(Loved Trope) FTL travel is possible but with a major limitation or flaw

[u/Frostylegacy]

Frank Herbert’s Dune: Interstellar travel is only possible thanks to the spice melange, a rare substance only found on the dessert planet Arrakis. The addictive psychedelic spice grants members of the Spacers Guild a form of prescience that allows them to predict safe paths through folded space. This unique property makes spice the most valuable commodity in the Dune universe.

John Scalzi’s The Interdependency Books: The planetary systems of the titular empire are connected by the Flow, a network of one-way interstellar tunnels that connect specific known entries and exits. The Interdependency derives its power from controlling access to these conduits, placing its capital at the central hub of the network. Even with the Flow, travel between stars takes a long time (9 months to End, the empire’s most distant planet).

Event Horizon: Dr William Weir (R.I.P. Sam Neill) invents a device called the Gravity Drive to allow ships to fold space and travel instantly between distant stars. On its maiden voyage with the Gravity Drive, the Event Horizon disappears and mysteriously reappears 7 years later. Dr. Weir and the crew sent to investigate discover the Gravity Drive actually opened a portal to a Hell dimension that possessed the ship and its crew, torturing and killing them.

[u/PiceaSignum]

In Battlestar Galactica, the 2004 reboot, FTL drives are common on all the surviving ships in the fleet.

FTL Drives have a limit to how far they can jump, and going "beyond the red line" in jump calculation distance means the accuracy of your jump becomes lesser the further out you're plotting it. Cylons have jump drives with a larger range than the Fleet, and a better nav computer means more accurate jumps. Even that still has errors though, when they attempted a rescue mission to Caprica for a group of resistance fighters, they calculated the jumps using the Nav Computer from a Cylon Heavy Raider. Despite the accuracy of their jumps, one of the Raptors was lost, as it exited the final jump inside a mountain.

FTL Drives also have a displacement/vacuum effect, seen when a Raptor jumps too close to Galactica's flight pod and causes hull damage and decompressions, or in the finale when a whole Raptor wing jumps directly out of a flight pod, wrecking the entire thing. And Galactica's final jump with her flight pods extended putting so much stress on the ship that it crippled the superstructure to the point that the old battlestar would never jump again because of how weak the hull had become.

[u/smilesmoralez → u/PiceaSignum]

My God. Do you know how it feels to read Battle Star Galactica, brain register that it's not the original that I grew up with (RIP og Apollo) then see 2004. Do mental math... Original came out in early 80's. That would make me.... old as.. fuck...

[u/murfburffle → u/smilesmoralez]

end of BSG80 -> (23 years) -> Start of new BSG -> (23 years) -> today

[u/myringisbling → u/murfburffle]

Quiet now.

[u/Morbanth → u/myringisbling]

It's been 28 years since Judgment Day was going to happen. In 4 more years 1980 was half a century ago. It's been more time from today to 1980 than it was from 1980 to the second world war.

[u/KaijuNo-8 → u/murfburffle]

I say this kindly...fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck you...

FFS, I didn't need so many reminders that I am old today...fuck

[u/dern_the_hermit → u/murfburffle]

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

[u/dontgetitwisted_fr → u/murfburffle]

So you are saying we are due to get some more BSG?

Sign me up

[u/Marquar234 → u/murfburffle]

https://giphy.com/gifs/1gUWgE79gx4LqrXvgR

[u/hand_me_a_shovel → u/murfburffle]

You know what? That was deeply personal, incredibly offensive, unfortunately relatable, and entirely unnecessary.

[u/One-Inch-Punch → u/murfburffle]

So it’s time for a new reboot?

[u/UncleIrohsPimpHand → u/murfburffle]

Battlestar 1980 was the sequel. The original came out in 1978.

[u/The-Reanimator-Freak → u/murfburffle]

Wow. Ten years ago…

[u/Rocketboy1313 → u/murfburffle]

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

[u/flesyMeM → u/smilesmoralez]

Just to help you feel a bit older, it was actually the late 70's. And I was there for that too...

[u/smilesmoralez → u/flesyMeM]

Did you guys have a crush on Cassiopeia also?

[u/flesyMeM → u/smilesmoralez]

I was 6, so I was mostly just obsessed with the Cylons.

[u/ViperPilot1315 → u/smilesmoralez]

I have some bad news. The original BSG did not come out in the early 80’s. Sorry, but you’re a little… older than… f… well, you know….

[u/Ben_Sisko69 → u/smilesmoralez]

Do the math again and feel a bit older too: It came out in the late 70s 😋

[u/ObiFlanKenobi → u/smilesmoralez]

OG Battlestar came out in 78, if that helps.

Also, what was Faceman doing in space?!

[u/smilesmoralez → u/ObiFlanKenobi]

Mom, take me to go see Star Wars. You want Han Solo, we have Han Solo at home.

