Your favorite FTL methods in Science Fiction?

[Christopher]

Re: 'Islands of Space' eBook

Islands of Space by John Wood Campbell - Project Gutenberg

"Download the free ebook: Islands of Space by John Wood Campbell."
www.gutenberg.org/etext/20988

Hmm, okay, it looks like Islands of Space just barely counts as a usage of the term "warp" for FTL propulsion. The only occurrence of "warp" in the body of the book, as opposed to the blurb at the beginning, is here in Chapter II:

Fuller still looked puzzled. "See here; with this new space strain drive, why do we have to have the molecular drive at all?"

"To move around near a heavy mass—in the presence of a strong gravitational field," Arcot said. "A gravitational field tends to warp space in such a way that the velocity of light is lower in its presence. Our drive tries to warp or strain space in the opposite manner. The two would simply cancel each other out and we'd waste a lot of power going nowhere. As a matter of fact, the gravitational field of the sun is so intense that we'll have to go out beyond the orbit of Pluto before we can use the space strain drive effectively."

So Campbell only used "warp" as a verb to describe the effect of the drive; the drive itself was called a "space strain" drive. I guess that's why Islands of Space isn't cited on the OED's SF terminology site as the first usage of the term. But it does have citations for "(space) warp" as a noun antedating 1936, "warp" as a verb meaning "to travel via space warp" antedating 1949, and "warp drive" (or "warp-drive") antedating 1950. However, "warp speed" seems to be a coinage original to Star Trek.

Also, the physics Campbell's assuming isn't quite the same as the later warp drive principle. From early in Chapter I:

Arcot pointed toward a glass of water sitting nearby. "Why do things look distorted through the water? Because the light rays are bent. Why are they bent? Because as each wave front moves from air to water, it slows down. The electromagnetic and gravitational fields between those atoms are strong enough to increase the curvature of the space between them. Now, what happens if we reverse that effect?"

"Oh," said Fuller softly. "I get it. By changing the curvature of the space surrounding you, you could get any velocity you wanted. But what about acceleration? It would take years to reach those velocities at any acceleration a man could stand."

Arcot shook his head. "Take a look at the glass of water again. What happens when the light comes out of the water? It speeds up again instantaneously. By changing the space around a spaceship, you instantaneously change the velocity of the ship to a comparable velocity in that space. And since every particle is accelerated at the same rate, you wouldn't feel it, any more than you'd feel the acceleration due to gravity in free fall."

So it is a drive based on distorting (i.e. warping) space, but Campbell was assuming, incorrectly, that doing so would alter the speed of light, rather than allowing a bubble of spacetime to move FTL relative to the space around it.

However, a bit later:

"Result: total annihilation of matter! When the contraterrene lead atoms met the terrene lead atoms, mutual annihilation resulted, giving us pure energy.

"Some of this power can be bled off to power the mechanism itself; the rest is useful energy. We've got all the power we need—power, literally by the ton."

"Contraterrene" is a term coined by Jack Williamson for the stuff we now call antimatter. So even if he was assuming a somewhat different principle, Campbell was postulating a faster-than-light drive based on warping space and powered by matter-antimatter annihilation. In 1930.

 

[SG-17]

The wormhole drive from Stargate: Atlantis.

 

[Hyperspace05]

The wormhole drive from Stargate: Atlantis.

It travels at the speed of plot! Very convenient...

 

[C.E. Evans]

Ludicrous drive works for me.

But I kind of like the idea of ships being able to enter a parallel dimension of spacetime where the farther (or deeper) you go, the greater the spatial distortion with points in normal space. To an outside observer, a ship appears to be moving at many times the speed-of-light while it's really nowhere near lightspeed within that parallel dimension.

The drawback is that while you can probably set exit points for reentering normal space, you still won't know what's waiting for you (like an asteroid or another vessel) until you get there...

 

[Hyperspace05]

Ludicrous drive works for me.

But I kind of like the idea of ships being able to enter a parallel dimension of spacetime where the farther (or deeper) you go, the greater the spatial distortion with points in normal space. To an outside observer, a ship appears to be moving at many times the speed-of-light while it's really nowhere near lightspeed within that parallel dimension.

