Top Ten Sci-Fi FTL Systems

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Spacedock breaks down ten of sci-fi’s most interesting faster than light propulsion systems.

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50 thoughts on “Top Ten Sci-Fi FTL Systems”

  2. I like you descriptions of systems. There is one thing that would be interesting: How do spaceships/starships like a Imperial Star Destroyer for example, operate in a planetary atmosphere? What keeps them in the air? So many large craft seem to be able to operate air but seem to have no means of providing the required lift. It would take a lot of power (more that required for mobility in space) to achieve this.

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  3. My favorite aspect of Stargate FTL was that experimental wormhole drive they found on Atlantis in the finale. Even the Ancients were afraid to use it. 😄

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  6. One thing I've noted about the frame shift drive in Elite: Dangerous is that it doesn't matter if you are jumping 1 light year or 65 light years, the jump takes 15 seconds.

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  12. New Battlestar Galactica seems to take a page or three from BattleTech with its Kearny-Fuschida Jump Drives, which can propel JumpShips several parsecs between star systems, usually at the apex or nadir jump points above and below the star's rotational axis, although "pirate points" can also be calculated along the system's ecliptic at Lagrange points located along the orbits of the various planets of the system (or so the novels and sourcebooks imply; pirate points are never accurately described IIRC except as being dangerous locations to jump to requiring extra jump calculations but are closer to the target planet than the 'standard' jump points 'above' and 'below' the central star). The KF Drive also takes time to recharge through solar sails or a special battery as well as requiring serious calculations by the navigation computer, and standard jump points around major star systems are often well-guarded by flotillas ready to defend the system the moment they detect the incoming energy pulse of the KF drive's incoming jump.

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  13. I love how Orville is an honourable mention but Star Wars and Star Trek aren't even mentioned.

    Personally I think B5 should have been mentioned alongside Halo – as it doesn't break the FTL Einsteinian physics laws as it travels that distance in a totally different layer of reality separate from normal space.

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  21. One type of FTL I haven't seen mentioned yet is Planar Space from the Crest of the Stars series. It's a navigable hyperspace, like B5… but it only exists in 2 dimensions. You have to generate a 3D spacetime bubble around your ship in order to not instantly be flattened into a 2-dimensional pancake… and if your drive ever fails, that's exactly what happens to you.

    Also, I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned the old Asimovian drives that were common among a number of novelists (not just Asimov) between the '30s and '80s. NuBSG and BattleTech (among others) definitely pay some homage to the old pulp sci-fi FTL drives, with their instantaneous (or near enough) point-to-point travel and their dependence upon very carefully calculated navigation settings in order to not misjump.

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  29. Some of my favorite episodes in Stargate were the ones focusing on quirks of said Stargate, to list a few:
    -oops, black hole, now we have time dilation issues and the thing won't close
    -oops, someone is stuck in the buffer, how do we get them out?
    -oops, our ship is stuck halfway inside the gate, what now?
    -oops, Anubis will blow our gate up
    -oops, all coordinates are now scrambled, what happened? (I don't like that episode simply because of the cringe scientist guy but I like the concept)
    -oops, there is a big stargate there, can we somehow block it?

    Also shoutout to the Iris, gotta be one of my favorite systems, even though I have no idea how the humans could understand the inner workings so quickly.

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  30. What I think would be an interesting FTL system would be basic wormholes, you go in one end, immediately pop back out the other.

    BUT! Since the energy in the universe needs to be the same, you can't just teleport from anywhere to anywhere without consequences. If you took a wormhole from the bottkm to the top of a mountain you would arrive with more potential energy than you started with, resulting in a higher energy consumption of the generator. But if you went the other way, you would need to free the potential energy you had on the mountaintop. What is the Universe's favorite way to remove excess energy? Radiation! So if you went from a point of high energy to a point of low energy, the energy difference would be accounted for with either heat or high-energy radiation, boiling or irradiating you in the progress. So you'd want to move from one point to another one of similar energy.

    Second! Because of energy conservation you would keep your speed when exiting relative to when entering. So if you were to move to a different star system you would moveat the same speed… relative to your original speed to the destination system. So if you were to warp to a system moving quickly relative to your entry system, you would need to do a lot of course correcting to account for the relative speed of star systems!

