Basic Trope: Travel faster than light, usually in spaceships.
- Straight: Bob rides in a spaceship that can reach speeds of 1 light-year per hour.
- Exaggerated: The ship can teleport instantly to anywhere in the observable universe.
- Downplayed:
- In-System FTL
- Bob's ship achieves 95% of the speed of light, which is still massively faster than any vehicle in real life and has the potential for Casual Interplanetary Travel.
- It's not FTL, it just feels like it is because of Bob's distorted Frame-of-Referrence (for example, 0.7c is where Time Dilation perfectly balances out to feel like 1c to the passengers but won't leave Mission Control centuries in the past).
- Justified:
- The speed of light is faster, sometimes even infinite.
- Bob's spaceship uses futuristic, phlebotinum-powered non-Newtonian propulsion that can break the lightspeed limit. (See Analysis.Faster Than Light Travel for common methods)
- The spaceship doesn't travel at all. It tricks the universe into thinking the ship is already where Bob wants it to be.
- The device folds the empty space between "where it is" and "where Bob wants it to be" down to "about an hour of travel." Anything caught in the fold is, unfortunately, folded as well, but at least there's no running into asteroids on the way there.
- The drive is called the "Skip Drive" because it "skips" atop the crests of gravity waves, rather than going down the other side.
- The Jump Drive causes the ship to make a macro-scale quantum leap, and everyone knows that Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything.
- Inverted:
- A spaceship travels even slower than real-life cars.
- Everything travels faster than light except the ship.
- Subverted: It appears that a spaceship travels faster than light, but that's because of Time Dilation.
- Double Subverted: It turns out that spaceships can travel faster than light, but it's expensive to do so, and it wasn't deemed necessary for that specific journey.
- Parodied:
- Alex can fly at superluminal speeds by farting extremely powerfully.
- Ludicrous Speed ensues.
- The method of FTL runs on pure concentrated nonsense:
- It works by showing everyone a travelog of where they want to be and letting Mental Time Travel do the rest.
- It increases the local speed of light by spinning a spotlight really fast.
- The ship's engine and/or navigation equipment is partly integrated into a bistro, because the sums in a little Italian café always works out to be much bigger than the sums outside of a little Italian café.
- Zig Zagged: ??
- Averted: Sub-Lightspeed Setting
- Lampshaded: "Once, people said faster-than-light travel was impossible. But before that, they said the same about airplanes. Now both are part of everyday life."
- Invoked: Alice, who is very rich, funds the private research that leads to the invention of FTL travel, because of personal interest and/or the potential for profit.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied:
- Alice destroys Bob's FTL drives as well as her own as soon as she realizes that going faster than light is tearing the fabric of the universe apart.
- Discussed: "Captain, how does this ship travel faster than light?" cue Infodump
- Conversed: "Why do spaceships travel faster than light in science fiction when it's physically impossible?" "It's just a show."
- Implied: We see Bob on Earth, then one in-show day later, we see him on Proxima Centauri B, without any mention of his travel method.
- Deconstructed:
- Did you really think there wouldn't be consequences for breaking the rules of reality?
- The FTL method violates causality and causes the laws of physics to break down across the universe after a successful jump, effectively dooming the FTL starship and all of reality.
- FTL is possible, but because it is more or less fundamentally a form of Time Travel by its very causality-violating nature, any advanced interstellar civilization which developed it is almost guaranteed to end up retroactively erasing themselves from existence by accident, thus providing another solution to the Fermi Paradox.
- Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: you better be prepared to face the immense risks, dangers and costs of messing with the laws of physics, because they range from being destroyed by hostile natural phenomena unique to your FTL-space to opening the way for horrible, incomprehensible inhabitants there to subject you and your destinations to a Fate Worse than Death.
- The Universe sends Clock Roaches after any ship that uses FTL. Fool the Universe once, shame on you. Fool it twice...
- A miscalculation folds the location Bob was aiming for, resulting in it being squashed into a lump of neutronium rather than the Planet of the Week.
- Travelling faster than the speed of light is Awesome, but Impractical. While it could enable rapid long-distance travel, it would introduce significant challenges that require entirely new regulations, standards, and operational protocols. These would include specialised infrastructure to prevent collisions, highly precise navigation systems to avoid overshooting destinations, and a reliable large-scale energy supply to sustain such travel. That energy would also need to be produced efficiently and priced in a way that makes the system economically viable. Operators must be extensively trained and educated in using these travel systems.
- Did you really think there wouldn't be consequences for breaking the rules of reality?
- Reconstructed: Yes, but they can be mitigated.
- The FTL method used would not violate causality it involves tunneling through space-time between two locations and traveling through it at subluminal speeds. The impossibility of faster-than-light relative speed only applies locally.
- A wormhole is effectively a time-portal that bypasses travel time; from Now to Then going there, and from Then to Now coming back; with time flowing normally past either end (ex, it goes from Sol to Alpha Centaurii. It's also a bridge to 4.5 years in the future, when light would've gotten there, and 4.5 years back from that, plus the time Bob spent adventuring). Since there's no way to get information back to before Bob left (communications going through the portal would only go back 4.5 years to arrive "in real-time"), there'd be no paradoxes
- The universe is much more paradox-resistant than previously speculated. While you DO travel back in time, when you arrive reality literally prevents you from doing anything that could violate causality until you catch up chronologically. Or the drive will simply not make the jump at all until probability for paradox goes down to zero.
- "The HMS Troper's Reality-Bubble-Generator (RBG) Mark 41 is a refinement of the staple artificial real-space envelopes that protects the vessels travelling in FTL-Space from its hostile environment and hostile inhabitants. Whereas previous models still carries a substantial risk of causing a 'Realspace Incursion Event' inside starships and at the planets they leave or arrive at, the Mark 41's refinements through further understanding of the principles behind the Predecessors' ancient relic star-drives is expected to reduce these risks, already miniscule compared to the early days of FTL travel with Mark 1 to 15 RBG, by another order of magnitude at only a fraction of the costs in credit and energy previously required..."
- The FTL method used would not violate causality it involves tunneling through space-time between two locations and traveling through it at subluminal speeds. The impossibility of faster-than-light relative speed only applies locally.
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