I like the Stargate-lite system in the game Terminus (2000). Unlike Stargate, each gate connects 1 to 1 with another, so there’s no “dialling up” a new destination. In fact, these gates don’t go anywhere unexplored. They only go where we’ve already been (around the solar system).

See, in Terminus the space ships can only fly at realistic speeds (similar to real life rockets) and maneuvering is difficult (with pretty decent Newtonian physics). If you want to travel to other places in the solar system it takes an extremely long time, so the gates make it actually feasible to get around.

This all had the effect of making space feel like the age of railroading. You can get around but you’re limited to where the rails can take you. I don’t know why, but there’s something so romantic about that.

Implosion drives from the Borderlands games.

Can’t travel faster than light in realspace? Fine. We’ll just annihilate all realspace between here and our destination.

goes Plaid

Robotech (or Macross for the purists).

Folding space, essentially.

A hard choice, so many of them have been well done in media and text.

If I had to make a choice I would pick versions that match up with what we think could be possible. And that means anything based on or similar to the Alcubierre drive theory. The “slower” travel around a system in Elite Dangerous uses this idea of moving the space the ship is in faster than light, avoiding any relativity issues. Stephen Baxter’s “Flood” and “Ark” novels (mainly Ark) use this idea and his descriptions of what it looks like from inside and departure/arrival are fantastic and not intuitive (Elite Dangerous gets the leaving right, but not the arrival maybe because it would look weird). When the ship arrives it would suddenly appear from nowhere, but then its virtual image would move away into a point as the light catches up.

For a great video of it, here’s a wonderful collection of potential future interstellar ships with the Alcubierre drive as the final solution to .

Recently read Hayden’s World and there’s some FTL in there that (mostly) obeys relativity and the associated time dilation issues, so that was fun to see. Also, a generally unpleasant experience for the humans on the craft. Otherwise I liked KSR’s Red/Blue/Green Mars, how the story developed travel technology organically on a timeline.

Cowboy Bebop 👩‍🚀🤠

What I like about FTL is how it works with the story.

My favourite examples are Elite Dangerous and Dune.

Elite Dangerous’s FTL tech is based on alien tech and that allows the developers to do cool stuff that you wouldn’t expect in an mmo (this is usually a loading screen so when this first started happening people were terrified).

And Dune’s idea of having the entirety of interstellar civilisation dependent on one substance that can only be made on one planet, which also has other uses extremely important to different groups, sets the stage perfectly for what happens in the books.

I like how Stellaris does hyperdrive; certain systems are connected by hyperplanes. Presumably something “man-made” in those systems generates the field and “throws” the ship to the next system.

Similar to Mass Effect except that whereas in Mass Effect, one generator can connect to any other, in Stellaris each one only goes between two points, like a subway.

I liked the wormholes from the Bobbyverse. You had instantaneous travel across interstellar distances but you had to get there via slower than light speed first. So no matter how technologically advanced you became your interstellar civilisation still grew at a rate of one or two systems per decade.

Hyperspace in Babylon 5 is pretty cool.

Also in Star Trek TNG when the Traveller uses his mind to go crazy fast.

I think it was the Old Man’s War series that had a really creative form of FTL travel that played off of the infinite multiverse theory.

Instead of traveling through space, they would jump into a parallel universe were everything was the exact same, except that their desired destination was closer to them and the same group of travelers were also jumping to a different verse at the same time.

I like gate type things and prefer them in space like babylon 5 and buck rogers.

Halo’s Slipspace has always been my favorite. It’s another dimension where instead of being able to move in four directions, things can move in eleven. This results in travel being faster there than in normal space.

The fun part is that the UNSC and the main antagonists- the Covenant- use the exact same method of FTL travel. The Covenant are just dramatically better at it, to the point of UNSC ships that attempt to run away from the Covenant via slipspace sometimes having the Covenant fleet they were fleeing already there and waiting on them.