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  31. Missing Battletech's jumpships.
    Basically teleportation that has to be made on system's lagrange point (where gravity from the star is at it's lowest).
    The jumpship have to set up a large sails to collect solar energy for recharge, which can take days, if not weeks.

    Dropships are the transpprts between planets that attach to the jumpships for ftl travel. Planet to jumpship travel is again, something that takes weeks…

    It's one of the most scientifically thought off FTL system in sci-fi. It's just overlooked because the 'mechs take the center stage in that universe.

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  34. As a long time Elite Dangerous player, I was smiling ear to ear to see it listed here. Witchspace and supercruise still make the science nerd in me slightly giddy because of how plausibly they're depicted. Thank you.

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  38. Interestingly, the idea of the suspension of mass / suspension of intertia as a drive system goes way, way back before the Mass Effect franchise. The "Inertialess drive" was both the sublight and FTL drive of choice in the Lensman universe by E. E. Doc Smith as far back as 1937. Of course, his explanation was the hand-waving "with the drive engaged, you can just keep accelerating past light speed (with no time dilatation, because no mass) until your thrust reaches equilibrium with your 'air resistance' through interstellar matter." (far from an actual quote there)

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  39. You got edge warp, a ball would rotate, but the ball takes advantage of gyroscopic action nulifying its rotation, essentially shaking the ship into higher higher dimensions that gauss law on the ball and edge thruster. The ball has 9 and 12 dimensional MS Excell pivot table gyroscopic action, so much so that it uses cold fusion direct entrophic rounding causing the thruster not to melt it, or even make any progress. The thruster is a unity point spark. These points like on a spark plug go ham salad dressing in the aura of basis sets drummong the engine heat past the points into space. The vibration was found by raw ignorance attemting to design the 4D gyro, pecker Buck build tthe 4D shaker and was turned into lightning electricity Man, he can be see on occulus after he was deported from solar command.

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  43. My friend who is a physicist and engineer came up with a warp system for a role-playing campaign he ran. In simple terms, space-time was most dense around matter and between stellar systems it was thin enough to penetrate with enough energy. You would travel on regular expanse-type drives to the edge of the solar system, charge your drive with enough power, "aim" the ship, and try and hit the target star's gravity well at the other end. Failure to aim properly would mean you miss the gravity well and pass by, potentially never entering another gravity well for the duration of the universe. So, the navigators were paid the big bucks.

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  44. Ngl I miss Stellaris having multiple ftl types. Having to account for sudden wormhole assaults made the game much more interesting especially since they each had their uses. Wormholes for instant transversal for quite a distance, but opening one took almost a year in game, and only lasted 3 months – 9 months
    Hyper drives were the fastest transport method, just a few days to jump at hd1, a day at hd3, but were limited to hyperlanes.
    Warp drives were a happy mix. Decent range, decent speed, and not limited to the hyper lanes. Wd1 was almost a month to complete fully, about a week at wd3.

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  45. I knew Stargate had to be your #1 top pick. Gosh since hearing amazon got control of the MGM IP I’ve been hoping for the continuation of the series Stargate Universe as well as maybe a new original series that could be set on earth truly taking up the role as the fifth race. Using the technology from the Asgard especially with power generation and other tech. After a few years of earth secretly building up defenses all around the solar system and on the moon and around the planet. They start making plans to take down the wraith in pegasus galaxy by building ships like those destiny came across. These ships would be navigated by Asgard AI fly into a system with 5+ wraith hive ships. Send in cloaked ships the size of a jumper to park right outside these ships hangers. Then launch dozens of ancient Drones that would destroy these ships easily. Doing this would hopefully bring down enough of the wraith fleet of hive ships

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  46. One of my favorite FTL drives is the Jump Point drive systems from Wing Commander/Freelancer and probably Star Citizen franchises. All from Chris Roberts. It made things really interesting that they had to use specific space time phenomena to be able to travel faster than light, Where as so many Sci-fi properties can just go into FTL anywhere.

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