In certain settings with Casual Interstellar Travel, the speed limit of about three hundred thousand kilometers per second (abbreviated c) is more of a guideline than a hard-and-fast law. However, with space being so big (you may be shocked at how big etc.), it's possible that some civilizations never learn how to go faster-than-light. But, scientific curiosity is strong, and so they set to building a starship to go as close as possible anyhow literally because "For Science!". It seems that they could do just as well for themselves by terraforming the heck out of their own solar system if they insist on having a Space Opera, or uploading their consciousnesses to the Matrix and playing full-immersion MMOs until their sun burns out (and thus open up all other genres to themselves as well), but they decided not to so that the Story can happen. Sometimes they get discovered by their own FTL-enabled descendants in a Lightspeed Leapfrog.
In other settings, the speed of light is an ironclad law of physics (or so it would seem), but its inhabitants find themselves needing to travel to another star-system anyways; perhaps as part of a Homeworld Evacuation or to prosecute an interstellar war. Unlike a Sub-Lightspeed Setting with a Space-Filling Empire somehow being viable when the response to a Distress Call takes decades, such ships are usually a desperate one-off or haphazard flotilla. In short, the answer to "Why'd they bother building a starship then?" is "They had to, or they'd go extinct."
This leads to A) an FTL civilization meets the ship of one that thought it was in a Sub-Lightspeed Setting and proves their fringe-theorists and sci-fi nerds right, or B) an interstellar empire run entirely by Sleeper Starships or being slowly colonized by Generation Ships. Rarer is C) (pun not intended but welcome) the whole plot revolves around what an achievement building a ship for sailing the Endless Vacuum and seeing many wonderous things without Faster-Than-Light Travel is, and why they're doing it. Finally is D) FTL is strictly limited to Portal Network which serves a star cluster rather than having a gate in each solar system, and so the ship must get to the nearest gate by going STL to another system or even somewhere out in deep space.
These ships might be propelled by a Nuclear Torch Rocket, Ram Scoop, Reactionless Drive, or Solar Sail. May involve Time Dilation at high speeds.
Super-Trope to Lightspeed Leapfrog (when FTL is discovered sometime after an STL ship is launched), Sub-Lightspeed Setting (specifically for when there's no FTL at all except maybe a Portal Network if your species was good all millenium), Generation Ships (if they have everyone awake and cognizant and can pack enough lunches for an aeon-long journey), and Sleeper Starship (if they put the crews in Suspended Animation for the trip).
Contrast Casual Interstellar Travel.
Examples include:
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Comic Books
- The Fantastic Four are exploring the Negative Zone where they encounter a Sleeper Starship from a world that hadn't developed FTL interstellar travel. The ship's captain explains that their homeworld was doomed, so their select crew hope to journey to a new habitable planet. A meteor storm caused enough damage to cause some crew members to awaken early to make repairs and manage the ship thereafter, becoming a Generation Ship as well. After Reed worms his way into the ship's navigation system and effects repairs, the ship makes a beeline for a suitable planet. The ship's high priestess confides that all the beings in suspended animation have perished; the awakened crewmen were the only survivors. And worse: having been shipboard for their entire lives, they are badly unprepared to live on an alien world. They will have to journey through space forever, or until their starship fails entirely.
- The Rocketfellers: Prior to the Rocketfellers relocating to the past, Rachel was an astronaut preparing for a spacefaring mission to Jupiter. It's noted that it would take 1.5 years to make it to Jupiter and another 1.5 years to get back, with the astronaut crew musing about what it will be like to see their loved ones again three years later.
Film — Animated
- Battle for Terra: After a devastating interplanetary war, the best and brightest of humanity set out in a sub-lightspeed Generation Ship to find a new habitable planet outside the solar system. They come across Terra, a planet with indigenous aliens living peacefully. The conflict arises when a desperate General Hemmer orders an assault force on Terra, because humanity's starship, The Ark, is at the end of its useful life. Any attempt to find another planet will result in every human perishing, and The Ark will become a spacefaring mausoleum.
