"How fast do you like your FTL? " Topic

No jokes along the lines of 186,000 mps please!

My Universe (modified Tufflyverse)
Not instantaeous transit into. Certain regious in space are 'weak' enough to allow transit into 'jump', but the exact point wanders (To stop players ambushing those coming out!)

Takes a few days.

No subspace radio- all message by ship or drone.

Faster than

Depends a bit on the imaginary physics model you chose, but it seems to me that something based on wormholes is currently popular, which seems not instanteous as it involves point to point jumping with an interval in between

As to moving around points, perhaps – but there would be definite navigational advantages to fixed point transit (for mundane things like inter-systems commerce)

Subspace radio? Always seemed a bit of a stretch – communication drones seems more likely

I like the B5 style of FTL. Using jump gates with regular travel time between. Also larger ships can open their own jump points.

Depends on your setting of course.

For my RPGs I liked a biggish setting with H Beam Piper's 1LY per hour

Plot Drive; the trip takes as long as it needs to, for max dramatic effect.

Crimson

I liked the system described in "The Forever War". Collapsar jumps.

Dave

I always liked the Traveller Jump Drives, 1 parsec a week.

I liked the fact that communication was only as fast as a ship.

I prefer what J. Michael Strazinski stated whihc is the Speed of Plot

"I liked the fact that communication was only as fast as a ship."

I like that too, although it makes it challenging to design a strategic wargame.

no one can go faster than the speed of light, so we changed the speed of light…..

1. Limited ansible communication, to whit: Ansibles are based on quantum changes of separated charged particles, so all ansibles are limited to paired devices; one shipboard, one at a base (likely the point of origin or the home base). This allows FTL communication, but only with someplace the ship has already been, or has received an ansible from via another ship. If you don't have a paired ansible with your destination, you can't communicate until you get there, or you can only communicate through an established ansible network that passes communication along.

2. Transit times measured in days, weeks or months. Short hops of a few hours are acceptable for nearby systems, but I tend to like that "Nelson's Navy" feel.

3. I like jump points in fiction, but in gaming I think the straight line "clear path" approach is simpler, tied to a "build up" to jump, with everyone able to detect the approaching change due to energy emissions of some sort. This allows attempts at blocks, intercepts, etc. to prevent escape.

4. Wormholes are essentially instantaneous (maybe a transit time of minutes or seconds), but are strictly point A to point B and back. I like the idea of variable wormholes that change entry point within a particular region (forcing players to guess when and where the wormhole for a region may open for use), but are otherwise stable as to destination.

I always wondered what 'ansibles' were. Now I know.
I still love my Yaquinto 'Starfall' game.

I always liked the system used in battletech: instantaneous but with limitations (can only jump at "gravity neutral" points, and it takes a long time to recharge for a jump)…

Damon.

The entire ansible concept was devised by Ursula k. Le Guin and used by others (notably bu Orson Scott Card in the Wiggins series).

Le Guin also did not believe in traveling faster than light but came up with the ansible concept as a plot device to allow instant communication across light years.

No real preference when it comes to fiction, as long as the author is reasonably consistent about things. For gaming, I think the old Starfire "warp point" system produced some nice effects, at least if you disallow minefields through some PSB. The need to be able to force defenders off of a warp point led to some nice balancing acts when it came to fleet construction. Ships optimized for long-range combat reign supreme in the STL fights between warp points, but they're dead meat against knife-fighting ships in a warp-point assault.

Oh, right…if you're not familiar with Starfire, FTL was only possible via naturally-occurring "warp points" which any ship could use without requiring a special drive or anything. Each point links to one other point, most systems have two or more WPs leading to other systems or deep-space WP junctions. Transit is instantaneous, but most points are hours away from one another at STL speeds.

In campaign terms, the structure of the warp point network produces a nifty "terrain" effect, with chokepoints and resource-rich systems being hotly contested.

Slow enough you can have a good chin-wag or play the odd game of Holographic Chess while waiting to 'get there'.

Slow enough you can come out of it and find something has happened since you went 'in'.

I rather liked the Bob Shaw 'Night Walk' overspace , where it was quite possible to get it horribly wrong and come out utterly and irrevocably lost.

Pat

"I always wondered what 'ansibles' were."

There's also the "Runcible" which is a teleport on the same principle.

For a list of possible systems, see;

link

Also see the Honor Harrington series..

I've got a couple different preferences, depending on the story I am reading/telling.

Sometimes, a 'Tachyon shunt' (or B5-style hyperspace) is the better way to tell the story.

Other times, a wormhole (instantaneous travel) with lots of time moving between openings makes for a better story.

Usually, I use the wormhole/BT jumppoint with lots of travel time from arrival in-system to arrival at destination. Let's face it, nothing really happens in Deep Space (or mid-ocean), everything important happens close to 'shore'.

