slowly), hyperdrive (travel along preset routes, quickly), wormhole stations (travel to any system within range very quickly, but you have to build the station first), and eventually jump drive (travel instantly to any system within range, but maybe trigger an interdimensional invasion).
Stargate also teaches us that you don't have to use the same FTL rules forever and can even introduce other concurrent FTL systems if you include differences between in the story, like the Stargates are the fastest way to travel, but they cannot be moved or be build normally so if you want to have a little bit more freedom or transport more mass at once you got to build a ship with a hyperdrive. Same with the question of ship bound vs independent FTL drives, having a setting where your FTL can't be connected to a ship but can be used once a connection is created means you can have both an unexplored frontier while also having a tight knit center where travelling from planet to planet is like hoping into an airliner.
@@nahuelleandroarroyo Well, you need to update star location when moving a gate around large distances, and that conventionally means having a dial device which will update automatically. The Pegasus - Milky Way gate netwerk was special, as it also daisy-chained a few dozens of gates together to the Midway station gate adress. It was a cool concept, sadly only used for a very short while because of story impact. It's one thing to spend time hyperdriving to another galaxy, it was another thing to actually have direct and 'free' gate to gate access.
Yes, and that would make sense as Stargates are more for (relatively small) infantry transit than ship drives which have to push huge masses between stars. You can only move so many troops and so much materiel through a Stargate because of size constraints. In terms of military logistics its like having to move your entire army through a very narrow hallway. This is less than optimal. You need starships.
4:27 a good one you could have included is battletech nuking themsleves into forgetting how to make new FTLs for 300 years, untill they remembered and nuked themsleves into forgetting them again!
They didn't lose the ability to make JumpShips during the Succession Wars and certainly not after the Jihad. They just slowed down to a trickle due to the catastrophic damage to human civilization. They may have lost the ability to produce 'compact' jump drives so that WarShips could be viable, but even then humanity as a whole didn't. Just the Great Houses and Periphery nations
Jumpships are hard to make at the best of times because the titanium-geranium core used in K-F drives cannot be transported easily through FTL since they interfere with the function of existing drives. So you either slot one into a naked drive, charge it, and send it away to the destination unmanned, OR you have to grind the metal into gravel, chemically treat it, and then painstakingly repurify, recast, and machine the core over months at the destination before it can be used in a new drive. So Jumpships are hard to make but they never quite forgot how to make them. Compact K-F drives used in Warships though? That knowledge either got bombed to kingdom come or was censored by [THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN INTERCEPTED BY YOUR COMSTAR CUSTOMER SECURITY TEAMPLEASE ASSUME THE CORPORATE SUBMISSION POSITION AND AWAIT OUR TEAM OF HIGHLY TRAINED REPRESENTITIVES CURRENTLY ON THEIR WAY TO YOUR LOCATION]
BattleTech has one of my favourite FTL systems, in part due to the set of limitations like those that were listed in this video. Like limited FTL comms, both due to technology and politics, and limits to where and how often FTL drives can be used. Yet these rules can be bent (e.g. "Pirate" jump points).
@@brutalchicken A lot of it was originally due to ComStar fuckery. They were actively sabotaging people trying to recreate Star League era tech. (kudos to the Grey Death for pissing on that little op)
Another cool limitation not mentioned is that in Halo, if too many ships use Slipspace travel too much for too long over a given period of time, Slipspace travel becomes longer and less efficient for the entire universe and may even be blocked completely. This effect is called Causal Reconciliation, or just Reconciliation debt. At the end of the Forerunner-Flood War, since the Forerunners were moving the Halos through Slipspace at the same time, all that mass being moved through it accrued so much Reconciliation debt that Slipspace travel was incredibly slow and even impossible in some places across the Milky Way before the firing of the Halo array. Another cool consequence of Reconciliation and the time dilatory nature of Slipspace travel is that if your Slipspace capabilities are very good and you jump over a short enough distance, you might be able to detect yourself from your previous and future positions in spacetime before or after you make the jump. That very chance of enciting a paradox is believed to be the reason for Causal Reconciliation's existence; it's a way for the universe to correct itself from breaking the laws of lower dimensions that the higher ones don't necessarily follow.
@murpheyholloran1067 Reconciliation dept is not limited to time since it is accumulated in a timeless dimension, and it's really cool when the Forerunner that was contemplating firing the Halos with the purge the whole galaxy setting on, knew for a fact that he already did, and/or was already destined to because reconciliation dept all over the galaxy suddenly started going down, meaning that the amount of ships and tonnage going through Slipspace was going to go way down in a somewhat short period of time, thus he or somebody else were going to fire the Halo array in a few days.
there’s also the ai halsey made that mentioned “other intellects in the mist” after she exposed it to slipspace and it rapidly grew in intelligence before halsey essentially got scared shitless
the expanse's ring gates have something similar. if too much mass-energy goes through them in a short time stuff starts getting eaten in transit for spoiler reasons
I love the "you have to be far away from any gravity well" trope because it makes other locations within a star system important and leads to more dynamic conflicts. Defenders have more locations to defend, including star system edges, and attackers have to plan for what resistance they'd meet when they transit in-system. I first encountered it in 40k and fell in love with it. I use it myself.
Also, if the FTL system involves some sort of gravity manipulation, then requiring you be far from a gravity well to use it makes a lot of sense. In the case of it being a jump-drive, it also allows for an interesting tactic of being able to jump to Lagrange points if you know exactly where they are.
I also like that it's a bendable rule in 40k, but dangerous and difficult to do without excellent ships. Most people would never try it in normal circumstances, but then Belisarius Cawl just shows up like a madlad and does it purely to show off.
@@lachlanmckinnie1406 in traveler one of the o shit moments is when a ship jumps in the up atmosphere of a planet. It the hole every one knows that is impossible so that ship is impossible but it is there. Real helps drive home the "you are out matched you can not win and you should run. All so the idea of jumping in to jump space well with in the jump limit (even landed on a the planet) when you being board by a enemy force that will kill or enslave you. Since it is 99.999999999% fatal instant death. This means most pirates actually don't go for killing the crew or taking slaves and have there own code they follow.
Yeah, particularly if it's somewhere beyond jupiter orbit (or equivalent) it really makes inter system travel relevant and often actually makes things like intercept and chases possible in many cases.
Mass Effect plays fast and loose with its mass relays for cinematic purposes. According to their description you're only guaranteed to emerge somewhere within 1,000 km of a relay, but every time they do one of those epic the-cavalry-arrives shots of a fleet jumping in, they always emerge right next to the relay and in formation.
It why despite loving at least the first Mass Effect (I go to the Shamus Young/Smudboy school of sequel haters) I laugh whenever someone argues that it's "relatively hard sci-fi." Sure, it's harder than a lot of other sci-fi out there given that it only has _one big lie™️_ (particles that can manipulate gravity via dark energy), but hard sci-fi it is not.
TRAVELLER MENTIONED!!! Running a pseudo-traveller rpg with friends right now, and my particular favourite thing is having multiple forms of FTL Travel which different civilisations use. My personal rule of thumb for an FTL Drive in regards to technobabble is that you should be able to gauge how it does its thing just by the name (and also makes things sound cool, like Quantum Jump/Stutterjump Drives, or Hyperdimensional Breaching Drives)
You can also have several different FTL systems that are used by different people/aliens. Like in WH40k the warp drive is only really used by the Imperium and Orks. Eldar have their webway, Tyranids fold space and Necrons change their FTL system every few years... Another example is the game Stellaris which used to have three different FTL systems; warp drive, hyperlanes and wormholes. When you made your nation you had to choose between one of them and each had pros and cons. It led to a very dynamic way of fighting wars because if you have a different FTL system then you'll have to make strategies that exploit those differences while the enemy does the same to you.
Each has it's different advantages as well. For 40k the webway is fast and safe, but you can only go certain places (and less of them if you aren't DE, because one of it's major hubs contains Cammorgh) and many webway routes are basically only accessible via personal transport. Nids have a safe method of travel, but it's incredibly slow by comparison and can't be used near systems, which fits them travelling in large, independent fleets. Necrons currently have a real-space... sort of FTL in the inertialess drive (it's unclear whether the innertialess drive is actually faster than light, or if necron ships are just incredibly good at getting up to light speed and back down again - most of the older lore is from the imperial perspective, who basically just don't know), but use the webway over greater distances. And the warp is dangerous and unredliable, but can go anywhere and doesn't necessarily require the passage of real-space time (given ships can exit the warp before they entered it, and a major navigational issue is emerging at the correct point in time).
@@chrisbingley they use Warp travel, just without all the security measures. cuz what we call "getting invaded by demons" they call "hanging out with the homies"
0:48 "Sgt" Floofy? Please. Cats are commissioned officers. They're there to sit around and look impressive. Dog's are the nco's for when you actually need to get something useful done;).
I LOVE the FTL system of Battletech. The transmission itself is instantaneous, but typically requires the ship to deploy a solar sail to recharge afterwards, though some ships can go one or two jumps using a specific type of battery. The jump range has a max limit of 50 lyrs and the transit can only happen at specific points in a system ie lagrange points. Travel between stars is split between the ship that's doing the jumping which are called...JumpShips, big shock, which are typically just enough hull to support crew and the jump drive, and DropShips, which unlike most dropships in SciFi are absolutely massive, capable of carrying companies of tanks, mechs, or platoons of infantry. DropShips dock with JumpShips and detach after the jump to travel to the planet.
I agree. Anytime you put limits on a system you add storytelling opportunities. And especially in the novels the need to recharge played a lot into the drama of just getting a ship down on a potentially hostile planet. (thinking of Mercenary's Star in particular)
Another interesting part about BT is how different Eras of the setting had different levels of FTL Battleships and FTL Comms. Giving very distinct flavours to the same setting depending on time period. Like before they figured out FTL coms, 'just orbital bombardment firststrike them' was the go to combat tactic because you knew they'd not get reinforcements. then FTL comms made reinforcements a relevant threat, so people decided 'lets all agree to not do terminatus level attacks as first strikes anymore' Then they blew up their battle ship shipyards Then someone blew up the FTL comm network. And now they are slowly recovering the FTL coms.
It is max 30 light years, but you can have more advanced ships with another charge stored to jump again (or more likely to keep it in reserve as a get out quick card). I love the Battletech setting.
I love Niven's Known Space hyperdrive. It preserves your normal-space momentum, so when you jump out you have to slow down whatever you had. It also doesn't work near gravity wells, so you have to leave a solar system to use it (as mentioned in the video). It preserves time drama in the story -- you've got to spend time in normal space approaching planets. It also has "speed quanta" - all FTL drives work at the first quantum, a single speed, until the Puppeteers invent the Quantum II hyperdrive which can travel at the higher quantum. That kicks off the discovery of the galactic core explosion which is the inciting incidents for MANY MANY other Known Space stories: the Pak migration into human and Puppeteer space as seen in Protector and Destroyer of Worlds. It is responsible for Puppeteers vanishing from Known Space in several stories.
I loved the Quantum 2 drive, especially how the Puppeteers decided to give it to humanity not just as a potential "last ditch" to escape the galactic core explosion via mass exodus, but also because they figured humans would eventually make a version that was _slower_ for more widespread use.
I had considered that too. Not to mention you could ratchet it up a bit more and make it so you can't even be in the magnetosphere of the star. Because while the plasma barrier might not be much to speak of at slow speed, slamming into it while going above the speed of light might have detrimental effects on your health.
@@Enforcer6kYeah. I also love how the Puppeteers thought humanity would be a good recipient of the Quantum II. They figured they'd wait around til the last moment then make a break for the Magellanic Clouds, beating the slower than light Puppeteer migration. But humans would be okay to have already around, they're predictable enough and good trade partners.
My college FTL I made was a twist on the Classic higher dimension travel, but the difference being the alternate dimention was actually fully traversable, had its own planetary bodies and was filled with a breathable gas: there was even a full civilisation of space pirates living there
@RorikH Yeah, basically. Its also only used on larger craft as it requires a lot of energy to get there (smaller craft use riftways, but these are not fully mapped and not everywhere)
That's the reverse to the FTL system used in Banner of the Stars by Hiroyuki Morioka. Ftl travel here uses entry points created by natural singularities to enter 2D space where laws such inertia and momentum don't apply.
Just watched this video and I love it. Made me think about the FTL rules of my novel and codify them. 1. Sublight drives: * Referred to in-universe as 'traction drives' * Reactionless * Have a maximum relative 'velocity' and must accelerate to that velocity 2. FTL drives * 'Turbocharged' version of sublight drives * Bulkier, more expensive, and take more power than sublight versions * Can't be safely engaged within a radius of a star, planet, or other massive object that depends on the object's mass * Not all drives are equal. Some are better at sublight speeds, others faster in FTL, more power efficient, etc. * Humanity does NOT have FTL drives 3. Warp gates * Must be bult on-site, too large and fragile to move * Similar prinicples to traction drives, actually invented as part of an effort to develop FTL traction drives * Provide FTL communications between gates * ONLY humanity has gate technology
There are several good series that revolve around jump points / wormholes and their defenses. I believe that it’s in the Honor Harrington series where a plot revolves around the discovery that two star systems that are quite distant when using the wormhole network are, in fact, only a few light years apart in real space, and the bad guys have already sent an invasion fleet the “long” way.
I'm not sure which exact part of the series you're referring to, but I suspect it's the other way around. Honorverse has two types of FTL, sort of - hyperspace, which takes time to transit (merchant ships can move at like 1300 times the speed of light iirc, military ships have better hyper generators and particle screening so can go faster) and wormholes, which are natural anomalies in real space, adjacent to some but not all star systems, that use the same tech as hyper travel to traverse 'warp bridges' between star systems (the longest in setting is over 900 light years in length, but most are shorter, and some systems have 'wormhole termini' that concentrate the ends of multiple bridges to different systems in one place) _instantly_ - with massive savings in time for interstellar travel, even if the ships are not just travelling between the systems linked by the warp bridge. This makes a wormhole bridge or terminus a massive economic resource and trade route centerpoint for any system or star nation that posesses one. I can think of several instances in setting where one side (despite being further away in normal space or normal hyperspace terms) has a communications turnaround advantage, sometimes a massive one, over the other side since the other side lacks a wormhole terminus, so I suspect that's what you're remembering. There is one or two instances of a fleet travelling the long way through hyperspace to attack a system much closer by (enemy-controlled) wormhole, and a few others where the wormhole provides an advantage to the defender.