Film — Live-Action
- Avatar (2009): The Venture Star uses a combination of Solar Sail and Anti Matter-powered rocket to approach lightspeed, allowing it to go from Earth to Pandora (in the Alpha Centauri system) in five years. Earth is running out of resources, and Pandora has loads, including mountains worth of a room-temperature superconductor called "Unobtanium" (literally) floating around. Shame about the primitive aliens who believe that having technology is a Deadly Sin...
- Interstellar: Being a realistic take on physics and space travel, all of the spacecraft in the film move slower than light; the main problem, involving launching a ship big enough to carry the remainder of humanity from a blighted Earth, is based around solving the problem of gravity rather than lightspeed. When the ship becomes a reality at the end, it will still take years or decades to reach its destination.
- Space Mutiny deals with the Southern Sun, a Generation Ship that's been traveling the cosmos despite apparent jumps in technology. The film deals with a group of officers lead by Kalgan and MacPherson seeking to take over the ship so they can give it to a group of Space Pirates and get off the ship.
Literature
- Again, Dangerous Visions: In Kurt Vonnegut's contribution, "The Big Space Fuck", after Earth uses up the last of its resources, the government aims a space probe full of preserved sperm cells (800 tons of it) towards Andromeda, and furthermore hopes that it'll hit a wormhole on the way so the human genome will be spread all across the universe (it's implied that the wormhole is on the way there, which makes Andromeda effectively closer than Alpha Centaurii). Then everyone gets eaten alive by mutant lampreys. The End!
- Doom (1995): Lightspeed is a hard limit, and space travelers must live with the knowledge that hundreds of years at least will pass while they travel, aging only a few months themselves due to the time dilation of near-light-speed travel. This is less of a problem for non-human species, whose immortal souls can inhabit new bodies and remember their past lives, making death and time lesser obstacles.
- Ender's Game: Starships travel at relativistic speeds, in the first book Ender leaves on a ship that takes 50 planetside years to reach its destination but only experiencing two years on board. In the later books set thousands of years later a 30-year voyage only takes subjective weeks. It's noted that crews on early space battleships were well aware they were on one-way suicide attacks, but did it anyway to fight the evil alien scourge-er, confused Bee People who kill a few dozen expendable Hive Drones as a way to say "hello."
- The Expanse:
- Invoked. The inventor of the Epstein Drive thought he could reach the stars with his prototype. He dropped the plans on the internet and dipped. Decades later, his ship is still visible through telescopes somewhere around Pluto; too far away for anyone to bother trying to rescue.
- In the first book, Leviathan Wakes, the LDS Church is building a Generation Ship to settle Alpha Centaurii with. Then the protagonists hijack it to use as a cruise missile against the Protomolecule-infected asteroid base Eros, to the Mormons' intense upset.
- Later books show that the Protomolecule was made to build wormhole gates, necessitating that humanity travel to a gate to use it.
- The Forever War: "Collapsars" are used as shortcuts across space but they're always light-years away from any inhabitable planet so ships spend most of their time traveling at near-light speed. Due to relativity the protagonists live through a thousand-year war.
- Hainish: Travel is by starships slightly below lightspeed. FTL does exist for communication (Ender's Game, above, shamelessly borrows both concepts, including the term), but for a long time, attempts to create starships based on it only allowed for vessels incapable of transporting living beings.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy: The in-universe Guide notes that there were interstellar empires even before Hyperspace travel was invented, and when soldiers on Slower-than- or Near-to- Lightspeed troop-ships finally got where they were sent, they were hellbent on fighting each other, the war being over for aeons be damned. Even afterwards, hyperspace navigation is noted to be so darn tedious that most of the speed advantages it provided were negated, leaving everyone looking for a better way to do it. This led to the invention of the Infinite Improbability Drivenote in the first book, and the Bistromathnote in the other three. It could be said that FTL in the series runs entirely on the Rule of Funny, with the more ridiculous the method, the faster it goes.