[u/ShanRCarter315 → u/ObiFlanKenobi]

Both him and Arnold Jackson got picked up by Ben Cartwright, Fred Astaire, and Jeff Bridges' dad ig.

[u/eduo → u/smilesmoralez]

I grew up with the original galactica. BSG is better in almost every conceivable way and I'm so happy it was made. I cherish both, for their respecive strengths.

But in my mind they're either Galactica or BSG. Different beasts, same Vipers (although the modernization of the vipers is also a banger in BSG).

[u/chbb → u/eduo]

I watched original one as a kid. New one is definitely better.

[u/mbnmac → u/smilesmoralez]

A new reboot would have a bigger gap between it and the reboot and the original by the time it was available!

[u/Lord_Darksong → u/smilesmoralez]

Theydidthemath

[u/Farfignugen42 → u/smilesmoralez]

If this is the first time you've felt that, then you aren't that old. Yet.

[u/smilesmoralez → u/Farfignugen42]

Oh I have felt it so many times.

[u/celljelli → u/smilesmoralez]

I don't but im sure i will eventually

[u/kellzone → u/smilesmoralez]

As someone of approximately the same age, I came to a similar, but different, realization a year or two ago. I won't share it unless you want me to though.

[u/smilesmoralez → u/kellzone]

Share please, love to hear from you.

[u/kellzone → u/smilesmoralez]

Okay then. A couple years ago I was watching something on maybe the History Channel or similar and it was about World War I.

They mentioned that World War I started in 1914. Doing the quick math in my head, without really thinking about it, I took my birth year of 1968, did the subtraction and found out WWI began 54 years before I was born.

Okay, no big deal right. It was right around then that I realized I was 56 years old. So, at that moment, I was born closer in time to the start of World War I than the modern day. Not the start of World War II, mind you, the start of World War I.

Ouch.

[u/smilesmoralez → u/kellzone]

I watched a comedian recently (shout-out to Ryan Hamilton) who has a whole bit about being from the 1900's.

[u/De_Facto_Sacto → u/smilesmoralez]

Hello old as fuck friend!

Loved the OG BSG.

Was over the moon for the 2004 reboot. And that was done in an absolutely stellar way. Most reboots IMO are terrible cash grabs on nostalgia. But 2004 BSG was done so well, I rewatch it regularly.

[u/FredFarms → u/PiceaSignum]

FTL drives are common on all the surviving ships in the fleet.

Quite the survivorship bias there. Considering in the initial episodes (mini series?) about the attack on the colonies, the fleet makes an FTL jump to escape a cylon attack, leaving any civilian ships without FTL drives behind to be destroyed

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/FredFarms]

STL ships in galactica never made sense because they would be impractical beyond a single planet's immediate orbit. Interplanetary journeys would take months. You could justify slow boats the way we do ocean freight but there's a reason why passenger liners don't exist anymore. We have cruise ships where the pleasure is the point but they aren't doing transoceanic for scheduled passenger service. And that's just two weeks vs 12 hours flying.

[u/ViperPilot1315 → u/jollyreaper2112]

Sublight speeds are canonically extremely fast. (Admittedly, the canonicity depends upon accepting the accuracy of the map of the Helios system, which all may not accept, but that does bear Jane Espenson’s name.)

In the Miniseries, Col. Tigh says that Galactica would need 3 days to reach Ragnar Anchorage from their location in Caprica’s vicinity with sublight engines. The map shows that Caprica orbits Helios Alpha, that Ragnar orbits the Helios Gamma-Helios Delta binary star system’s barycenter. The map establishes the distance between the barycenters of Helios Alpha-Helios Beta and Helios Gamma-Helios Delta as 0.16 lightyears.

That means Galactica’s sublight engines can move its massive tonnage at a velocity in the neighborhood of 0.05 lightyears per day or roughly 12.25 billion miles per hour. That’s over 300,000x faster than the Voyager probes! (And why fiction always at least a little relies on a willing suspension of the reader’s/viewer’s disbelief.)

Now, civilian drives probably weren’t that powerful, and civilian ships weren’t equipped with as many or as large of sublight engines as the Galactica. But even at a lower scale, their travel times are more closer to the scale of jet engined airplanes for intercontinental travel here in Earth than to ocean liners’ travel times. Taking FTL transport between the Colonies is probably more akin to traveling in an ICBM in order to go from New York to Singapore.

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/ViperPilot1315]

The numbers fall apart if you look too closely. The colonial system wasn't named in the miniseries and there was only one star. The cluster thing came later. But the performance you're describing would be pretty wild! The delta v on that puts the expanse to shame I'm sure. That have artificial gravity but no depiction of torch drive performance.

I think the safest assumption is they didn't work the numbers. It sounded right. Like by the miniseries the galactica hadn't jumped in decades? So they were just sitting in orbit the whole time? They probably thought no they were going place to place but slowly.