@taiko1237 I'd say it starts with On Basilisk Station though there it was not as close as at some occasions later when all that saved Manticore's bacon was a fleet equipped with the newest magic tech in reach of a convenient wormhole towards home.
2 Things about the Star Wars Example. 1) Navicomputers can be preloaded with hyperspace coordinates, but this does really on being in the right location to jump. 2) The Force, a Force user can make a hyperspace jump blind trusting in the Force to know when to exit. The canon Thrawn trilogies, make reference to Chiss navigators who use the Force to find safe hyperspace paths through the unknown regions. And as even non-trained individuals are connected with the Force, one could preform a blind jump safely and may attribute their success to the Force, to luck, or just claim they are that good.
@@Wintermute909 the original Thrawn Trilogy and the Thrawn Duology are considered Legends, BUT there are 2 canon Thrawn Trilogies. The "new" Canon Trilogy and the Thrawn: Ascendancy trilogy.
even then, star wars bends its own rules on speed. in earlier movies and even the clone wars, moving at lightspeed takes time to get places. in some of the later movies and shows, a ship just instantly appears in one place or another (for example, that one guy's X-wing in the mandalorian, which goes from a remote outer rim backwater to literal coruscant for a 5 minute meeting, then instantly teleports back to the outer rim, all during the course of a single combat scene from Mando's perspective)
I know right? So many people never misalign the panendermic semi-bovoid slots in the stator because the instructional videos never show how to properly set the hydrocoptic marzlevanes properly. Breath of fresh air to see someone get it right for a change.
@@littlekong7685 True, if you have the Turboencabulator, but despite the occasional renumerative velocitation of the sperving bearings and the formative galling of the millford trunyions, the Retroencabulator will still do the job just as well as the newer models.
I still think that 40K's style of "hyperspace is literally Hell" is good for shenanigans, even if you have a setting that dials back the hellishness in favour of strangeness. Having the Warp be hostile is good for the horror scenario that is the 40K galaxy, but having a Warp-analogue that's more weird than dangerous can be fun too. Somewhere between the Warp from 40K and the Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitchhikers, where you make a jump through a few uncharted 'branes, and end up with Mark Twain and Lieutenant Columbo inexplicably manifested on the Rec Deck.
My only issue with 40k is that its so unreliable you could wind up getting there 100 years too late, arriving before you left, or not arriving at all. Hell of a system to run a galaxy on. (pun intended) Its not a surprise the Imperium has issues, its a smegging miracle it still exists at all.
@@Wastelandman7000 Unless I'm mistaken, that tends to be when ships can't be guided by the Astronomican. So long as it's light can guide them though, FTL is much more reliable. It also can be sped up by the God Emperor himself from what I know.
@@irystocrattakodachithatmooms You are correct, mostly. While the God Emperor can most certainly speed things up, the astronomican is more of a north star, giving you a continual reference point to where you are in the galaxy. While absolutely necessary for long warp jumps, it is perfectly feasible to perform shorter range warp jumps without it, such as system to system. However, that depends a lot on the experience of the Navigator, and how well charted the warp tides are in the area. If the navigator is experienced and familiar with the area, then even these "blind" jumps can be quite reliable in ideal conditions. Of course, the big problem with warp travel is the "ideal condition" part. While you won't have issues most days, the moment a warp squall or storm blows in, things get dangerous fast. And ever since the Cicatrix Maledictum opened, there are a LOT of those. The greatest danger is that these squalls don't just disrupt ships currently in the warp, but can permanent change the "current" of the warp, making the charted warp routes take you completely off course, or worse, out of the current entirely, where you are marooned in the immaterium, completely reliant on your thrusters to get back into the current. 40k Warp travel is a lot like sailing. It's about finding the right current and headwind, and staying in it. With a good navigator or a short enough jump, it's easy. But now there are storms out there that will sink you or blow you far off course...or far faster ahead. Give these storms the ability to change water currents and also be influenced by literal daemons, and that's warp travel.
Look up the Void in Warframe, it’s kinda close to that! They have the notion of "conceptual embodiment" where strong emotions and stray thoughts can straight up physically materialize
FTL was a huge consideration for me when writing my fantasy/sci-fi novel. Not because of the huge distances that need to be traveled (It's one planet traversed by airships), but because of the flexibility that simply appearing at your enemy's doorstep allows for. I designed in all sorts of quirks and gimmicks about this kind of travel and the politics surrounding it. First: this is a fantasy/sci-fi, and as the "fantasy" part suggests, there is an underworld dimension with warped distance in terms of connecting with realspace that used to have a monopoly on the travel district. The kingdom that resided there imposed tolls on those who entered to use their dimension for travel, and it got absurdly rich on it. Wars were fought by this underworld kingdom to maintain their right to collect this tax. FTL devices, be they magical or technological, rely on breaking into and skimming this dimension to achieve their ludicrous 8 times the speed of light, which the underworld kingdom is not too happy about, because they see it as both a violation of their sovereignty as well as a decline of their hegemony. Second, there are several types of FTL. Some rely on fixed beacons to warp to others within a network like stargates, others are a derivative of this same magic which consumes extremely valuable resources to teleport the ship from anywhere to anywhere. There are other technological drives too which brute force their way into FTL, simply smashing a hole between the two dimensions and jumping through it. Lastly, FTL is extremely expensive, and often one way. Both magic and technological FTL drives utilize various types of exotic materials to create a jump, therefore ships often only carry enough of these materials to execute a few jumps at a time. Generally speaking, if a warship initiates FTL, there is something serious going down, usually initiating or responding to war. Anyways, sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to geek out a bit considering that these spacedock weapons/tech vids have given me tons of ideas to integrate into my own story. Hopefully I'll actually finish it someday lol.
so its wh40k warp but the warp dimension isnt full of demons, rather than a kingdom that impose tax on you whenever you are using their dimension/service just like dune navigators ?
@@Ruzaraneh Yes. You don't nessicarily need a ship to move through this dimention either. Think the nether and its 1:8-meter ratio. You could simply enter a portal, walk, ride or drive down a pathway, and exit the other side. FTL drives skip this process of entering a portal, so it kinda just breaches their dimension without legally passing through their customs. The underworld kingdom has fought several wars and even invaded realspace from time to time when their travel laws are violated by other nations.
6:34 1) How did the Normandy get from Ilos to Arcturus station, then to the Citadel in less than an hour even though that trip involved crossing half the galaxy and should have taken days. 2) Since Mass relays accelerate objects between them and don't teleport, how did a buried underground mass relay transport Shepherd to another mass rely in an enclosed space station.
Ahh see the way Mass Relays work is they create artificial Massless Corridors between relays or in other words, inside the corridors there is mass but as far as the outside galaxy is concerned everything within the corridor is energy. Also where in the lore does it say it should have taken days to cross the Galaxy? The point of the mass effect Relays is that it is faster to go all the way across the Galaxy using relays then it is to FTL travel to the nearest star system.
1, it doesn't take days, all primary relays are in seconds, and the trip from citadel to relay and relay to ilos could be seconds 2,yes this is the one. The monument on ilos was above ground, but the one on the citadel was behind walls. However the beam tower in the third game shows again that they can teleport through walls, so that is just skill issue it seems
1) It took 15 hours to travel from Eden Prime to the Citadel. Both systems are relay systems. In Revelation, it's stated that it took 6 hours to travel from Earth to Arcturus. Also relay systems. They are also close enough that it only took 1 jump. 2) It's stated in the lore that in order for the Alliance to deploy ships to a specific location in less than a day, they have to position these ships at key relay systems across Alliance space. If mass relay transit was instantaneous, then realistically, you could place the entire fleet at Arcturus and be able to deploy to anywhere in Alliance space in seconds. Yes, the actual relay jump is instantaneous, however, ships do not ping pong off of relays. If, for example, you need to perform 3 relay jumps to reach a destination. You would need to perform 3 separate jumps. And there is a slight warmup period in which the pilot needs to prepare the relay for the next jump. All this takes time. 3) not all relays are omni directional. Meaning that in some cases you would have to perform a relay jump that travel for several hours to another relay in order to perform the next jump.
The Babylon 5 hyperspace is probably my favourite FTL method in fiction. It elegantly solves alot of problems while adding a lot of possible story hooks. Like how it allows small craft to travel far for our protagonists to get places, but can't be used as a WMD and trivialise any combat. Or, well, it can, but the gates are stationary somewhere in open space so it won't do much. And the ominous, but not outright hostile, atmosphere in hyperspace allows travel to be routine while still giving great story potential. If you leave the beacon paths you may never find it again, so ancient shipwrecks sometimes drift into lanes. We never found life native to hyperspace, but old sailors tell tales of seeing shadows moving in the fog. (And yes, most of these are used pretty well in the show.)
I've seen a lot of different FTL systems mentioned in the comments, but no one's mentioned that used in David Weber's Honorverse novels. The hyperspace bands that exist, and how they are used and can be transited up to higher or lower bands, and how the Warshawski sails work and have to be dumped of excess energy after a hyperspace transition, then shifted into impeller bands for reactionless movement... it's a fascinating system that shows an actual evolution of ingenuity and design.
Yeah. There's also a really interesting dynamic, which imo isn't explored enough in the setting, from the centuries when hyper travel was discovered but impeller drive and Warshawski sail tech didn't yet exist, where most large scale movement between systems was done with sublight generation ships but scouting of new colonies and conveyance of information was done with very dangerous (because of grav waves and hyper walls, neither of which could be effectively detected for most of this period) hyperdrive-equipped ships running on reaction drives while in hyperspace and therefore restricted to about 50c. Also, Warshawski sails allow for ships to move within gravity waves (which are massive space time distortion structures present in hyperspace that are deadly to ships not using or carrying Warshawski sails). Ships seek these out since they provide much higher accelerations in hyperspace than impeller drives do. When not in a gravity wave, ships in hyper still must use impeller drive to maneuver.
tbh, the loss ofthe settings FTL Coms was one of the more interesting Parts of the Battletech Dark Age era imo. you had this almost galaxy spannign setup of feudal empires, and suddenly the rulers on the thrones couldn't easily check on their vassals anymore.
More accurately, I'd say, long-range FTL comms, as in enough to reach another system. Which is why, in the Honor Harrington series, the Manticorans' main naval operations centre is quiet and things happen unhurriedly in there, because the information they work with could be weeks or even months old, and the response time can be measured in weeks and months.
@@Andrewza1 and that leads to adding some interesting things to the setting. Like is there interstellar laws protecting news and mail couriers? How secure are messages on courier ships? And economically, could you cripple a system's economy by not letting them have the most recent stock exchange numbers?
@@patrickdusablon2789 So i can anserw how traveler does it Yes mail ships are very protected and attacking one will very quickly get the full might of the Imperial navy on your head. You will then if you are taken alive be executed. Only the most insane and crazy terrorists would try attack one. The agency that runs the Messange boat network all so runs the most effective intlgiance againcy so attack one would be like robbing a UPS van but the UPS all so ran the FBI/CIA/NSA/Mossad hybrid force They protected by law and threat of a response that goes over board. Though during wars they are at risk they legal targets during war though still a save job since enemy forces will capture you. The navy, nobels and corporation would use other own courier ships that are a mixed of very fast, armoured or stealth options to get through. As for the data it self. They can be hacked given enough time but again doing so and being found out means death. Most hackers would not risk it. All so they might have explosive fail safes. Not to menstion actually getting your hand on data is hard since the pilot can just purge the data if any one tries to board him. Most worlds in Traveller are a island on to them selfs so being cut off will hurt the economy but never criple it
I think it's a very cool detail that the quantum drives in Star Citizen are actually slower than light (but still very fast, compared to a non-quantum drive), and that the ships rely on jump gates for true FTL travel (like the one that will be added in the upcoming 4.0 patch).
In Perry Rhodan most ships need to reach 50% of the speed of light before they can access hyperspace or linearspace, though that can vary depending on the technology level. Star Trek has established a galactic transporter in TOS and one that could beam an entire ship in Voyager, so the Federation has a long way to go before reaching the limits of that technology.
I can't believe you didn't mention the "Adama Maneuver". Battlestar Galactica made great use of their FTL concept to drive the plot throughout the show.
That's made possible by military vessels mounting two jump drives. One can be cooling off while the other spinning up ready to go. IDK if the civilian ships had the same dual drive systems but I can see quite a few not bothering due to cost
Back in the day I found ship building to be some of the most fun in Traveller. A lot of times it came down to, "Hey, I built his, how can I wrap a story around it?"
This one was pretty informative. Using GURPS as the RPG system, I wanted to have a Firefly-ish kind of game. Basically, renegades roving the outskirts of civilization, while taking various jobs - some on the side of other side of the law. I decided the best way for spaceships to get around would be the jump drives like Battlestar Galactica (the revision) with the same take on weapon systems. I also had them use Tachyon pinholes for communication over vast distances, no shields, but would use wave generators for disbursing particles while flying. Never got it off the ground but maybe when I retire.
Traveller's sublight drives do this. M-drives are essentially gravity generators that yeet the ship 'down' towards its destined target, whilst the internal plating applies a countering force and an actual 'down'. Yes, this can and has been weaponised. My players reconfigured the gravity plating when boarded, so the bridge was fine, the rest of the ship was randomised... And then they pulled a few high-g manoeuvres. Space pirate jam, anyone?