"I liked the fact that communication was only as fast as a ship."

I like that too, although it makes it challenging to design a strategic wargame.

Historical precedent

Nelson's Navy

In a campaign background you end up with a pre 1850's way to run a galactic federation/empire with local Governors representing a distant president/emperor. For galactic campaigns there is a lot to be said for fixed star lanes, with known speeds.

Fast enough to get the miniatures on the table.

I like mine about 514,022,749.3 miles per hour.

Even better if that's on one tank of gas…

The StarFire and WarpWar naturally occurring jump points comes from the Mote in God's Eye I think

Old Man's War has a kind of Jump Drive here, because FTL is impossible, you actually travel to another alternate universe, but you don't notice the difference because the differenc eis in the orbit of an electron some place

But plot driven should always be the answer. The warp point idea is good because you can have misjumps, and jump routes that take you by circuitous routes

Set throttle to ludicrous speed!

And damn the torpedoes?

"They've gone plaid!"

Oh, right…if you're not familiar with Starfire, FTL was only possible via naturally-occurring "warp points" which any ship could use without requiring a special drive or anything. Each point links to one other point, most systems have two or more WPs leading to other systems or deep-space WP junctions. Transit is instantaneous, but most points are hours away from one another at STL speeds.

Reminds me of two books I recently ready – In Death Ground and The Shiva Option…

Which a quick Wiki search tells me were in fact based directly on Starfire.

There's also the "Runcible" which is a teleport on the same principle.

That's not what I thought it meant: link

Does that make me a duncible?

I've like the Traveller Colonial period feel for communications 1 week per jump is reasonable for plot and the relative expense of higher jump drives is sufficently limiting.

I would like to try a system based on Navigable hyperspace, with the unique exception of a few fixed wormholes to warp the terrain as it were. Drake's "Leary" series with a speed band structure to hyperspace and the need to sail the hyperspace is rather a nice touch. The Sailing skill adds an exploitable skill for plotting in RP and strategic warfare.

The idea of a length of time passing for an FTL 'jump' makes real-world sense, as the major barrier in physics to FTL is the problems that instantaneous travel would raise.

My own take is something between short passages of time, and the GZG impalpable transfer time; Jumps are disorienting to nay thinking being and AIs have to be powered down before the transit is made. A short amount of time passes, but the crew are unaware of what happnes to them during the procedure . . . Most of the time taken to travel between stars is taken in charging the jump drives in Normal space, travelling out from major gravitational influences or navigating closer to the target system, so there are delays in transits.

Transmissions at FTL speeds are open; In Full Thrust there are none which opens up a wide range of scenarios and that I like :), but I would have a very cumbersome form of subspace radio in use – set up beyond the bow-waves of gas giants, taking massive power for each burst of information, and with a delay of a few seconds per parsec.

Niven and Pournelle discussed tech and its implications for interstellar organization in "N-Space". They discussed the Drive and Langston Field amongst other things.

criticism of "doubletalk drives" in SF.

They likened MOTE's universe to the steam and *not* the sail age.
eg you cant just drop anchor chop down a tree and repair your ships. this pre-dread/coaling era analogy sounds a better fit for me to the tuffleyverse.

well worth a read.

Ah, but can they make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs?

she's fast enough for you, old man

I think it all comes down to the design of the starship in question. Ones painted red have to be 3 times as fast…

Char jokes aside I've always thought it interesting how Gunbuster used the faster you go, the faster time around you moves. So the heroines of the story finally made it back to Earth a couple of thousand years after they left when it was only a couple of hours (seemingly) to them.

While I tend to like many different types of FTL, I am fond of the warp-point/wormhole/gate set-up for gaming. Good for objectives.

The Better Than Light drive from Spaceship Zero (tv show and RPG).

"…when the BTL drive is activated, it doesn't move the Zero at better-than-light speeds as advertised. Instead, it gives the ship infinite mass, creating a gravity well that destroys the entire universe and making the ship ground zero (pardon the pun) for a new Big Bang.

"Once the crew is through freaking out, they decide to use the Deconstitutor – the setting's equivalent of hypersleep, which works by reducing people into their essential salts (sound familiar, Lovecraft fans?) for storage – and wait for the new universe to re-evolve into what should, theoretically, be a carbon copy of the original."