- The Jupiter Theft: The Cygnans are Space Nomads who travel between stars in a convoy of immense ships that move at a high fraction of the speed of light, enough so that time dilation leads to them only experiencing a few years of interstellar travel between each star system they visit.
- Known Space: While most prominent races use hyperdrives for FTL, various lesser races use Ram Scoop ships for interstellar travel.
- The Outsiders are believed to be the most technologically advanced race in the setting, and use Reactionless Drives capable of accelerating to near lightspeed, but they rarely use FTL, for reasons that they haven't disclosed (because no-one can afford their prices for answering personal questions). Beowolf Shaeffer was able to sell them information about the explosion of the galactic core, since their non-FTL-equipped ships might not have been able to escape it otherwise.
- In Ringworld, Louis falls in love with a Human Alien girl who was crew on a pre-FTL starship until being stranded on Ringworld.
- Noon: 22nd Century: The chapter "Homecoming" concerns a pair of cosmonauts who return to Earth after a couple of centuries of relativistic travel on the pre-FTL spaceship Taymyr. They then discover that not only have they been presumed dead, but that humanity has discovered FTL space travel since their launch and has mapped the star system that the rest of their crew had died exploring.
- Of Monsters And Mainframes: Starships are able to make the trip between Earth and Alpha Centauri within six years, which is a short enough time for colonization to be viable, and no mention of going faster than light is ever mentioned. They can also do Y'ha-nthiel, Cthulhu's homeworld, in a similar timeframe if the radiation shields are turned off, although this damages the ship and harms the passengers..
- Project Hail Mary: Earth's sun is being shadowed by alien bacteria called "Astrophage". Luckily, they use an ultra-efficient biological photon rocket to move in space, so they can be utilized as starship fuel to reach the only star in the galaxy immune to them.
- Rocheworld has a combination of Longevity Treatment and Solar Sail ship being used to explore the Barnard's Star. The second vingiette of each book is about the crew's challenges just getting there.
- In The Songs of Distant Earth, humans discover that the Sun will become a supernova in the coming centuries. Therefore, they build numerous "seed ships" that are sent to other star systems to colonize other planets. Technology only allows travel at a fraction of the speed of light, so each journey lasts centuries. As technology advances, the latest seed ships are faster and reach their destinations sooner than ships sent centuries earlier, though they never approach the speed of light.
- There and Back Again: The only way to travel FTL is by paired black and white holes, and ships must travel between them at near-lightspeeds, with the attendant Time Dilation that leaves your start hundreds of years in the past. Thus, ships have to find a chain of singularities going back the other way; at least until the party finds the hoard of Precursors goodies in the Galactic Core that stands in for the Treasure of Erebor. The stand-in for the One Ring is a "snark" (a piece of the aforementioned Precursor technology named in honour of The Hunting of the Snark, as one-in-ten turns out to be an incredibly dangerous "Boojum") that's the control board for the entire singularity network. However, relativity causes ships trying to go backwards through a wormhole to meet their past self coming out, and annihilate each other. Part of the hoard is a precursor AI called Librarian who explains how to use spatial wormholes as time-portals, causing Bailey to arrive the day before he left on his adventure.
- We All Died At Breakaway Station by Richard Meredith has a state of war between Earth and the alien "Jillies." Although no starships can travel faster than light, FTL communications via "tachyon beams" is possible, making interplanetary messages take days instead of years. Breakaway Station acts as a switchboard for these tachyon beams, shunting loads of data between Earth and her outposts. The Jillies are eager to eradicate the station, especially after Earth spies figured out where their homeworld.
Live-Action Television
- Andromeda: The episode "The Lone and Level Sands" features the Bellerophon, a relativistic exploration starship launched by Earth over fifteen centuries ago, mere years before humanity made contact with aliens and received the Slipstream technology.