My thinking for my story is that the main faction and some others have 2 main forms of FTL, the Space Warp Drive, and the Wormhole generators. The Space Warp drive is carried on most ships and work by effectively warping space around the ship to achieve to move it at FTL speeds. This method requires the use of shields or very strong armor, to prevent particle impacts, and those shields often have to modulated to roll the particles off of them to prevent the so called particle shotgun effect when the ship returns to normal speed. The Wormhole generators create worm holes obviously, they most often tend to appear as giant Gates, that can connect to each other. Wormholes have a so called Fold Space Efficiency percentage, 100% would be near instantaneous travel from a complete fold, with percentages below that indicate some amount of travel distance, wormholes over greater distances tend to require more power for more efficient folds so there can be significant travel time even within the wormhole. This leads to the so called fold and warp method, where one creates a massive wormhole jump, then warps through the wormhole tunnel. Warp is limited by well the vastness of space, even the newest generation advanced drives can take not insignificant amounts of time to get to far off places but wormholes are limited by requiring infrastructure and power generation. Wormholes must connect to the coordinates of other wormholes gates to form a connection. So when going to new regions, only warp ships can make the journey until a wormhole generator is built.
Really loved playing Traveller in college, with a great GM. I've always preferred the "no FTL communications" restriction, since it makes the ships themselves the heralds of everything.
I've been working on a setting with an FTL drive, I call it the Warp Cannon. Warp Cannons are at least a lightsecond long, and make a warp bubble around a spacecraft or fleet, launching them out the front at a speed best measured in light years per day, dependent on the length of the cannon. For ships without a gravity generator (see: most ships early on), the warp bubble cannot be popped from the inside, but it will pop on it's own after a few weeks, or once it hits a strong gravity gradient. Ships with gravity generators can sustain the bubble for longer, or quickly weaken it, from the inside. Almost every inhabited system has a warp cannon, but most are quite small, and are intended to take a week or two to send ships to a nearby system with a larger, high-speed warp cannon. Warp cannons can take weeks to turn, and larger ones are modular in order to facilitate this. There is also extremely little in the way of FTL communication, one alien civilization has figured out how to use the technology of a long-gone civilization to transmit the minds and possibly souls of the dead to a central location. This is the only known method of FTL communication aside from Warp Cannons, and the civilization that has it uses it to roughly halve communications lag to their emperor and back. Warp Cannons were inspired by trains, and hearing the estimations that a warp drive would need a cubic meter of iron converted into pure energy to power it, along with hearing that the bubbles would be surprisingly stable. I also wanted to make invading or colonizing a star system very risky, and to allow for tense situations in which reinforcements are impossible, and to add a specific object in the system that's more valuable than anything else there.
Piper had an interesting hyperspace system. No FTL comms. Fixed FTL speed limit, one light year an hour so vessel size limits range due to life support considerations. Unable to accurately jump planet to planet, jump to the system then perform a series of micro jumps to close on the destination (get the last one wrong and get kicked back) meaning you need a good hyperspace astrogator. An odd sub light system using both lift and drive, hand waved away with something to do with magnetics. Along with a form of anti grav for in amto vehicles and small robots. The same system was used both in The Commonwealth era and later during the rise of the Sword Worlds. I think the smallest hyperspace capable ship he mentions is a 300 foot diameter globe and a small freighter coming in at 1500 foot diameter. Pournelle used a jump system described like tram lines, almost instantaneous apart from jump shock which debilitated both human and computer, even harder on the Moties. The jump points had to be surveyed prior to first use. Another downside was that gravitational influences could make a jump point variable, or you might find a jump point in the photosphere of a red giant. And, like Piper, used the same system in both the First and Second Empire of Man.
I really like settings with solid rules on travel. Older Star Trek (the rules fell apart later on travel time of FTL comms), Battletech (surprise! BT has intricate rules for FTL travel), and as you said, Stargate. Consistent rules make for good storytelling, because you can't just handwave your way out of everything.
Gonna mention Hyperion as one of my personal favorite settings for FTL rules. The Farcaster gates allow instant travel from point to point at a human ship scale (like Star Gates) but with a level of convenience that rich people can have entire homes made of Farcaster portals. Without a Farcaster, you are limited to a Hawking Drive which is still a light speed/slightly FTL engine but it's still slow, can take years, and comes with time dilation issues of near light travel. It makes for a really interesting setting and advances the settings themes about imperialism and how the inner core expands and commercializes planets when they get integrated into the World Web.
Definitely followed a few of these rules for FTL in my stories, being that Warp Drives and Wormhole Generators are the primary modes of FTL in my stories, the main ones being that the same Gravity Manipulation tech that powers the FTL is also used to generate Artificial Gravity (I call it "True" Gravity), make Gravity Shields to protect ships and generate Antigravity Fields to help propel ships (in tandem with Fusion Drives and Antimatter Fusion Drives) when they're not at FTL and, at least for Warp Drives, you can't Warp in and out of gravity wells like planets, moons, and stars without great risk to your ship.... and possibly the planet or star you're near!
In my own, I use a combination of star system geometry and a function of the ship's mass and velocity. Basically, the "you can't go to FTL here" volume, which is dependent on the mass of the primary, is shaped like a flat spinning top, with the points nearest to the primary's poles, and the furthest being along its equator, and objects with enough mass, like a gas giant, will reshape it some, or have their own limit based on their mass if they're outside the primary's zone. And then there's the need for a ship to reach a certain energy state before it can activate its FTL drive, and that's a function of mass and velocity to reach a given threshold, so a ship with more mass will have to go slower than a lighter one to break into FTL. At this point, a ship will be roughly at rest within the FTL state they're in, and will need to accelerate, and can shift up to FTL states that correspond to a higher compression factor compared to normal spaces (Zero State). And when dropping out of FTL, a ship has to slow down relative their current state so they can downshift gracefully, which will leave them somewhere near the upshift velocity for that State. Though, a crash downshift to zero state is possible, but it's hard on the ship and crew, and then they have to decelerate in-system. And then there are customs, like ship enter a system from the southern polar region, and go out through the northern one. Anyone coming out anywhere else, that's in the realm of not good, and all going in and out of FTL can be detected FTL through a gravitic "flash", and then by lightspeed sensors with a burst of primarily Cherenkov radiation.
I really liked how Freelancer managed FTL travel. You had your ship's cruise engine(good for local travel but took a long time to reach any other planet in sytem), travel lanes(easy and fast planet hopping but tightly controlled and could be disrupted) and jump gates(move to another system and even more restrictions). It sold the idea that this was an engineering challenge that took centuries.
In my experience as a world builder the best rules/limitations for both ftl-drives and teleporters are: make them as potent as you want but make them piss easy to interfere with if one has any basic idea how they work. It makes for fascinating feats but any adversary remotely on the same level of development will be able to effectively nullify them and thus forcing you to resort to more traditional means of travel once within range. It also prevents any homegrown terrorist from teleporting bombs all over the place.
Yeah the conduit thing in Mass Effect always bothered me slightly as well. Would have been better if they made it some experimental worm hole tech or something to have it standout from the Reaper tech a bit more I think. And get around Mass Relays not working like teleportation.
Look mate, after having to drive the Mako over 30 different baby's-first-topographical-maps with 4 buildings shared between them, I think I deserved to have it go where it was supposed to on the first try just that once.
I almost never hear anyone discussing it, but the FTL in David Weber's Honorverse is a very interesting one. First off, you have normal space, and then hyper space - hyper space is a related 'nesting' of dimensions to our own, but each 'band' of hyperspace is compressed in distance/space compared to lower bands (lowest being the 'alpha' band, or base-line hyperspace). This gives a cascading set of normal space relative speeds depending on how 'high' you can climb into the hyperspace bands, generally some X100s c (light speed). But you could only enter/leave hyperspace outside of a certain distance from a star or risk either a) drive failure or b) total destruction of the ship. In addition, however, hyperspace has "gravity waves", essentially big, focused regions of gravitational energy powerful enough to destroy ships unlucky enough to hit them (some 'rouge waves' add additional hazard). The settings normal propulsion, using artificial gravity waves as a sort of warp drive (sublight), are especially vulnerable to this - unless a change is made to the drive (normally a wedge forcing the ship forward, the artificial waves would be placed at 90 degrees to the ship to catch the wave like sails). Making this change allowed ships to use the wave to increase their acceleration rates (and ability to undergo them - the setting used the grav waves to dump the ship's inertia into to avoid splatting everyone on to the walls - additionally, the systems for that could be battle damaged for terrible effect) into the X1000 c. Some waves were powerful enough to punch through hyperspace into normal space, creating wormholes (which the plot of the series is largely centered on - wormholes meant INSTANT travel over lightyears, but only to specific points, so if you controlled those points you had a lot of wealth and influence). So this meant several things - 1) ships could travel on specific trade routes and had certain 'no go' points - too far in, and you had to either run from fights or win them, and how you went into those situations was very important, 2) you are limited by equipment - merchants wouldn't go in for large, more expensive systems that allowed for higher accels, but warships generally had up to date equipment for the best performance, and 3) some methods of warfare changed dramatically between combat environments, hyper vs. normal space. I strongly suggest sci fi fans to read On Basilisk Station to enjoy the story for themselves - you REALLY need the full book experience to really enjoy it.
A fairly unique one is in the animorph book. There "zero space" works basicly like the ocean with currents that change over time. This allows for the story to happen almost entirly on earth without to much interference for the wieder galaxy while still keeping everyone on their toes as the currents may change allowing for either enemy reinforcements or the galactic "good" guys to Show up
Similar to hyperspace in Glenn Stewards Duchy of Terra Books. They have hyperspace currents which form the hyperlanes, which higher tech races can influence to some degree, or even completely change which is considered a holy grail in the books.
No mention of the best "hand wave" of a ship's speed - "Blake's 7" "Zen, set course, Standard speed." Need to get somewhere in a hurry? "Standard x 6!"
Had an interesting idea for a three "layer" FTL system I want to use in a game at some point. Drive takes advantage of the "curve" of space time around substantial bodies in space; the more curved the space, the faster the travel. Basically an excuse to slow down at the edge of a system(where the gravity well of the star ceases to have a large effect) and near planets/stars(where the gravity well is at it's steepest). Second layer is the same thing, just with an order of magnitude more power and control required, limiting cross-system travel to dedicated ships like exploration cruisers or carriers. Third is a galaxy-to-galaxy, that requires access to and a large installation around the galactic core.
Traveller is still around! When I watched Fallout (having not played the games) I was like, wait, this is the Gamma World I've wanted since I was a teen. And sure enough the games were inspired by Gamma World.
yes they current on i think 7th generation classic, mega, gurps, mongoose 1, 5t, mongoose 2e. Though at this point mongoose own the right to traveler fully so only mongoose 2e is really getting any new books one ever 4 to 6 months
@@Andrewza1 There are five editions by Marc W. Miller (Classic, MT, TNE, T4, T5). Then there are the two editions by Mongoose, one by GURPS, one by Hero Games and one based on D&D 3e (T20). So there are ten editions of Traveller.
@@barbarossarotbart Thanks. an i think mongoose only has access to the Marc Miller version other than T5 with the deal they made. So if you want you can now read the older edestion I find it nice that they still for sale offiacly on a digital store front. I guess marc is still working ont5 then if mongoose does not sell it. o and I burnt the very idea of T20 from my mind.
@@Andrewza1 I do not think so. I believe that the deal is that Mongoose gets Marc Miller's full Traveller archive which BTW also includes third party material and OOP editions in other languages.
In a story I wrote a while ago, the newest and most powerful form of FTL was called the Gravity Drive (no, not Event Horizon gravity drive). Using exotic matter, it creates a literal "bubble" around the ship using it, isolating it from "normal" space while highly excited gravitons are focused at the front of the bubble, causing the ship to move faster than light. There's still travel time, but trips that would normally take weeks can instead take hours with the proper routes mapped out. Ships incapable/too small to mount the Gravity Drive are able to "surf" with the leading ship within its literal sphere of influence too. As far as limitations go, Gravity Drives are incredibly energy intensive to operate, needing a special reactor system utilizing a synergistic mix of fusion power and exotic matter in order to operate at all. In addition to this, they cannot function within the influence of large gravity wells such as planets or stars, in part due to built-in safety features and inherent dangers in attempting to do so. Also, two ships equipped with Gravity Drives cannot operate within proximity to one another, requiring other vessels to either "surf" or to jump separately/great distances away from one another. Later, pirates with stolen Gravity Drives realized that they could "modify" them to emit far greater spheres of influence, causing the safeties on Gravity Drives to trip on passing ships and force them out of FTL.
Very good explanation. Really interesting as always. I've always thought that the limits of an FTL drive are the most interesting part. When I discovered Traveller I found the limits really narratively interesting. It's one of my favourite FTL systems. I also like having multiple systems in universe. I think that makes for a more believable setting as well as one with more story interest. Such as in Stargate where ships can arrive by hyperdrive but it's just slower.
For my own work, FTL is achieved by bending space to "overlap" a target location with the sending volume before "resolving" being in two locations at once when they overlap collapses, leaving the ship at the target. This requires vast amounts of energy and computing power and so ships are launched from megastructure stations orbiting close to stars to make use of the plentiful energy supply there. It is possible to host the technology on a ship, but to have anything more than a 'skip' between two points a few thousand meters apart requires energy and computing power that can only be found in the largest ships. This is the in-universe classification for Dreadnoughts, a ship with enough power output to contain its own interstellar FTL system. Needless to say, they are rare, heavily defended, and often carry their own escort fleet docked to them when they jump.
My consists of three particle accelerators, two create the essence of a neutron star and the one in the middle create negative matter and the two outside the one in the middle hurls that energy into the central one that is then channeled to the ships anti grav engines thus opening a singularity. Akin to Halo's Slipstream drive.
Freelancer is still my favourite system of FTL - both the lanes for intrasystem and the gates/holes for intersystem travel. The idea that they were built by one corporation just seemed so realistic 😅
I love your videos! You’ve given me a lot of inspiration over the last 3 years, and have helped with my science fiction novel. Keep up the great work! Chris
I really like the Warp Navigation/Geshtam Jumps from Space Battleship Yamato 2199. Having it be a near instantaneous jump with a hard limit on how far you can go in a single jump and a limit of how many times you can jump per day means there is a lot of time spent cruising at Sunlight speeds during your big space journeys which allows much more shenanigans and interaction with stuff in space without having to stop or be stopped.