This from Galactic:Conflict in the Stars

Stellar Body/Planetary Body – Lagrangian Wormhole

Originally the Lagrange points around Stellar/Planetary bodies were known for their spacial stability. Put an object there and unless acted on it stayed. But as technology expanded and gravimetric spacedrives become common, it was noticed that strange permutations created "waves" in the fabric of space. After further analysis and experimentation, it was
discovered that if the gravimetric drive could be focused in the Lagrange Zone of space and the focusing track was directed at another stellar body, then a wormhole connecting the two
zones was created.
The distance traveled depended upon the mass of the parent body. From a Class 3 sized world (11,000-13,000 Km diameter) a vessel could travel to another world half-way across its solar
system. While gas giants (90,000+ Km diamter could propel you clear across the solar system to another gravity point. Exit points vary between 5,000 and 45,000 Km of the target Lagrange
Zone point due to gravity and electromagnetic flux. And the exit point zone is always outside of the Zone for the same reason.
Entrance speed has not been an issue in known record with transit times on the average of 1.4 light-years per minute. So this makes solar system transit time fairly fast. And then interstellar travel a day to day occurance. The only draw-back even with todays technology is the recharge times for interstellar transit. One crossing usally requires between 5-18 hours of recharging of the Jump drives. Planetary jump recharge intervals are trivial.

link

link

I use a variant on warp points for AV:T, and 'stellar push' for Squadron Strike. Both have their appeal; the real problem is making sure your FTL drives don't render putting pewter on the table impossible or futile.

the link to the landis list posted earlier by KatieL is well worth a look..
one wrinkle from babylon 5 I didnt realize until I read through my recently acquired EFSB was

FTL drivs are only used for the exit/enttry into hyperspace outside the gate network, NOT the transit of hyperspace itself.

pubic jumpgates
coded jumpgates (eg to use a narn gate you have to buy or treat for an entry code)
jump capable ships whose adhoc self generated jump points remained briefly open for accompanying non jump capable ships

pubic jumpgates

Shall we just assume the jokes have been made, and just move on?

Last Hussar: I agree completely.

The Niven essay on FTL is a classic, well worth reading. As always, Nyrath's website is essential reading. I'd say my favorite systems are of the "let's get this over with and stick all our physics-breaking mechanics into a black box that we only pull out between battles" variety.

The Alderson Drive in the Mote in God's Eye is excellent.

Next I'd have to have (shock, because I otherwise hate the setting and system) K-F drive from BattleTech's BattleSpace supplement. It's another point-to-point drive, with interesting mechanics.

Ground Zero Games's T-K drive is very strong as well. It leaves open room for interesting tactics but also shuts the door against game-breaking physics implications. But I'd rank it third because it's less developed than either of the other two.

The FTL drive of Battlestar Galactica is weak sauce-- a go-anywhere, anytime drive is filled with implications that were totally ignored by the writers. It isn't so much that it was unworkable (though Niven points out that teleport-at-will drives make space combat as we see it in fiction impossible), it is that it follows rules which vary from episode to episode.

Babylon 5's jump drives are little better; the fact that you're physically loitering in hyperspace opens up all kinds of problems. Again, travel times, ranges and precise rules vary to suit the needs of the plot. JMS flat-out bans space combat in hyperspace but refuses to come up with anything better than "it's not a good idea". It does have the virtue of episode-to-episode consistency (mostly).

The Old Grey Ladies of space combat, Star Trek and Star Wars, can barely be said to have FTL drives at all, in the sense that they don't seem to follow any rules whatsoever. They harken back to a simpler age in Science Fiction when Harlan Ellison could claim that science didn't belong in "speculative" fiction, much less internal consistency, and everyone thought it was brilliant.

The warp drive of Trek is pretty realistic, although it still violates causality, requiring some kind of tachyon energy.

As for the most realistic, as in something we could build this century, that could be the wormhole. Some of the latest pre-print papers I've read suggest that the LHC could produce stable wormholes, and it wouldn't require a gazillion tonnes of exotic matter either. Rather, an "exotic geometry" is used.

Depends on the exact setting and flavor, but generally I prefer instant jumps, with the 'jump zone' either being a fixed (but large) point or any area a certain distance from a body with mass (mass^9 km or something). I like most of the maneuvering/travel to be 'real space'

-Will

Oddly enough, the FTL drive I like the most now is the one from the Ariane Kedros novels. You navigate between 4th-dimensional anchor buoys, with a fixed transit time in universal time, but you have to have a live pilot at the controls, with everyone else sedated. Computers can't find their way out of the nous-space, has something to do with human consciousness and the fact that neurons are quantum detection devices.

To the n-space pilot, the transit is a variable time (an 8-hour Universal time trip may seem to be 8 minutes or 80 hours to the pilot). It's very physically demanding, pilots lose several kilograms of weight, and can lose hair if it's a bad drop back into realspace. The pilot even needs to be drugged to prevent dissociative insanity!

Although, I must admit that the Time Buoy FTL system is pretty much speed of plot, with all the maneuvering and combat done in realspace. However, they do have FTL comms through the buoy network. If this short brief sounds interesting, I recommend you read the second book in the series, 'Vigilante'. It has a good amount of detail about the ship-tech, and even an assault into a hostile system.

How fast can Superman fly?

At the speed of plot.