- Battlestar Galactica (2003): While the Twelve Colonies possess FTL drives, the Thirteenth Tribe did not. When their own mechanical servants rebelled, their survivors undertook a massive near-lightspeed trip, with the resulting time dilation seeing it take only a few years from their perspective.
- In the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail", the Enterprise and another starship, the Farragut, confront a mysterious Scavenger Ship full of Planet Looters. It is eventually revealed that the Scavenger Ship's inhabitants are humans who originally left Earth on a slower-than-light interstellar vessel, which survives as the core of the Scavenger Ship, during the Trek universe's period of chaos, war and disaster on Earth during the 21st century. Despite their initial good intentions, they degenerated into a ruthless predatory culture who plundered and destroyed other civilisations for their resources.
Tabletop Games
- Lancer: Blink gates are too big and expensive to build in every inhabited system so most colonized stars are only reachable by starships that use "kinetic sinks" to rapidly accelerate up to 0.995c, meaning that lancers might have subjective months or years of downtime between missions and they may arrive on the scene decades after a situation is reported.
- Warhammer 40,000: In the distant past of the game's lore (from around the 3rd to 15th millennia), when humanity was first beginning to colonize worlds outside the solar system, FTL travel wasn't available (and Warp travel hadn't been discovered yet) so they used Generation Ships to ensure that there would be people to actually make it to their destinations and do the terraforming and colonizing.
Video Games
- Anachronox: The only known form of FTL is by "Sender", huge space stations that resemble a Koosh ball
. When a ship touches one of the tines, the ship is teleported to a corresponding tine on another Sender. Most of the tines on the ones dotted around the galaxy lead to the emponimous Space Station, making it the hub of the galactic government.
- Civilization: Beyond Earth: The ships that bring the game's Civilizations to the Planet travelled there through STL means. A post-Singularity Supremacy civ can figure out how to build wormhole gates back to Earth, however.
- Endless Sky:
- The Avgi didn't develop faster than light travel until very recently, but they were still exploring and colonising space before that. As a result, they have developed unusually powerful atomic engines that allowed them to cross interstellar distances within a workable period of time.
- The Incipias are the youngest known species in the galaxy, and do not have any faster-than-light drives at all. Instead, their spaceships have focused on competing over the scarce metal resources in their solar system, with extreme agility and the ability to freely visit gas giants that most ships from other species cannot (to mine metallic hydrogen from them).
- Galactic Civilizations: In the backstory, the moment the Drengin detected another civilization in another solar system, they set to building ships to fight the aliens with, aeons of travel time notwithstanding. Come the games proper, a human e-mailed the plans for the Hyperdrive to every civilization in the galaxy, which is why everyone starts with only their homeworlds.
- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: UNS Unity was the pinnacle of Earth engineering circa 2050. Launched in 2060 to Alpha Centauri, it took 40 years to get there, with the entire crew and settlers in cryostasis for the duration of the travel. Keep in mind that while slower than light, the ship still moved at roughtly 1/9th of the light-speed.
- Stellaris: Back in the 21st Century, humanity constructed six STL ark ships and tossed them through an unstable wormhole. Generations later it turned out that one of them survived, colonized a moon in the Deneb System and formed the Commonwealth of Man, a xenophobic military dictatorship.
- Sword of the Stars: The Hivers are limited in FTL to a Stargate network, so they need to build slower-than-light robot ships with Ram-Augmented Interstellar Rockets to drop off gates to expand their Portal Network.
Webcomics
- Runaway to the Stars: When humanity was making preparations for colonization of bodies beyond the solar system, they planned to use Generation Ships and genetically engineered Space People to better tolerate the journey. However, these were immediately rendered obsolete when First Contact was made with bug ferrets, whose wormhole gate technology allowed for near-instantaneous travel across lightyears. However, starships are still STL; most time spent during space travel is getting to and from wormhole gates, which, for safety reasons, can't be placed too close to inhabited bodies.