Im going to have to argue with you about Mass Effect relay. I think it was done correctly. 1) size. Its much smaller so we can assume different rules. 2) The relays were built by a different species. That one was built by the protheons the others were built by Reapers/Reaper builders. 3) Plot. The protheons wouldve needed to travel from Ilos to the Citadel without a ship. It would only make sense that they wouldve needed to travel that distance faster as well.
@LikeDaniel So the antagonist is Saren who is under the control of galaxy ending AI ships called reapers. The final mission involves going to Ilos chasing Saren down. You find the final holdout of the Protheans, a 50,000 year old civilization that was wiped out by the reapers. A whole bunch of plot stuff happens but you need to get back to the Citadel, a giant space station that was built by the reapers, and save the day. Unfortunately, Saren found a small Mass Relay built by the Protheons for fast travel to the Citadel and so you need to follow him through in your tank to save the day.
I feel like there's not a whole lot of reason to re-invent the wheel there. Traveller already does a lot of what you'd need for a Sojourn RPG experience: all you'd need is a few setting-specific supplemental rules to get the details right.
It would be fun, but also Impulse Drive exists and makes for a fantastic universe agnostic Space Opera PbtA TTRPG, you might need to delete mystics for Sojourn, but depending on how Faithless goes that might not even be the case.
You could make a sojourn compediume for traveller it very flexbil system, Gurps is there to for that. Actually making a system is a lot harder and will need more people working on it.
I also like the idea of space highways that I first saw in X:Rebirth (even though the game itself wasn’t particularly good) making ships behave more like cars. Maybe there are backroads and there could be special ships that resemble offroaders that could travel outside the roads but at a very limited speed. Also kinda interesting how this creates the opportunity of space traffic jams
My FTL systems are twofold. One part is the Blank Void Projector (BVP) which opens a gateway into the Blank Void, a pocket dimension where time doesn't flow and the laws of physics don't apply. The second part is the Blank Void Energy Field Acceleration Unit (BVEFAU) which is a field around the ship that isolates it from the space outside and allows the ship to "glide on the waves".
Neat. I had the idea that since our universe only exists as we know it because it was 1 billionth more matter than antimatter, and the billionth that wasn't instantly annihilated is what we live in, the next universe over could just have been completely annihilated and thus, with no matter to get in your way or sort of hold things down gravitationally, warping space to get to your destination would be much easier once you got there.
FTL was something I wanted in my novel but this video has given me pause on how to think it out based on how other franchises do it and how they enact it. Especially fuel concerns
Love essays like this, a help for scifi writers. Niven and Pournelle wrote an essay called “Building the Mote in God’s Eye”, with a section dedicated to the FTL drive used, how it worked, and how it affected the setting. I’d check it out.
I feel that for a setting to be good, FTL should have a cost. If it is to easy and there is no cost then: “Anything can be a weapon, if the man or woman who holds it has the nerve and will to make it so.” ― Robert Jordan
One of the best explanations for casual FTL travel I've read was in the Old Man's War books. Easier to read the first book and find for yourself then have someone explain it to you.
Personally I think that the concept of lightspeed skipping is a neat elaboration of the way the Star Wars hyperdrive was originally laid out - specifically showing why you need to wait for it to finish calculating. If you don't wait for it to be done, it'll drop you off at a potentially hazardous place between Point A and Point B while it calculates the next leg of the journey, and even then it critically damages your hyperdrive.
The FTL for my homebrew setting is based on the orion drive; the ship calibrates and then drops behind it a shaped-charge explosive made of special material (extradimensional mumbo jumbo; its kinda the settings thing) that hits a special energy barrier at the rear of the ship and catapults it forward outside of space time to a predetermined destination. The calibration takes time (measuring chemical component amounts, getting it setup in the explosive casing) and the material is very expensive so it sets up the limit that jumps cant really be made on a moments notice and the explosives arent practical as weapons because they are very expensive and also dont actually cause that much damage outside a fairly small area (because space is empty and emptiness doesn't transmit forces very well). It also means the ship has a certain amount of fuel in the form of the base material, but also in spare casings (which are like, minivan sized) that cannot be easily refilled. Small ships CAN use it theoretically, but most won't have the space to carry the casings to make more than a handful of jumps.
As an infrastructure enjoyer I do like FTL gates that take some time to get to the destination as space is huge. However we can make special exceptions for flagships or hero ships as a risky option.
Discworld rules - the hero getting where they need to be without exploding may be a million to one chance, but a million to one chance happens every time.
One of my favorite FTL settings is in battletech with their jumpships. The jump drives have to maintain a certain distance from other jump devices to the point that vessels interacting with jump fields not their own would cause a cascade effect and destroy all vessels in the interaction. This also means if a jump drive breaks down there is no way to send spare drives to the stranded ship making jump capable vessels extremely valuable. Basically have to take years sending hardware and subcomponent level equipment and manufacturing equipment to the location and build a new one.
I've got a setting running around in my head with an interesting (in my opinion at least) FTL system: It's based loosely on the IRL Penrose process (where an object can sacrifice mass while near a black hole to speed up), just without those pesky laws of relativity turning you into light etc. It's also made to be FAR more powerful, so that you can "easily" get to lightspeed. That way it can feel scientific without also needing an essay to understand. In terms of limitations, it has a fairly major one: you need a black hole at either end for it to work, as the Penrose process only works with black holes. But you can get around that limitation via artificial black holes either in state-of-the-art ships or stations at the destination (the first of which is in the early stages of prototyping in the setting, which works as a nice plot device). Travel is (practically) instant, mainly for ease of writing. FTL communication isn't possible, so messenger drones (like in Sojourn) are used. Oh yeah there's also the small matter of probably going insane if you use it while conscious/not high as a kite, because there's no way breaking reality, geometry and basically every law of physics is good for the brain. All ships can use the process, but crew sanity and the precise calculations required make FTL travel only really viable for the rich and/or batcrap crazy.
Always loved anachronistic Age of Sail stuff in Sci-fi, like the way 40K ships moving through the Warp are constantly in danger until/if they reach their destination or the fast-paced broadside combat of Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
I am now interested I getting Traveler. STL comms in an FTL setting is something so simple but I had no thought of and will work perfectly for a setting I’m working on.
This makes me wonder about the process for Scalzi's Interdependency books. The method of long distance travel in those was a naturally occurring extradimensional network called the Flow, which couldn't really be controlled, just taken advantage of their existence (if you've listened to The Sojourn, this may sound familiar). The super interesting part in those books was the central plot point, that the Flow was changing as of the start of the books. Flow entry and exit shulls were shifting, closing, and collapsing. With no other means of superluminal travel, the Flow collapsing could mean the end of civilization. It was a fantastic trilogy.
My favourite is the way FTL works in Battletech as it feels so limited. Very few ships have FTL drives, a jump can only be done from the zenith and nadir of a star (unless the captain is feeling particularly lucky), jump preparation takes a while and after a jump the FTL drive needs to recharge for about a week or two, and if you try rushing any step there a good chance you missjump and meet a grizzly end. This means that in the setting FTL capable ships act more like trains going from one station to another transporting smaller craft rather than spaceships as is common in scifi.
Another tabletop example: 4000 A.D. had a really cool FTL system. You enter FTL on one turn, and can exit it on any turn after that. The restriction is that the number of turns you spend in FTL is the number of spaces away from your starting point you have to travel. You don't get an expanding circle of potential destinations anywhere within a maximum range, you get an expanding ring or donut, with a hole in the middle, only able to land on the outer edge of that circle and not anywhere inside it. A journey which takes 2 turns to complete *can't* be stalled to take 3 or 4, without having to drop out of FTL beyond your destination then head back, potentially giving away your change of course.
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www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/starship-operators-manual?_pos=1&_psq=starship&_ss=e&_v=1.0
I designed my own drive - so I am getting some amusement out of this video for reasons only I would know.
This is seriously one of the best RPG flavor supplements I have ever read.
Wow! I remember Traveler from decades ago. I'm glad it is still going strong!
@@erroneousbosch As one of the authors of said book, thank you for the compliment!
Worth noting that Traveller the Sci-fi RPG has two Ls, Traveler the noun referring to one who travels has only one. Useful for googling and such.
Congratulations to Traveller on having more exposure to wide audience in those 10 minutes than in the previous 30 years.
My heart skipped a beat when it popped up on the screen. I play Cepheus now instead of Traveller, but I always have love for the source.
honestly it deserves it! How many other systems let you die during character creation?!
@@SabreKen that was only v1 and if you *_REALLY_* doing everything to do so.
@@TheTrueAdept I coulda sworn it was also a rule in Mongoose Traveller, but I do recall one of them added injuries in character creation that was a little spicy
@@SabreKen that was fixed after the literal first edition. These days, you *_REALLY_* have to work at it to kill your character during creation.
1. Open portal to space that might be described as Actual Hell
2. Tokyo Drift through it.
3. Celebrate if you exit
That’s basically Warhammer FTL tech lol
basically whole W40K :P
Playing Rogue Trader. Felt that. (I actually really like the way navigator points work, where you can pay points to make paths safer, or forge shortcuts at the cost of extra energy. Makes it extra dramatic when a slightly-spoilery-bad-dude attack is happening and you have to just put all of your points into tearing hell one more hole just to get there on time.)
Or just ork it trough: let the daemons fear YOU.
*IF*
The fun thing with the Stargates, is that the "rules" were presented from the human perspective, things the Humans had figured out through experimentation but their understanding was never complete. IE, the 31 minute rule was just a limit of how long the SGC has been able to keep a gate open with their limited understanding and systems. Longest time group A has been able to keep the mechanism running, doesn't mean the mechanism can't go longer with greater understanding of how it works or sufficient power supply.
Stuff like Anubis Gate Weapon or the times they connected to a gate near a black hole come to mind
@@zeux5583 One of those moments its like 'oh it can be held open for longer, just need to connect to a black hole, easy. Why is the gate throwing a bunch of angry looking messages we can't decipher at us? Crap now how do we force close it?"
38 minutes.
I always liked that about Stargate. With regular power, you get 38 minutes. Give or take a few quantum hand-Waves that Carter could tell you about.
But if you dump enough power into it, it can stay open longer. Maybe indefinitely. Who knows! Humans sure don't. But we'd like to find out!
Black holes, zero-point energy modules, who knows what else!
One thing that always bugged me about Stargate is that they kept saying that you can't go back through an incoming wormhole but they never established (in universe) why that is or how they know that.
@@Canadamus_Primeit may be based on the black hole-white hole model of wormholes. In a wormhole, blacholes would be the part you can enter and white holes where you exit.
It's always nice to see how much love you give Stargate
Spacedock try not to mention Stargate in world building challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
@@dark_ops1651 Stargate did SO WELL with worldbuilding that it's kind of hard. Although I thought Andromeda deserved a nod with its Slipstream drive: The FTL corridors have branching paths and a sentient being (usually) knows where and when to turn. An AI can't do it, so you need a pilot. And because Slipstream is not really well understood, you don't need to explain it any more than that. Also you can go places you shouldn't be able to get to and … we even learn that you can arrive later than you expected or even I suspect earlier than you left.
They just need to give more love to the best Stargate: Universe
I like the idea of ships not having their own FTL drive and needing the help of another ship or structure to go FTL
So like wormholes?
@1reefshark basically. My ttrpg setting, Blood and Satellites, uses what they call Slip Gates to warp between solar systems and shit, but they can only jump so far at once before the gates become unstable. Multiple jumps have to be made if you wanna go across an entire galaxy, and the ships have to "cool down" between jumps or else the Ether Normalizing Field around the ship breaks down and fuckery can happen.
Ships don't have their own slip drives and instead have to deploy a Slip Gate in orbit because they've seen what happens when teleportation goes wrong, so each gate opening is practically it's own ceremony with how much precision and care is put into opening each one.
Yeah, I think that's actually one of the best justifications for space fighters (or Expanse style Sufficiently Maneuverable Corvettes) - any ship with a warp drive is far too valuable to ever risk in combat, so they just show up, deploy some smaller ships, and then either retreat to hyperspace until the battle is over or just stay on the very, very backlines of combat.
Mech warrior or battle tech has that.
@@WolfPawArmoury sounds interesting
My favorite is probably in J.S. Morin's Black Ocean series: literal wizards.
As in, your "hyperdrive" is a dude named "Mordecai the Brown" with a pointy hat and a staff and everything.
This adds extra fun points because electronics can and will malfunction, in the presence of sufficiently potent magic.
OK that sounds hilarious.
@@the_senate8050 The series, broadly speaking, is a rehash of Firefly; which makes it a little divisive. Some might find that familiar and comfy, others might see it as a cheap imposter.
I like it well enough though, and it's probably the best bang-for-buck on Audible, at 1 credit for something like 65 hours of audiobook.
@@the_senate8050 The series, broadly speaking, is a rehash of Firefly, which makes it somewhat divisive. Some will see it as familiar and comfy, while others will see it as a cheap imitation. I like it well enough though, the audiobooks, specifically, which are available as a huge bundle deal
Starship's Mage, unsurprisingly, does something similar (but without the "magic breaks the computers" bit). The "FTL system" is a specially-trained Jump Mage teleporting the ship up to a light year at a time, with the usual teleportation spell being amplified by a massive array of runes called a Jump Matrix etched throughout the entire ship.
Apparently the spell really knocks the caster on their ass, though. It's likened to having run an entire marathon in an instant. Between that and the risk of thaumic burnout (which is apparently *not* a pretty sight) civilian Jump Mages are expected to only use the spell once every eight hours, and even the Royal Martian Navy's training can only get that down to about six hours, but RMN ships tend to have a lot more jump-trained mages on board so with proper personnel cycling they can make pretty good time to their destination.
@@procrastinatinggamer This feels like a discworld in space style adventure, and I am all about that.
The game "Sword of the Stars" has multiple methods of FTL. Each race you play as has their own method, or some variation of another. One tunnels through natural corridors. Another creates their own temporary tunnels. Another usees bog standard warp. Another uses a form of teleportation. Another uses a combination of STL and Jump gates. And so on. It's certainly one to represent a variety of these methods.