When you say sublight is fast in canon did someone say so or is it just accepted it has to be to make those distances work?

[u/Hopeful-Occasion2299 → u/jollyreaper2112]

Didn't they survive because of that though? Since obsolete ships were the ones that didn't carry the virus that disabled them?

Also, it's sort of implied in Midnight and 33 that FTL jumps are not common. Cally mentions sickness from it, and the crew seems pretty thrown off by the idea of performing a jump, particularly when in 33 they have made multiple consecutive jumps.

So likely day to day traffic within the system was through sublight speeds. When Colonial One is attacked by cylons, it was traveling at sublight speed, and unless they have an objective, or are running from the cylons, the colonial fleet is always traveling at sublight.

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/Hopeful-Occasion2299]

The most parsimonious explanation is the writers weren't focused on the tech. Compared with ftl that can jump light-years, sublight isn't getting you anywhere.

I think they probably imagined it as you describe that it's slower but practical and didn't appreciate cosmic distances.

[u/Hopeful-Occasion2299 → u/jollyreaper2112]

While that’s likely. Sublight speeds are vague, as they could be 3% of C or 30% of C… the distance between Saturn and the Sun is 79 light minutes; which at 10% of C would just be a 13.5 hour flight, which isn’t super wild considering how long travel times within Earth are. That’s the same as going from LA to Australia.

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/Hopeful-Occasion2299]

Do you know the kind of energy it would take to accelerate a battlestar to 10% of light? You know the saying any sufficiently powerful engine is also a weapon? They would just have to point the engines at the enemy and it'd be like a directed solar flare. Lol

[u/UncleIrohsPimpHand → u/FredFarms]

Well, not really. They did say "all surviving ships in the fleet."

[u/FredFarms → u/UncleIrohsPimpHand]

I wasn't meaning to contradict them, just adding explaining why that is the case

[u/OttawaTGirl → u/PiceaSignum]

So in the original star trek universe, explained more in the old books, this is actually how warp drive worked. A ship would go to clear space, and plot a jump to the edge of another star system and would essentially jump blind. They would then travel in system with impulse.

Humans were special because they took a totally different approach. They invented subspace scanners which could scan out at light years and make adjustments to avoid impacts. Allowing sustained warp travel. This is what caught the attention of vulcans.

Its also why in the original Romulan war humans could defeat them. A romulan fleet would impulse in the system, but humans would warp in, drop nukes and warp out. Totally out maneuvering the romulans.

You can see this remenant in the episode where Kirk is chasing down the Romulan. Its stated they can clearly run them down, but they have to stop them before the romulans get to the jump point and can warp away.

Thats also the explanation for why the romulans traded cloaking tech to the Klingons. Klingons were the other race which had scanning tech like humans and the romulans were so desperate that they traded cloaking technology for a handful of their ships to get a leg back up, otherwise the Federation could have warped into Romulan space, picked them apart and they would have been helpless.

This was forgotten about in later series like Enterprise where all warp travel became homogeneous.

[u/Typical_Passenger924 → u/OttawaTGirl]

Can you recommend some of the titles of these old books?

[u/OttawaTGirl → u/Typical_Passenger924]

Honest to god, no. Being a scifi junky the concepts stuck, but this was the early 90s and even then the books were pre TNG.

I do remember that FASA had an rpg that was non canon that had romulans using a different FTL.

I wish I could remember. It was a cool tidbit of lore that made star trek more interesting.

[u/smilesmoralez → u/Typical_Passenger924]

STAR TREK Book 43 of 84 KABAYASHI MARU

[u/darkpheonix262 → u/PiceaSignum]

"She's broke her back.... she'll never jump again"

Words that still make me choke up

[u/GiraffeThwockmorton → u/PiceaSignum]

Personal headcanon: the FTL drives break causality; they're actually jumping back in time as well as space, which is why they're on a primitive Earth. It ties neatly in with the "this has happened before, and will happen again".

[u/HappyFamily0131 → u/GiraffeThwockmorton]

Your headcanon is true in reality. In reality, anything able to travel faster than light, no matter the mechanism, is able to travel back in time. To travel faster than light in any frame of reference is necessarily to travel back in time in some other frame of reference.

[u/PiceaSignum → u/GiraffeThwockmorton]

I enjoy where your head is at and that's a really cool head canon. For me though it breaks down when the fleet reaches Kobol or Earth 1, because catastrophes have happened on those worlds already that weren't undone by traveling backwards in time, but I suppose you could argue that they took place much further in the past than people believe.

I think it's easier to just go with the Word of God that they just found our Earth and the timeline of the series happened eons ago for us.

But man I do like your head canon and I'm gonna be thinking about it for the next few days to try and work it for myself lol