- Schlock Mercenary:
- In the backstory (and the first few story arcs), the only viable method of FTL travel was F'sherl-ganni controlled "wormgates", which could be set to disgorge a replicator duplicate out the other end if the F'sherl-ganni decided to interrogate a luckless crew, which had to be reached STL (although 60% c was nothing for a warship). That is, up until Kevyn developed the "teraport", which uses conversion to a "standing gravity wave" and innumerable tiny wormholes to go anywhere in the galaxy — and is small enough to be used as a pocket teleporter — for a fraction of the cost in energy, which it gets by converting a few molecules of the target into energy (not enough to cause problems, but enough that a person feels noticeably lighter. The first Blind Jump burned Schlock's Porn Stash for fuel, as well). When it became clear the F'sherl-ganni tried to suppress development of the teraport to protect their monopoly on FTL travel, Kevyn's sister Breya responded by going open-source with it, unlocking a more casual style of interstellar travel. However, people do still need to use starships, as a way to block teraports from coming into where they're not wanted (say, a bank vault, government Black Site facility, or foreign/contested star system) was quickly discovered.
- In a later storyline, the Toughs meet a Solar Sail craft large enough to "gift wrap planets" crewed by robots who explain that they overthrew their creators and loaded them into a colony ship that they made from a gas giant by fitting it with an immense fusion rocketnote . Which they crashed.
Ennesby: They crashed a gas giant!
Tagon: You mean they crashed into a gas giant?
Ennesby: They did that too.
- In one story arc near the end of the comic's run, they encounter an STL ship with it's Living Gasbag crew dehydrated (their version of being frozen) for transit. On revival, the aliens reveal they know that FTL is possible, but it's more trouble than its worth (it turns out that teraporting annoys Dark Matter aliens into destroying planets because the "conversion into standing gravity waves" part harms them). One gasbag alien reveals this is his second or third time being revived so "modern" people can pick at his brains about it.
Websites
- Orion's Arm: One of the hard rules of the project is "no FTL drives", and even the wormholes that allow "shortcuts" need to be placed hundreds of Astronomical Units away from any planet or star. There are a wide variety of STL propulsion methods though, ranging from nuclear rockets to magsails propelled by particle beams and even Alcubierre Drives capable of instantly accelerating to near-light speed (but not exceeding).
Western Animation
- The Fairly OddParents!: In "Power Pals!", AJ convinces the titular antagonists to leave Earth to help a made-up planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. When Timmy asks what would they do once the heroes realize that they had been tricked, AJ says that Andromeda is millions of light years away. Cut to the elderly Power Pals in a spaceship decades in the future, still far from getting to Andromeda.
- Love, Death & Robots: Played with in "Beyond the Aquila Rift", based on the short story of the same name. Humans can use a Portal Network in space to simulate FTL travel even if, on paper, such is beyond what their ships alone can do. However, they underestimate just how far and fast portal travel can be: a single routing error sends the ship Blue Goose beyond the Aquila Rift and into the home of an Eldritch Abomination, who informs Captain Thom that even if it was somehow in her power to send him back, centuries on Earth have already passed.
- Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Moist Vessel", the Cerritos is called upon to help accelerate a Sleeper Starship from a species that's otherwise gone extinct, which is stocked with Programmable Matter intended for terraforming its destination.
Real Life
- Provided that the Alcubierre Drive doesn't pan out, this will ultimately be the fate of the human race if we are ever able to become a space-faring civilization. Light serves as the universal speed limit, and modern day scientists have explained that Time Dilation would affect any passengers onboard a ship the closer in speed they come to reaching it. It would still take numerous generations for humans just to reach the nearest star, but at least the trip itself won't feel like it took that long. And if there are stable wormholes that allow for Portal Network-style FTL, we'll have to go and find them to use them.