@@aurongrande6141 my favorite drive type here is the Morrigi Flock drive. The more ships in the formation the faster it goes.
Some other FTL varieties from other media. The Farscape starburst. Super Dimensional Fortress Macross space fold system. Psionically empowered teleportation seen in Anne Macaffrey's Tower and Hive series.
@@mrbluebell2735 I prefer the Liir's Flicker Drive. Using micro teleportation to move around and negate inertia. Even having a chance for weapon fire to pass through and miss.
That's the best thing about Sword of the Stars. Different drives mean different play styles. Hiver jumpgates are slow to set up but allow instant movement, meaning you can transfer a lot of reinforcements to a system with an approaching enemy fleet. Liir stutter warp gets faster the further you are from a gravity well, which means it's better to intercept enemies in deep space than to fight near one of your planets. Human node drive is fast, but dependant on naturally occurring node lines that can force you to take indirect routes.
For hivers and humans, even a system without any habitable planets can be important. Hivers want to deploy their jumpgates as widely as possible, and humans might station tankers or refineries along node routes and allow their ships to refuel between turns.
@@darthquigley A rare pain for the Humans is the VN Planet Killer. I've had one of those take out a planet at a choke point for node lines, in effect cutting my empire in half.
Stellaris also used to have this. You could choose between warp (travel between any stars, but slowly), hyperdrive (travel along preset routes, quickly), wormhole stations (travel to any system within range very quickly, but you have to build the station first), and eventually jump drive (travel instantly to any system within range, but maybe trigger an interdimensional invasion).
Stargate also teaches us that you don't have to use the same FTL rules forever and can even introduce other concurrent FTL systems if you include differences between in the story, like the Stargates are the fastest way to travel, but they cannot be moved or be build normally so if you want to have a little bit more freedom or transport more mass at once you got to build a ship with a hyperdrive.
Same with the question of ship bound vs independent FTL drives, having a setting where your FTL can't be connected to a ship but can be used once a connection is created means you can have both an unexplored frontier while also having a tight knit center where travelling from planet to planet is like hoping into an airliner.
I like how Mass Effect justifies having the same FTL setup for everyone. Other methods might be possible or even preferable but we'll never know.
This! I love this comment, and I love stargate.
Oh, and don't forget Destiny's warp like FTL giving more options to Ship FTL.
Stargates can be moved, the Midway station had two gates in close proximity and they were set up artificially
@@nahuelleandroarroyo Well, you need to update star location when moving a gate around large distances, and that conventionally means having a dial device which will update automatically.
The Pegasus - Milky Way gate netwerk was special, as it also daisy-chained a few dozens of gates together to the Midway station gate adress.
It was a cool concept, sadly only used for a very short while because of story impact. It's one thing to spend time hyperdriving to another galaxy, it was another thing to actually have direct and 'free' gate to gate access.
Yes, and that would make sense as Stargates are more for (relatively small) infantry transit than ship drives which have to push huge masses between stars. You can only move so many troops and so much materiel through a Stargate because of size constraints. In terms of military logistics its like having to move your entire army through a very narrow hallway. This is less than optimal. You need starships.
4:27 a good one you could have included is battletech nuking themsleves into forgetting how to make new FTLs for 300 years, untill they remembered and nuked themsleves into forgetting them again!
They didn't lose the ability to make JumpShips during the Succession Wars and certainly not after the Jihad. They just slowed down to a trickle due to the catastrophic damage to human civilization. They may have lost the ability to produce 'compact' jump drives so that WarShips could be viable, but even then humanity as a whole didn't. Just the Great Houses and Periphery nations
Jumpships are hard to make at the best of times because the titanium-geranium core used in K-F drives cannot be transported easily through FTL since they interfere with the function of existing drives. So you either slot one into a naked drive, charge it, and send it away to the destination unmanned, OR you have to grind the metal into gravel, chemically treat it, and then painstakingly repurify, recast, and machine the core over months at the destination before it can be used in a new drive. So Jumpships are hard to make but they never quite forgot how to make them. Compact K-F drives used in Warships though? That knowledge either got bombed to kingdom come or was censored by [THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN INTERCEPTED BY YOUR COMSTAR CUSTOMER SECURITY TEAMPLEASE ASSUME THE CORPORATE SUBMISSION POSITION AND AWAIT OUR TEAM OF HIGHLY TRAINED REPRESENTITIVES CURRENTLY ON THEIR WAY TO YOUR LOCATION]
@@VallornDeathblade Damn you and your Blake!
BattleTech has one of my favourite FTL systems, in part due to the set of limitations like those that were listed in this video. Like limited FTL comms, both due to technology and politics, and limits to where and how often FTL drives can be used. Yet these rules can be bent (e.g. "Pirate" jump points).
@@brutalchicken A lot of it was originally due to ComStar fuckery. They were actively sabotaging people trying to recreate Star League era tech. (kudos to the Grey Death for pissing on that little op)
Another cool limitation not mentioned is that in Halo, if too many ships use Slipspace travel too much for too long over a given period of time, Slipspace travel becomes longer and less efficient for the entire universe and may even be blocked completely. This effect is called Causal Reconciliation, or just Reconciliation debt. At the end of the Forerunner-Flood War, since the Forerunners were moving the Halos through Slipspace at the same time, all that mass being moved through it accrued so much Reconciliation debt that Slipspace travel was incredibly slow and even impossible in some places across the Milky Way before the firing of the Halo array. Another cool consequence of Reconciliation and the time dilatory nature of Slipspace travel is that if your Slipspace capabilities are very good and you jump over a short enough distance, you might be able to detect yourself from your previous and future positions in spacetime before or after you make the jump. That very chance of enciting a paradox is believed to be the reason for Causal Reconciliation's existence; it's a way for the universe to correct itself from breaking the laws of lower dimensions that the higher ones don't necessarily follow.
@murpheyholloran1067 Reconciliation dept is not limited to time since it is accumulated in a timeless dimension, and it's really cool when the Forerunner that was contemplating firing the Halos with the purge the whole galaxy setting on, knew for a fact that he already did, and/or was already destined to because reconciliation dept all over the galaxy suddenly started going down, meaning that the amount of ships and tonnage going through Slipspace was going to go way down in a somewhat short period of time, thus he or somebody else were going to fire the Halo array in a few days.
there’s also the ai halsey made that mentioned “other intellects in the mist” after she exposed it to slipspace and it rapidly grew in intelligence before halsey essentially got scared shitless
the expanse's ring gates have something similar. if too much mass-energy goes through them in a short time stuff starts getting eaten in transit for spoiler reasons
I love the "you have to be far away from any gravity well" trope because it makes other locations within a star system important and leads to more dynamic conflicts. Defenders have more locations to defend, including star system edges, and attackers have to plan for what resistance they'd meet when they transit in-system. I first encountered it in 40k and fell in love with it. I use it myself.
Also, if the FTL system involves some sort of gravity manipulation, then requiring you be far from a gravity well to use it makes a lot of sense. In the case of it being a jump-drive, it also allows for an interesting tactic of being able to jump to Lagrange points if you know exactly where they are.
I also like that it's a bendable rule in 40k, but dangerous and difficult to do without excellent ships. Most people would never try it in normal circumstances, but then Belisarius Cawl just shows up like a madlad and does it purely to show off.
@@lachlanmckinnie1406 in traveler one of the o shit moments is when a ship jumps in the up atmosphere of a planet. It the hole every one knows that is impossible so that ship is impossible but it is there. Real helps drive home the "you are out matched you can not win and you should run.
All so the idea of jumping in to jump space well with in the jump limit (even landed on a the planet) when you being board by a enemy force that will kill or enslave you. Since it is 99.999999999% fatal instant death. This means most pirates actually don't go for killing the crew or taking slaves and have there own code they follow.
@@Roxor128 Or from. Joshua Calvert, I'm looking at you...
Yeah, particularly if it's somewhere beyond jupiter orbit (or equivalent) it really makes inter system travel relevant and often actually makes things like intercept and chases possible in many cases.
Mass Effect plays fast and loose with its mass relays for cinematic purposes. According to their description you're only guaranteed to emerge somewhere within 1,000 km of a relay, but every time they do one of those epic the-cavalry-arrives shots of a fleet jumping in, they always emerge right next to the relay and in formation.
It why despite loving at least the first Mass Effect (I go to the Shamus Young/Smudboy school of sequel haters) I laugh whenever someone argues that it's "relatively hard sci-fi." Sure, it's harder than a lot of other sci-fi out there given that it only has _one big lie™️_ (particles that can manipulate gravity via dark energy), but hard sci-fi it is not.
Nice to see Traveller getting some mention!
TRAVELLER MENTIONED!!! Running a pseudo-traveller rpg with friends right now, and my particular favourite thing is having multiple forms of FTL Travel which different civilisations use. My personal rule of thumb for an FTL Drive in regards to technobabble is that you should be able to gauge how it does its thing just by the name (and also makes things sound cool, like Quantum Jump/Stutterjump Drives, or Hyperdimensional Breaching Drives)
You can also have several different FTL systems that are used by different people/aliens. Like in WH40k the warp drive is only really used by the Imperium and Orks. Eldar have their webway, Tyranids fold space and Necrons change their FTL system every few years...
Another example is the game Stellaris which used to have three different FTL systems; warp drive, hyperlanes and wormholes. When you made your nation you had to choose between one of them and each had pros and cons. It led to a very dynamic way of fighting wars because if you have a different FTL system then you'll have to make strategies that exploit those differences while the enemy does the same to you.
Each has it's different advantages as well. For 40k the webway is fast and safe, but you can only go certain places (and less of them if you aren't DE, because one of it's major hubs contains Cammorgh) and many webway routes are basically only accessible via personal transport. Nids have a safe method of travel, but it's incredibly slow by comparison and can't be used near systems, which fits them travelling in large, independent fleets. Necrons currently have a real-space... sort of FTL in the inertialess drive (it's unclear whether the innertialess drive is actually faster than light, or if necron ships are just incredibly good at getting up to light speed and back down again - most of the older lore is from the imperial perspective, who basically just don't know), but use the webway over greater distances. And the warp is dangerous and unredliable, but can go anywhere and doesn't necessarily require the passage of real-space time (given ships can exit the warp before they entered it, and a major navigational issue is emerging at the correct point in time).
Chaos also use warp-drives, sort of.
@@chrisbingley they use Warp travel, just without all the security measures. cuz what we call "getting invaded by demons" they call "hanging out with the homies"
@@MONKEY_BEAM But they also live in the warp. So it's less "warp travel" and more "crossing the street to beat up their neighbours".
Sword of the stars game series has 7 different FTL types unique to each race. Worth a look through as it gives both flavour and strategic advantages.
0:48 "Sgt" Floofy? Please. Cats are commissioned officers. They're there to sit around and look impressive. Dog's are the nco's for when you actually need to get something useful done;).
I LOVE the FTL system of Battletech. The transmission itself is instantaneous, but typically requires the ship to deploy a solar sail to recharge afterwards, though some ships can go one or two jumps using a specific type of battery. The jump range has a max limit of 50 lyrs and the transit can only happen at specific points in a system ie lagrange points. Travel between stars is split between the ship that's doing the jumping which are called...JumpShips, big shock, which are typically just enough hull to support crew and the jump drive, and DropShips, which unlike most dropships in SciFi are absolutely massive, capable of carrying companies of tanks, mechs, or platoons of infantry. DropShips dock with JumpShips and detach after the jump to travel to the planet.
So glad someone else came here for this
I agree. Anytime you put limits on a system you add storytelling opportunities. And especially in the novels the need to recharge played a lot into the drama of just getting a ship down on a potentially hostile planet. (thinking of Mercenary's Star in particular)
30ly, not 50. You 'can' do more than that, but the risk probabilities start stacking up faster
Another interesting part about BT is how different Eras of the setting had different levels of FTL Battleships and FTL Comms. Giving very distinct flavours to the same setting depending on time period.
Like before they figured out FTL coms, 'just orbital bombardment firststrike them' was the go to combat tactic because you knew they'd not get reinforcements. then FTL comms made reinforcements a relevant threat, so people decided 'lets all agree to not do terminatus level attacks as first strikes anymore'
Then they blew up their battle ship shipyards
Then someone blew up the FTL comm network.
And now they are slowly recovering the FTL coms.
It is max 30 light years, but you can have more advanced ships with another charge stored to jump again (or more likely to keep it in reserve as a get out quick card). I love the Battletech setting.
I love Niven's Known Space hyperdrive. It preserves your normal-space momentum, so when you jump out you have to slow down whatever you had. It also doesn't work near gravity wells, so you have to leave a solar system to use it (as mentioned in the video). It preserves time drama in the story -- you've got to spend time in normal space approaching planets. It also has "speed quanta" - all FTL drives work at the first quantum, a single speed, until the Puppeteers invent the Quantum II hyperdrive which can travel at the higher quantum. That kicks off the discovery of the galactic core explosion which is the inciting incidents for MANY MANY other Known Space stories: the Pak migration into human and Puppeteer space as seen in Protector and Destroyer of Worlds. It is responsible for Puppeteers vanishing from Known Space in several stories.
I loved the Quantum 2 drive, especially how the Puppeteers decided to give it to humanity not just as a potential "last ditch" to escape the galactic core explosion via mass exodus, but also because they figured humans would eventually make a version that was _slower_ for more widespread use.
I had considered that too. Not to mention you could ratchet it up a bit more and make it so you can't even be in the magnetosphere of the star. Because while the plasma barrier might not be much to speak of at slow speed, slamming into it while going above the speed of light might have detrimental effects on your health.
A lot of old "hard" sci-fi used this, and many still do. I think they're all working off the same futurist tech and physics concepts.
@@Enforcer6kYeah. I also love how the Puppeteers thought humanity would be a good recipient of the Quantum II. They figured they'd wait around til the last moment then make a break for the Magellanic Clouds, beating the slower than light Puppeteer migration. But humans would be okay to have already around, they're predictable enough and good trade partners.