The drawback is that while you can probably set exit points for reentering normal space, you still won't know what's waiting for you (like an asteroid or another vessel) until you get there...

So in other words, just like Babylon 5's Hyperspace and Thirdspace?

 

[O'Dib]

Foldspace from Dune. I like how ships needs prescient mutants to fly through it.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Ludicrous drive works for me.

But I kind of like the idea of ships being able to enter a parallel dimension of spacetime where the farther (or deeper) you go, the greater the spatial distortion with points in normal space. To an outside observer, a ship appears to be moving at many times the speed-of-light while it's really nowhere near lightspeed within that parallel dimension.

The drawback is that while you can probably set exit points for reentering normal space, you still won't know what's waiting for you (like an asteroid or another vessel) until you get there...

So in other words, just like Babylon 5's Hyperspace and Thirdspace?

I was thinking more along the lines of the hyperspace in Star Wars, but I was including a little bit of the subspace from Star Trek too, but basically yeah.

 

[StarshipDefiant]

I think I kind of like the FTL (somewhat used lightly here) as seen in the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica.

 

[Myasishchev]

Star Trek warp with an Albucierre metric gloss over it.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

FTL

interesting new short article today:

Light Speed – How Science Fiction Failed Us.

I ask myself how science fiction has failed us in this regard, I can only answer, “It hasn’t…yet.”

 

[Christopher]

Re: FTL

interesting new short article today:

Light Speed – How Science Fiction Failed Us.

But very flawed.

Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity says that the energy required to move an object (E) is equal to its mass (m) times the speed of light (c) squared (E=mc2). For the rest of us, that means even if something weighed one unit of mass, it would require many millions of units of energy to move it for just one second.

That's not true. E=mc^2 refers to the amount of energy that a mass corresponds to, the amout "contained" within it, not the amount it takes to move it. If this interpretation were right, then you'd need the total energy released in the Hiroshima bomb to move a paper clip.

And it's making the same mistake debunked earlier in this thread, namely treating warp drive as if it were Gene Roddenberry's invention.

 

[Checkmate]

Favorite? The Improbability Drive.
One I Prefer in Most Sci-Fi Shows? "Jump" drives which leave the ship(s) vulnerable as they plot their next course and let their engines replenish. Like in BSG.

 

[FluffyUnbound]

So even if he was assuming a somewhat different principle, Campbell was postulating a faster-than-light drive based on warping space and powered by matter-antimatter annihilation. In 1930.

What makes this really impressive to me is that Einstein published in 1905, but wasn't proven experimentally until 1919, and won his Nobel in 1921.

Getting into print with a space warp idea in popular fiction by 1930 is really impressive. Modern sci-fi doesn't always get cutting edge work into popular media in under a decade. That's FAST.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, I dunno. I based a novel on Leger's ocean planet concept only five years after the first papers came out, and Ian McDonald's novella "The Tear" beat me to it by a year.

It's true that mass-media SF tends to be a couple of decades behind the state of the art, but prose SF is generally pretty quick at responding to cutting-edge theoretical work. Especially since some SF novelists, like Gregory Benford, Charles Sheffield, and Robert L. Forward, are/were working physicists. Benford's Timescape was based on the author's own theoretical work on tachyons, IIRC. Similarly with Forward's Timemaster and wormholes. Heck, Carl Sagan's Contact actually contributed to the creation of new physics, since Sagan asked Kip Thorne to come up with a plausible FTL method and Thorne's ideas sparked a whole resurgence of theoretical work on wormholes, exotic matter, the Casimir effect, and so on.

 

[Ethros]

This is mine-

Five
Four
Three
Two
Jump!

 

[Meredith]

Planespace from Crest of the Stars, Banner of the Stars.

You travel via a 2-D realm where you ship generates a bubble to keep you intact, if your bubble generator goes down..... Your ship collapses into elementary matter.

 

[Checkmate]

I mostly like jump drives (BSG, Farscape, etc.) because they allow for more drama and suspense, and genuine tactics play a huge part in things. You can't always just run away when things get ugly, especially if it happens right after you reach your destination.

 

[firehawk12]

Specific jump points tied to a location in space. I don't know why, but I like the Wing Commander idea of being able to camp a point and shoot any ship that exits a point on sight.