My college FTL I made was a twist on the Classic higher dimension travel, but the difference being the alternate dimention was actually fully traversable, had its own planetary bodies and was filled with a breathable gas: there was even a full civilisation of space pirates living there
Oh fun! Is it just like, a compact dimension, like how traveling one block in the Nether moves you 8 in the surface world in Minecraft?
@RorikH Yeah, basically. Its also only used on larger craft as it requires a lot of energy to get there (smaller craft use riftways, but these are not fully mapped and not everywhere)
That's the reverse to the FTL system used in Banner of the Stars by Hiroyuki Morioka. Ftl travel here uses entry points created by natural singularities to enter 2D space where laws such inertia and momentum don't apply.
Big fan of Traveller's FTL rules, very engaging for a role-playing game!
Star Trek has Stargates too. The Ionian gateway, for example. Very dangerous technology and super scary when you think about it.
It also has hyperlanes with the borg transwarp conduits. All FTL all the time. Not to mention solar sialing shenanigans.
Iconian.
@@the_senate8050 It also has salamander inducing infinite speed technology! :D
Just watched this video and I love it. Made me think about the FTL rules of my novel and codify them.
1. Sublight drives:
* Referred to in-universe as 'traction drives'
* Reactionless
* Have a maximum relative 'velocity' and must accelerate to that velocity
2. FTL drives
* 'Turbocharged' version of sublight drives
* Bulkier, more expensive, and take more power than sublight versions
* Can't be safely engaged within a radius of a star, planet, or other massive object that depends on the object's mass
* Not all drives are equal. Some are better at sublight speeds, others faster in FTL, more power efficient, etc.
* Humanity does NOT have FTL drives
3. Warp gates
* Must be bult on-site, too large and fragile to move
* Similar prinicples to traction drives, actually invented as part of an effort to develop FTL traction drives
* Provide FTL communications between gates
* ONLY humanity has gate technology
There are several good series that revolve around jump points / wormholes and their defenses. I believe that it’s in the Honor Harrington series where a plot revolves around the discovery that two star systems that are quite distant when using the wormhole network are, in fact, only a few light years apart in real space, and the bad guys have already sent an invasion fleet the “long” way.
I'm not sure which exact part of the series you're referring to, but I suspect it's the other way around. Honorverse has two types of FTL, sort of - hyperspace, which takes time to transit (merchant ships can move at like 1300 times the speed of light iirc, military ships have better hyper generators and particle screening so can go faster) and wormholes, which are natural anomalies in real space, adjacent to some but not all star systems, that use the same tech as hyper travel to traverse 'warp bridges' between star systems (the longest in setting is over 900 light years in length, but most are shorter, and some systems have 'wormhole termini' that concentrate the ends of multiple bridges to different systems in one place) _instantly_ - with massive savings in time for interstellar travel, even if the ships are not just travelling between the systems linked by the warp bridge. This makes a wormhole bridge or terminus a massive economic resource and trade route centerpoint for any system or star nation that posesses one.
I can think of several instances in setting where one side (despite being further away in normal space or normal hyperspace terms) has a communications turnaround advantage, sometimes a massive one, over the other side since the other side lacks a wormhole terminus, so I suspect that's what you're remembering. There is one or two instances of a fleet travelling the long way through hyperspace to attack a system much closer by (enemy-controlled) wormhole, and a few others where the wormhole provides an advantage to the defender.
@taiko1237 I'd say it starts with On Basilisk Station though there it was not as close as at some occasions later when all that saved Manticore's bacon was a fleet equipped with the newest magic tech in reach of a convenient wormhole towards home.
2 Things about the Star Wars Example. 1) Navicomputers can be preloaded with hyperspace coordinates, but this does really on being in the right location to jump. 2) The Force, a Force user can make a hyperspace jump blind trusting in the Force to know when to exit. The canon Thrawn trilogies, make reference to Chiss navigators who use the Force to find safe hyperspace paths through the unknown regions. And as even non-trained individuals are connected with the Force, one could preform a blind jump safely and may attribute their success to the Force, to luck, or just claim they are that good.
I thought the Thrawn trilogy novels all got 'de-cannoned' and are now classed as 'legends' or something.
@@Wintermute909 There is a canon Thrawn trilogy: Thrawn, Thrawn: Alliances and Thrawn: Treason.
@@Wintermute909 the original Thrawn Trilogy and the Thrawn Duology are considered Legends, BUT there are 2 canon Thrawn Trilogies. The "new" Canon Trilogy and the Thrawn: Ascendancy trilogy.
even then, star wars bends its own rules on speed. in earlier movies and even the clone wars, moving at lightspeed takes time to get places. in some of the later movies and shows, a ship just instantly appears in one place or another (for example, that one guy's X-wing in the mandalorian, which goes from a remote outer rim backwater to literal coruscant for a 5 minute meeting, then instantly teleports back to the outer rim, all during the course of a single combat scene from Mando's perspective)
You could also do the hard work and drop satellites from a unmanned scout ship every 2 light years.
Video starts at 1:10
I'm so glad to see the retroencabulator being used properly.
I know right?
So many people never misalign the panendermic semi-bovoid slots in the stator because the instructional videos never show how to properly set the hydrocoptic marzlevanes properly.
Breath of fresh air to see someone get it right for a change.
@@rsrt6910 Eh, most of us have gone with a digital frotosimulator for the hydrocoptic marzelvane reticulation and bypass the mendelrotors entirely.
@@littlekong7685 True, if you have the Turboencabulator, but despite the occasional renumerative velocitation of the sperving bearings and the formative galling of the millford trunyions, the Retroencabulator will still do the job just as well as the newer models.
screw it all, I'm shoving the green thing in there
I still think that 40K's style of "hyperspace is literally Hell" is good for shenanigans, even if you have a setting that dials back the hellishness in favour of strangeness. Having the Warp be hostile is good for the horror scenario that is the 40K galaxy, but having a Warp-analogue that's more weird than dangerous can be fun too. Somewhere between the Warp from 40K and the Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitchhikers, where you make a jump through a few uncharted 'branes, and end up with Mark Twain and Lieutenant Columbo inexplicably manifested on the Rec Deck.
My only issue with 40k is that its so unreliable you could wind up getting there 100 years too late, arriving before you left, or not arriving at all. Hell of a system to run a galaxy on. (pun intended) Its not a surprise the Imperium has issues, its a smegging miracle it still exists at all.
@@Wastelandman7000 Unless I'm mistaken, that tends to be when ships can't be guided by the Astronomican. So long as it's light can guide them though, FTL is much more reliable. It also can be sped up by the God Emperor himself from what I know.
@@irystocrattakodachithatmooms You are correct, mostly. While the God Emperor can most certainly speed things up, the astronomican is more of a north star, giving you a continual reference point to where you are in the galaxy. While absolutely necessary for long warp jumps, it is perfectly feasible to perform shorter range warp jumps without it, such as system to system. However, that depends a lot on the experience of the Navigator, and how well charted the warp tides are in the area. If the navigator is experienced and familiar with the area, then even these "blind" jumps can be quite reliable in ideal conditions.
Of course, the big problem with warp travel is the "ideal condition" part. While you won't have issues most days, the moment a warp squall or storm blows in, things get dangerous fast. And ever since the Cicatrix Maledictum opened, there are a LOT of those. The greatest danger is that these squalls don't just disrupt ships currently in the warp, but can permanent change the "current" of the warp, making the charted warp routes take you completely off course, or worse, out of the current entirely, where you are marooned in the immaterium, completely reliant on your thrusters to get back into the current.
40k Warp travel is a lot like sailing. It's about finding the right current and headwind, and staying in it. With a good navigator or a short enough jump, it's easy. But now there are storms out there that will sink you or blow you far off course...or far faster ahead. Give these storms the ability to change water currents and also be influenced by literal daemons, and that's warp travel.
Look up the Void in Warframe, it’s kinda close to that! They have the notion of "conceptual embodiment" where strong emotions and stray thoughts can straight up physically materialize
FTL was a huge consideration for me when writing my fantasy/sci-fi novel. Not because of the huge distances that need to be traveled (It's one planet traversed by airships), but because of the flexibility that simply appearing at your enemy's doorstep allows for. I designed in all sorts of quirks and gimmicks about this kind of travel and the politics surrounding it. First: this is a fantasy/sci-fi, and as the "fantasy" part suggests, there is an underworld dimension with warped distance in terms of connecting with realspace that used to have a monopoly on the travel district. The kingdom that resided there imposed tolls on those who entered to use their dimension for travel, and it got absurdly rich on it. Wars were fought by this underworld kingdom to maintain their right to collect this tax. FTL devices, be they magical or technological, rely on breaking into and skimming this dimension to achieve their ludicrous 8 times the speed of light, which the underworld kingdom is not too happy about, because they see it as both a violation of their sovereignty as well as a decline of their hegemony. Second, there are several types of FTL. Some rely on fixed beacons to warp to others within a network like stargates, others are a derivative of this same magic which consumes extremely valuable resources to teleport the ship from anywhere to anywhere. There are other technological drives too which brute force their way into FTL, simply smashing a hole between the two dimensions and jumping through it. Lastly, FTL is extremely expensive, and often one way. Both magic and technological FTL drives utilize various types of exotic materials to create a jump, therefore ships often only carry enough of these materials to execute a few jumps at a time. Generally speaking, if a warship initiates FTL, there is something serious going down, usually initiating or responding to war. Anyways, sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to geek out a bit considering that these spacedock weapons/tech vids have given me tons of ideas to integrate into my own story. Hopefully I'll actually finish it someday lol.
so its wh40k warp but the warp dimension isnt full of demons, rather than a kingdom that impose tax on you whenever you are using their dimension/service just like dune navigators ?
@@Ruzaraneh Yes. You don't nessicarily need a ship to move through this dimention either. Think the nether and its 1:8-meter ratio. You could simply enter a portal, walk, ride or drive down a pathway, and exit the other side. FTL drives skip this process of entering a portal, so it kinda just breaches their dimension without legally passing through their customs. The underworld kingdom has fought several wars and even invaded realspace from time to time when their travel laws are violated by other nations.
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1) How did the Normandy get from Ilos to Arcturus station, then to the Citadel in less than an hour even though that trip involved crossing half the galaxy and should have taken days.
2) Since Mass relays accelerate objects between them and don't teleport, how did a buried underground mass relay transport Shepherd to another mass rely in an enclosed space station.
Speed of plot. Necessary prerequisite, especially in games.
Ahh see the way Mass Relays work is they create artificial Massless Corridors between relays or in other words, inside the corridors there is mass but as far as the outside galaxy is concerned everything within the corridor is energy.
Also where in the lore does it say it should have taken days to cross the Galaxy? The point of the mass effect Relays is that it is faster to go all the way across the Galaxy using relays then it is to FTL travel to the nearest star system.
1, it doesn't take days, all primary relays are in seconds, and the trip from citadel to relay and relay to ilos could be seconds
2,yes this is the one. The monument on ilos was above ground, but the one on the citadel was behind walls. However the beam tower in the third game shows again that they can teleport through walls, so that is just skill issue it seems
1) It took 15 hours to travel from Eden Prime to the Citadel. Both systems are relay systems. In Revelation, it's stated that it took 6 hours to travel from Earth to Arcturus. Also relay systems. They are also close enough that it only took 1 jump.
2) It's stated in the lore that in order for the Alliance to deploy ships to a specific location in less than a day, they have to position these ships at key relay systems across Alliance space. If mass relay transit was instantaneous, then realistically, you could place the entire fleet at Arcturus and be able to deploy to anywhere in Alliance space in seconds.
Yes, the actual relay jump is instantaneous, however, ships do not ping pong off of relays. If, for example, you need to perform 3 relay jumps to reach a destination. You would need to perform 3 separate jumps. And there is a slight warmup period in which the pilot needs to prepare the relay for the next jump. All this takes time.
3) not all relays are omni directional. Meaning that in some cases you would have to perform a relay jump that travel for several hours to another relay in order to perform the next jump.
ME1 is one of my all time favorites, but that second isdue has always bothered me
The Babylon 5 hyperspace is probably my favourite FTL method in fiction. It elegantly solves alot of problems while adding a lot of possible story hooks.
Like how it allows small craft to travel far for our protagonists to get places, but can't be used as a WMD and trivialise any combat. Or, well, it can, but the gates are stationary somewhere in open space so it won't do much.
And the ominous, but not outright hostile, atmosphere in hyperspace allows travel to be routine while still giving great story potential. If you leave the beacon paths you may never find it again, so ancient shipwrecks sometimes drift into lanes. We never found life native to hyperspace, but old sailors tell tales of seeing shadows moving in the fog.
(And yes, most of these are used pretty well in the show.)
Damn, sounds a lot like what I came up with as a teenager and gradually iterated upon, despite no longer prioritizing that setting or stories.
I've seen a lot of different FTL systems mentioned in the comments, but no one's mentioned that used in David Weber's Honorverse novels. The hyperspace bands that exist, and how they are used and can be transited up to higher or lower bands, and how the Warshawski sails work and have to be dumped of excess energy after a hyperspace transition, then shifted into impeller bands for reactionless movement... it's a fascinating system that shows an actual evolution of ingenuity and design.
Yeah. There's also a really interesting dynamic, which imo isn't explored enough in the setting, from the centuries when hyper travel was discovered but impeller drive and Warshawski sail tech didn't yet exist, where most large scale movement between systems was done with sublight generation ships but scouting of new colonies and conveyance of information was done with very dangerous (because of grav waves and hyper walls, neither of which could be effectively detected for most of this period) hyperdrive-equipped ships running on reaction drives while in hyperspace and therefore restricted to about 50c.
Also, Warshawski sails allow for ships to move within gravity waves (which are massive space time distortion structures present in hyperspace that are deadly to ships not using or carrying Warshawski sails). Ships seek these out since they provide much higher accelerations in hyperspace than impeller drives do. When not in a gravity wave, ships in hyper still must use impeller drive to maneuver.
FTL travel without FTL communications is one of the most fascinating possibilities.
yeah it mean news need to travel on ships and if you stop those ships you stop the news
tbh, the loss ofthe settings FTL Coms was one of the more interesting Parts of the Battletech Dark Age era imo. you had this almost galaxy spannign setup of feudal empires, and suddenly the rulers on the thrones couldn't easily check on their vassals anymore.
More accurately, I'd say, long-range FTL comms, as in enough to reach another system. Which is why, in the Honor Harrington series, the Manticorans' main naval operations centre is quiet and things happen unhurriedly in there, because the information they work with could be weeks or even months old, and the response time can be measured in weeks and months.
@@Andrewza1 and that leads to adding some interesting things to the setting. Like is there interstellar laws protecting news and mail couriers? How secure are messages on courier ships? And economically, could you cripple a system's economy by not letting them have the most recent stock exchange numbers?
@@patrickdusablon2789 So i can anserw how traveler does it
Yes mail ships are very protected and attacking one will very quickly get the full might of the Imperial navy on your head. You will then if you are taken alive be executed. Only the most insane and crazy terrorists would try attack one. The agency that runs the Messange boat network all so runs the most effective intlgiance againcy so attack one would be like robbing a UPS van but the UPS all so ran the FBI/CIA/NSA/Mossad hybrid force
They protected by law and threat of a response that goes over board. Though during wars they are at risk they legal targets during war though still a save job since enemy forces will capture you. The navy, nobels and corporation would use other own courier ships that are a mixed of very fast, armoured or stealth options to get through. As for the data it self. They can be hacked given enough time but again doing so and being found out means death. Most hackers would not risk it. All so they might have explosive fail safes. Not to menstion actually getting your hand on data is hard since the pilot can just purge the data if any one tries to board him.
Most worlds in Traveller are a island on to them selfs so being cut off will hurt the economy but never criple it
I've never been excited to see a sponsor before. Traveller is great!
I think it's a very cool detail that the quantum drives in Star Citizen are actually slower than light (but still very fast, compared to a non-quantum drive), and that the ships rely on jump gates for true FTL travel (like the one that will be added in the upcoming 4.0 patch).
I adore Moya's FTL system. Point in a direction, slip through dimensions over actual space, pop out somewhere random in that aimed direction!
In Perry Rhodan most ships need to reach 50% of the speed of light before they can access hyperspace or linearspace, though that can vary depending on the technology level.
Star Trek has established a galactic transporter in TOS and one that could beam an entire ship in Voyager, so the Federation has a long way to go before reaching the limits of that technology.
Ah, Traveler! I had a full set of campaign books. I really enjoyed the depth of world building and game play options.
So good to see Traveller getting some love.
I can't believe you didn't mention the "Adama Maneuver". Battlestar Galactica made great use of their FTL concept to drive the plot throughout the show.
That's made possible by military vessels mounting two jump drives. One can be cooling off while the other spinning up ready to go. IDK if the civilian ships had the same dual drive systems but I can see quite a few not bothering due to cost
Back in the day I found ship building to be some of the most fun in Traveller. A lot of times it came down to, "Hey, I built his, how can I wrap a story around it?"
This one was pretty informative.
Using GURPS as the RPG system, I wanted to have a Firefly-ish kind of game. Basically, renegades roving the outskirts of civilization, while taking various jobs - some on the side of other side of the law.
I decided the best way for spaceships to get around would be the jump drives like Battlestar Galactica (the revision) with the same take on weapon systems. I also had them use Tachyon pinholes for communication over vast distances, no shields, but would use wave generators for disbursing particles while flying. Never got it off the ground but maybe when I retire.
If warp drives bend space with gravity, wouldn't that mean that artificial gravity plating is based on the same fundamental technology?
"That, Detective, is the right question" 🔥🔥🔥
In my "I don't remember whether physics still thinks gravitons are a thing"-punk setting, you make artificial gravity by just making more gravitons.
Traveller's sublight drives do this. M-drives are essentially gravity generators that yeet the ship 'down' towards its destined target, whilst the internal plating applies a countering force and an actual 'down'.
Yes, this can and has been weaponised. My players reconfigured the gravity plating when boarded, so the bridge was fine, the rest of the ship was randomised... And then they pulled a few high-g manoeuvres. Space pirate jam, anyone?
Wunderbar! I've been looking forward to another vid about FTL drives!
My thinking for my story is that the main faction and some others have 2 main forms of FTL, the Space Warp Drive, and the Wormhole generators.
The Space Warp drive is carried on most ships and work by effectively warping space around the ship to achieve to move it at FTL speeds. This method requires the use of shields or very strong armor, to prevent particle impacts, and those shields often have to modulated to roll the particles off of them to prevent the so called particle shotgun effect when the ship returns to normal speed.
The Wormhole generators create worm holes obviously, they most often tend to appear as giant Gates, that can connect to each other. Wormholes have a so called Fold Space Efficiency percentage, 100% would be near instantaneous travel from a complete fold, with percentages below that indicate some amount of travel distance, wormholes over greater distances tend to require more power for more efficient folds so there can be significant travel time even within the wormhole. This leads to the so called fold and warp method, where one creates a massive wormhole jump, then warps through the wormhole tunnel.
Warp is limited by well the vastness of space, even the newest generation advanced drives can take not insignificant amounts of time to get to far off places but wormholes are limited by requiring infrastructure and power generation. Wormholes must connect to the coordinates of other wormholes gates to form a connection. So when going to new regions, only warp ships can make the journey until a wormhole generator is built.
Really loved playing Traveller in college, with a great GM. I've always preferred the "no FTL communications" restriction, since it makes the ships themselves the heralds of everything.
that clip of gab hissing at a yeager class is truly iconic lmao
I've been working on a setting with an FTL drive, I call it the Warp Cannon. Warp Cannons are at least a lightsecond long, and make a warp bubble around a spacecraft or fleet, launching them out the front at a speed best measured in light years per day, dependent on the length of the cannon. For ships without a gravity generator (see: most ships early on), the warp bubble cannot be popped from the inside, but it will pop on it's own after a few weeks, or once it hits a strong gravity gradient. Ships with gravity generators can sustain the bubble for longer, or quickly weaken it, from the inside.
Almost every inhabited system has a warp cannon, but most are quite small, and are intended to take a week or two to send ships to a nearby system with a larger, high-speed warp cannon. Warp cannons can take weeks to turn, and larger ones are modular in order to facilitate this. There is also extremely little in the way of FTL communication, one alien civilization has figured out how to use the technology of a long-gone civilization to transmit the minds and possibly souls of the dead to a central location. This is the only known method of FTL communication aside from Warp Cannons, and the civilization that has it uses it to roughly halve communications lag to their emperor and back.
Warp Cannons were inspired by trains, and hearing the estimations that a warp drive would need a cubic meter of iron converted into pure energy to power it, along with hearing that the bubbles would be surprisingly stable. I also wanted to make invading or colonizing a star system very risky, and to allow for tense situations in which reinforcements are impossible, and to add a specific object in the system that's more valuable than anything else there.
Piper had an interesting hyperspace system. No FTL comms. Fixed FTL speed limit, one light year an hour so vessel size limits range due to life support considerations. Unable to accurately jump planet to planet, jump to the system then perform a series of micro jumps to close on the destination (get the last one wrong and get kicked back) meaning you need a good hyperspace astrogator. An odd sub light system using both lift and drive, hand waved away with something to do with magnetics. Along with a form of anti grav for in amto vehicles and small robots. The same system was used both in The Commonwealth era and later during the rise of the Sword Worlds. I think the smallest hyperspace capable ship he mentions is a 300 foot diameter globe and a small freighter coming in at 1500 foot diameter.
Pournelle used a jump system described like tram lines, almost instantaneous apart from jump shock which debilitated both human and computer, even harder on the Moties. The jump points had to be surveyed prior to first use. Another downside was that gravitational influences could make a jump point variable, or you might find a jump point in the photosphere of a red giant. And, like Piper, used the same system in both the First and Second Empire of Man.
I really like settings with solid rules on travel. Older Star Trek (the rules fell apart later on travel time of FTL comms), Battletech (surprise! BT has intricate rules for FTL travel), and as you said, Stargate. Consistent rules make for good storytelling, because you can't just handwave your way out of everything.
Gonna mention Hyperion as one of my personal favorite settings for FTL rules.
The Farcaster gates allow instant travel from point to point at a human ship scale (like Star Gates) but with a level of convenience that rich people can have entire homes made of Farcaster portals.
Without a Farcaster, you are limited to a Hawking Drive which is still a light speed/slightly FTL engine but it's still slow, can take years, and comes with time dilation issues of near light travel.
It makes for a really interesting setting and advances the settings themes about imperialism and how the inner core expands and commercializes planets when they get integrated into the World Web.
Traveller is great. I still have my original black books.
Definitely followed a few of these rules for FTL in my stories, being that Warp Drives and Wormhole Generators are the primary modes of FTL in my stories, the main ones being that the same Gravity Manipulation tech that powers the FTL is also used to generate Artificial Gravity (I call it "True" Gravity), make Gravity Shields to protect ships and generate Antigravity Fields to help propel ships (in tandem with Fusion Drives and Antimatter Fusion Drives) when they're not at FTL and, at least for Warp Drives, you can't Warp in and out of gravity wells like planets, moons, and stars without great risk to your ship.... and possibly the planet or star you're near!
In my own, I use a combination of star system geometry and a function of the ship's mass and velocity.
Basically, the "you can't go to FTL here" volume, which is dependent on the mass of the primary, is shaped like a flat spinning top, with the points nearest to the primary's poles, and the furthest being along its equator, and objects with enough mass, like a gas giant, will reshape it some, or have their own limit based on their mass if they're outside the primary's zone.
And then there's the need for a ship to reach a certain energy state before it can activate its FTL drive, and that's a function of mass and velocity to reach a given threshold, so a ship with more mass will have to go slower than a lighter one to break into FTL. At this point, a ship will be roughly at rest within the FTL state they're in, and will need to accelerate, and can shift up to FTL states that correspond to a higher compression factor compared to normal spaces (Zero State). And when dropping out of FTL, a ship has to slow down relative their current state so they can downshift gracefully, which will leave them somewhere near the upshift velocity for that State. Though, a crash downshift to zero state is possible, but it's hard on the ship and crew, and then they have to decelerate in-system.
And then there are customs, like ship enter a system from the southern polar region, and go out through the northern one. Anyone coming out anywhere else, that's in the realm of not good, and all going in and out of FTL can be detected FTL through a gravitic "flash", and then by lightspeed sensors with a burst of primarily Cherenkov radiation.
I really liked how Freelancer managed FTL travel. You had your ship's cruise engine(good for local travel but took a long time to reach any other planet in sytem), travel lanes(easy and fast planet hopping but tightly controlled and could be disrupted) and jump gates(move to another system and even more restrictions). It sold the idea that this was an engineering challenge that took centuries.
This would've been such a good episode to talk about Honor Harrington! You should check it out, I think you'd really like the worldbuilding
Battletech FTL traveling is really interesting!
"Outbound Flight arriving at nadir, KF drive ETA 5 minutes" - last words before disaster
In my experience as a world builder the best rules/limitations for both ftl-drives and teleporters are: make them as potent as you want but make them piss easy to interfere with if one has any basic idea how they work. It makes for fascinating feats but any adversary remotely on the same level of development will be able to effectively nullify them and thus forcing you to resort to more traditional means of travel once within range. It also prevents any homegrown terrorist from teleporting bombs all over the place.
Yeah the conduit thing in Mass Effect always bothered me slightly as well. Would have been better if they made it some experimental worm hole tech or something to have it standout from the Reaper tech a bit more I think. And get around Mass Relays not working like teleportation.
Look mate, after having to drive the Mako over 30 different baby's-first-topographical-maps with 4 buildings shared between them, I think I deserved to have it go where it was supposed to on the first try just that once.
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-THE POWER OF KITBASH COMPELS YOU!
-NOOOOOOOARGHGABL
Traveller is my favorite sci fi TTRPG!
I almost never hear anyone discussing it, but the FTL in David Weber's Honorverse is a very interesting one.
First off, you have normal space, and then hyper space - hyper space is a related 'nesting' of dimensions to our own, but each 'band' of hyperspace is compressed in distance/space compared to lower bands (lowest being the 'alpha' band, or base-line hyperspace). This gives a cascading set of normal space relative speeds depending on how 'high' you can climb into the hyperspace bands, generally some X100s c (light speed). But you could only enter/leave hyperspace outside of a certain distance from a star or risk either a) drive failure or b) total destruction of the ship.
In addition, however, hyperspace has "gravity waves", essentially big, focused regions of gravitational energy powerful enough to destroy ships unlucky enough to hit them (some 'rouge waves' add additional hazard). The settings normal propulsion, using artificial gravity waves as a sort of warp drive (sublight), are especially vulnerable to this - unless a change is made to the drive (normally a wedge forcing the ship forward, the artificial waves would be placed at 90 degrees to the ship to catch the wave like sails). Making this change allowed ships to use the wave to increase their acceleration rates (and ability to undergo them - the setting used the grav waves to dump the ship's inertia into to avoid splatting everyone on to the walls - additionally, the systems for that could be battle damaged for terrible effect) into the X1000 c. Some waves were powerful enough to punch through hyperspace into normal space, creating wormholes (which the plot of the series is largely centered on - wormholes meant INSTANT travel over lightyears, but only to specific points, so if you controlled those points you had a lot of wealth and influence).
So this meant several things - 1) ships could travel on specific trade routes and had certain 'no go' points - too far in, and you had to either run from fights or win them, and how you went into those situations was very important, 2) you are limited by equipment - merchants wouldn't go in for large, more expensive systems that allowed for higher accels, but warships generally had up to date equipment for the best performance, and 3) some methods of warfare changed dramatically between combat environments, hyper vs. normal space.
I strongly suggest sci fi fans to read On Basilisk Station to enjoy the story for themselves - you REALLY need the full book experience to really enjoy it.
A fairly unique one is in the animorph book. There "zero space" works basicly like the ocean with currents that change over time. This allows for the story to happen almost entirly on earth without to much interference for the wieder galaxy while still keeping everyone on their toes as the currents may change allowing for either enemy reinforcements or the galactic "good" guys to Show up
Similar to hyperspace in Glenn Stewards Duchy of Terra Books. They have hyperspace currents which form the hyperlanes, which higher tech races can influence to some degree, or even completely change which is considered a holy grail in the books.
No mention of the best "hand wave" of a ship's speed - "Blake's 7"
"Zen, set course, Standard speed."
Need to get somewhere in a hurry? "Standard x 6!"
Had an interesting idea for a three "layer" FTL system I want to use in a game at some point. Drive takes advantage of the "curve" of space time around substantial bodies in space; the more curved the space, the faster the travel. Basically an excuse to slow down at the edge of a system(where the gravity well of the star ceases to have a large effect) and near planets/stars(where the gravity well is at it's steepest). Second layer is the same thing, just with an order of magnitude more power and control required, limiting cross-system travel to dedicated ships like exploration cruisers or carriers. Third is a galaxy-to-galaxy, that requires access to and a large installation around the galactic core.
Traveller is still around! When I watched Fallout (having not played the games) I was like, wait, this is the Gamma World I've wanted since I was a teen. And sure enough the games were inspired by Gamma World.
yes they current on i think 7th generation classic, mega, gurps, mongoose 1, 5t, mongoose 2e. Though at this point mongoose own the right to traveler fully so only mongoose 2e is really getting any new books one ever 4 to 6 months
@@Andrewza1 There are five editions by Marc W. Miller (Classic, MT, TNE, T4, T5). Then there are the two editions by Mongoose, one by GURPS, one by Hero Games and one based on D&D 3e (T20). So there are ten editions of Traveller.
@@barbarossarotbart Thanks. an i think mongoose only has access to the Marc Miller version other than T5 with the deal they made. So if you want you can now read the older edestion I find it nice that they still for sale offiacly on a digital store front.
I guess marc is still working ont5 then if mongoose does not sell it.
o and I burnt the very idea of T20 from my mind.
@@Andrewza1 I do not think so. I believe that the deal is that Mongoose gets Marc Miller's full Traveller archive which BTW also includes third party material and OOP editions in other languages.
uuuh, Mongoose and Traveller. see now this is actually the context which within i use most of the topics on this channel.
In a story I wrote a while ago, the newest and most powerful form of FTL was called the Gravity Drive (no, not Event Horizon gravity drive). Using exotic matter, it creates a literal "bubble" around the ship using it, isolating it from "normal" space while highly excited gravitons are focused at the front of the bubble, causing the ship to move faster than light. There's still travel time, but trips that would normally take weeks can instead take hours with the proper routes mapped out. Ships incapable/too small to mount the Gravity Drive are able to "surf" with the leading ship within its literal sphere of influence too.
As far as limitations go, Gravity Drives are incredibly energy intensive to operate, needing a special reactor system utilizing a synergistic mix of fusion power and exotic matter in order to operate at all. In addition to this, they cannot function within the influence of large gravity wells such as planets or stars, in part due to built-in safety features and inherent dangers in attempting to do so. Also, two ships equipped with Gravity Drives cannot operate within proximity to one another, requiring other vessels to either "surf" or to jump separately/great distances away from one another.
Later, pirates with stolen Gravity Drives realized that they could "modify" them to emit far greater spheres of influence, causing the safeties on Gravity Drives to trip on passing ships and force them out of FTL.
Very good explanation. Really interesting as always. I've always thought that the limits of an FTL drive are the most interesting part. When I discovered Traveller I found the limits really narratively interesting. It's one of my favourite FTL systems.
I also like having multiple systems in universe. I think that makes for a more believable setting as well as one with more story interest. Such as in Stargate where ships can arrive by hyperdrive but it's just slower.
For my own work, FTL is achieved by bending space to "overlap" a target location with the sending volume before "resolving" being in two locations at once when they overlap collapses, leaving the ship at the target. This requires vast amounts of energy and computing power and so ships are launched from megastructure stations orbiting close to stars to make use of the plentiful energy supply there. It is possible to host the technology on a ship, but to have anything more than a 'skip' between two points a few thousand meters apart requires energy and computing power that can only be found in the largest ships. This is the in-universe classification for Dreadnoughts, a ship with enough power output to contain its own interstellar FTL system. Needless to say, they are rare, heavily defended, and often carry their own escort fleet docked to them when they jump.
another great video, and I agree FLT drives is all about the rule and how it effects the story.
This has become one of my new favorite channels. I can’t get enough!
My consists of three particle accelerators, two create the essence of a neutron star and the one in the middle create negative matter and the two outside the one in the middle hurls that energy into the central one that is then channeled to the ships anti grav engines thus opening a singularity. Akin to Halo's Slipstream drive.
Freelancer is still my favourite system of FTL - both the lanes for intrasystem and the gates/holes for intersystem travel. The idea that they were built by one corporation just seemed so realistic 😅
I love your videos! You’ve given me a lot of inspiration over the last 3 years, and have helped with my science fiction novel. Keep up the great work!
Chris
I really like the Warp Navigation/Geshtam Jumps from Space Battleship Yamato 2199. Having it be a near instantaneous jump with a hard limit on how far you can go in a single jump and a limit of how many times you can jump per day means there is a lot of time spent cruising at Sunlight speeds during your big space journeys which allows much more shenanigans and interaction with stuff in space without having to stop or be stopped.
Great, now I have to buy another Traveller book. For f***s sake!
it is a really good one. one of the better RPG fluff books out there along with third imperium.
Im going to have to argue with you about Mass Effect relay. I think it was done correctly.
1) size. Its much smaller so we can assume different rules.
2) The relays were built by a different species. That one was built by the protheons the others were built by Reapers/Reaper builders.
3) Plot. The protheons wouldve needed to travel from Ilos to the Citadel without a ship. It would only make sense that they wouldve needed to travel that distance faster as well.
It's been a LONG time since I've played Mass Effect. I didn't know what the issue was supposed to be. Can you jog my memory?
@LikeDaniel So the antagonist is Saren who is under the control of galaxy ending AI ships called reapers. The final mission involves going to Ilos chasing Saren down. You find the final holdout of the Protheans, a 50,000 year old civilization that was wiped out by the reapers. A whole bunch of plot stuff happens but you need to get back to the Citadel, a giant space station that was built by the reapers, and save the day. Unfortunately, Saren found a small Mass Relay built by the Protheons for fast travel to the Citadel and so you need to follow him through in your tank to save the day.
Traveller promo makes me think there should be Sojourn TTRPG…
I feel like there's not a whole lot of reason to re-invent the wheel there. Traveller already does a lot of what you'd need for a Sojourn RPG experience: all you'd need is a few setting-specific supplemental rules to get the details right.
It would be fun, but also Impulse Drive exists and makes for a fantastic universe agnostic Space Opera PbtA TTRPG, you might need to delete mystics for Sojourn, but depending on how Faithless goes that might not even be the case.
You could make a sojourn compediume for traveller it very flexbil system, Gurps is there to for that. Actually making a system is a lot harder and will need more people working on it.
I also like the idea of space highways that I first saw in X:Rebirth (even though the game itself wasn’t particularly good) making ships behave more like cars.
Maybe there are backroads and there could be special ships that resemble offroaders that could travel outside the roads but at a very limited speed. Also kinda interesting how this creates the opportunity of space traffic jams
Ooo, Traveller, great to see it in the wild
My FTL systems are twofold. One part is the Blank Void Projector (BVP) which opens a gateway into the Blank Void, a pocket dimension where time doesn't flow and the laws of physics don't apply.
The second part is the Blank Void Energy Field Acceleration Unit (BVEFAU) which is a field around the ship that isolates it from the space outside and allows the ship to "glide on the waves".
Neat. I had the idea that since our universe only exists as we know it because it was 1 billionth more matter than antimatter, and the billionth that wasn't instantly annihilated is what we live in, the next universe over could just have been completely annihilated and thus, with no matter to get in your way or sort of hold things down gravitationally, warping space to get to your destination would be much easier once you got there.
FTL was something I wanted in my novel but this video has given me pause on how to think it out based on how other franchises do it and how they enact it. Especially fuel concerns
Just do it like Space RPG 4 "Hyper Drive"
I am so gonna use this video and it's comments as reference for my novel, this was so helpful ngl
Love essays like this, a help for scifi writers.
Niven and Pournelle wrote an essay called “Building the Mote in God’s Eye”, with a section dedicated to the FTL drive used, how it worked, and how it affected the setting. I’d check it out.
I feel that for a setting to be good, FTL should have a cost. If it is to easy and there is no cost then: “Anything can be a weapon, if the man or woman who holds it has the nerve and will to make it so.” ― Robert Jordan
"There is no such thing as an unarmed spacecraft"
-Isaac Arthur
There is no such thing as an unarmed vehicle. Quotation me
A starships propulsion drive effectiveness is direcly proportional to its effectiveness as a weapon.
@@iriswaters "Unharmed" or "unarmed"?
@@TNH91 oops, lol. Unarmed. Swypos, man. Fixt
One of the best explanations for casual FTL travel I've read was in the Old Man's War books.
Easier to read the first book and find for yourself then have someone explain it to you.
Personally I think that the concept of lightspeed skipping is a neat elaboration of the way the Star Wars hyperdrive was originally laid out - specifically showing why you need to wait for it to finish calculating. If you don't wait for it to be done, it'll drop you off at a potentially hazardous place between Point A and Point B while it calculates the next leg of the journey, and even then it critically damages your hyperdrive.
The FTL for my homebrew setting is based on the orion drive; the ship calibrates and then drops behind it a shaped-charge explosive made of special material (extradimensional mumbo jumbo; its kinda the settings thing) that hits a special energy barrier at the rear of the ship and catapults it forward outside of space time to a predetermined destination. The calibration takes time (measuring chemical component amounts, getting it setup in the explosive casing) and the material is very expensive so it sets up the limit that jumps cant really be made on a moments notice and the explosives arent practical as weapons because they are very expensive and also dont actually cause that much damage outside a fairly small area (because space is empty and emptiness doesn't transmit forces very well). It also means the ship has a certain amount of fuel in the form of the base material, but also in spare casings (which are like, minivan sized) that cannot be easily refilled. Small ships CAN use it theoretically, but most won't have the space to carry the casings to make more than a handful of jumps.
8:27 the most important annotation
As an infrastructure enjoyer I do like FTL gates that take some time to get to the destination as space is huge. However we can make special exceptions for flagships or hero ships as a risky option.
Discworld rules - the hero getting where they need to be without exploding may be a million to one chance, but a million to one chance happens every time.
One of my favorite FTL settings is in battletech with their jumpships. The jump drives have to maintain a certain distance from other jump devices to the point that vessels interacting with jump fields not their own would cause a cascade effect and destroy all vessels in the interaction. This also means if a jump drive breaks down there is no way to send spare drives to the stranded ship making jump capable vessels extremely valuable. Basically have to take years sending hardware and subcomponent level equipment and manufacturing equipment to the location and build a new one.
I've got a setting running around in my head with an interesting (in my opinion at least) FTL system:
It's based loosely on the IRL Penrose process (where an object can sacrifice mass while near a black hole to speed up), just without those pesky laws of relativity turning you into light etc. It's also made to be FAR more powerful, so that you can "easily" get to lightspeed. That way it can feel scientific without also needing an essay to understand.
In terms of limitations, it has a fairly major one: you need a black hole at either end for it to work, as the Penrose process only works with black holes. But you can get around that limitation via artificial black holes either in state-of-the-art ships or stations at the destination (the first of which is in the early stages of prototyping in the setting, which works as a nice plot device).
Travel is (practically) instant, mainly for ease of writing. FTL communication isn't possible, so messenger drones (like in Sojourn) are used.
Oh yeah there's also the small matter of probably going insane if you use it while conscious/not high as a kite, because there's no way breaking reality, geometry and basically every law of physics is good for the brain. All ships can use the process, but crew sanity and the precise calculations required make FTL travel only really viable for the rich and/or batcrap crazy.
Traveler! Wow, that takes me back
Always loved anachronistic Age of Sail stuff in Sci-fi, like the way 40K ships moving through the Warp are constantly in danger until/if they reach their destination or the fast-paced broadside combat of Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
The best TTRPG franchise ever in my honest opinion.
Great video as always! I'd love for you to cover near light travel like presented excellently in Project Hail Mary. Keep up the good work!
I am now interested I getting Traveler.
STL comms in an FTL setting is something so simple but I had no thought of and will work perfectly for a setting I’m working on.
This makes me wonder about the process for Scalzi's Interdependency books. The method of long distance travel in those was a naturally occurring extradimensional network called the Flow, which couldn't really be controlled, just taken advantage of their existence (if you've listened to The Sojourn, this may sound familiar).
The super interesting part in those books was the central plot point, that the Flow was changing as of the start of the books. Flow entry and exit shulls were shifting, closing, and collapsing. With no other means of superluminal travel, the Flow collapsing could mean the end of civilization. It was a fantastic trilogy.
My favourite is the way FTL works in Battletech as it feels so limited. Very few ships have FTL drives, a jump can only be done from the zenith and nadir of a star (unless the captain is feeling particularly lucky), jump preparation takes a while and after a jump the FTL drive needs to recharge for about a week or two, and if you try rushing any step there a good chance you missjump and meet a grizzly end. This means that in the setting FTL capable ships act more like trains going from one station to another transporting smaller craft rather than spaceships as is common in scifi.
Another tabletop example: 4000 A.D. had a really cool FTL system. You enter FTL on one turn, and can exit it on any turn after that. The restriction is that the number of turns you spend in FTL is the number of spaces away from your starting point you have to travel. You don't get an expanding circle of potential destinations anywhere within a maximum range, you get an expanding ring or donut, with a hole in the middle, only able to land on the outer edge of that circle and not anywhere inside it. A journey which takes 2 turns to complete *can't* be stalled to take 3 or 4, without having to drop out of FTL beyond your destination then head back, potentially giving away your change of course.