Do you prefer FTL to be stolen/scavenged from ancient aliens...

Do you prefer FTL to be stolen/scavenged from ancient aliens, or just a scientific discovery that any species soon makes after achieving space-flight?

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So how did the ancient aliens discover FTL?

>inb4 "Even older aliens, stupid!"

Discovered by combining two species' specific outlook on physics and technology, unavailable to either of them individually.

Bargain with the space satan.

Individual discoveries seems like the safe default.

If you have some specific direction you want to take the old alien tech thing in, sure, go ahead. If it's good it'll be good. Otherwise you probably shouldn't bother.

Do it the way Stellaris/Sword of the Stars does it. Many paths to the same result, often with typical outcomes.

Warp along ftl lines
Gate jumping
Hyperdrives
Interdimensional jumping
Etc

I prefer FTL not to exist.

Because it makes my fucking brain hurt.

How the fuck would a universe without causality work?
Or how the fuck would a universe with time travel work?

That's why I stick to good old spacetime bending/worm holes.

That would be cool, Stellaris is the only one I know of that uses multiple methods for FTL.

Technically our universe has time travel if you get close enough to a black hole.

Time travel into the future isn't really time travel.

That's just going really fast.

It's older aliens all the way down

Larry Niven's approach was to have the existence of a hyperdrive be well-known to humans, something used by ancient aliens billions of years ago but which hasn't been re-invented.

The reason is that hyperdrive depends on physics in very, very flat space far away from any mass sources. Unexpected discoveries that you won't blunder into unless you spend most of your time at the furthest reaches of your solar system or beyond.

So in Known Space, Niven's humans end up buying the secret of hyperdrive from aliens called the Outsiders, beings who exist mostly due to the chemistry of liquid helium and evolved eons ago at kuiper-belt distances from their sun. They don't use hyperdrive themselves for a number of reasons, but once they figured the physics out they made a practice of selling it to races who were unlikely to ever develop it themselves.

I don't really have a preference when it comes to whether humans invent or acquire hyperdrive. It depends on the kind of setting you're building and both can be cool. But if you're going to go down the road of buying it from aliens, this is a nice way to do it without making them Precursor cliches or hyper-advanced.

FTL is not time travel unless you're really bad at math, and it doesn't violate causality unless you're a philosophy major with too much time and alcohol on your hands.

Also, spacetime bending/worm holes _are_ a type of FTL travel, though if you believe Hawking, Worm holes are also a possible means of actual time travel, which means they violate your own rule of "don't make my brain hurt".

>So how did the ancient aliens discover FTL?

Aliens who haven't even been born yet going back in time to the start of the universe to escape the inevitable "big whimper" at the end of time.

Magic.

>FTL is not time travel unless you're really bad at math

This is what people who have never drawn a Minkowski diagram actually believe.

FTL = time travel is trivial.

If you really must have FTL in a relativistic setting, a directed graph (or Visser radiation, if you believe that meme) can be set up to maintain causality inside the network. But someone in-setting could simply build a network that breaks it.

I like it pseudo-Mass Effect style. FTL is impossible, travel between systems at any reasonable speed has to be accomplished with existing gates created by a long-extinct species of alien through technology so advanced it seems like magic.

ever see event horizon user? Like that.

>They don't use hyperdrive themselves for a number of reasons, but once they figured the physics out they made a practice of selling it to races who were unlikely to ever develop it themselves.
I can't explain exactly why, but I like this.

FTL exists in ME, it just still has travel speed, making gates and their instantaneous travel interesting. Gates just link clusters of systems together, they're not in every system.

>FTL
Ugh.

Fuck off.
Thanks pretentious-kun, your own opinions are soooo much better. ugh.

>Ugh

I this the stupid thing to do now when someone posts an acronym?

Makes me baka desu 4 real.

I just combined a bunch of things and called it done.

Once you find a way to mass produce the FTL powering crystals, you are basically in the clear.

Only problem is that scientists are still working on understanding it. They know more or less how to get it to work 99.999% of the time, but they also found out, that I'm smaller sizes but altering the shape, you can basically use them as Catalysts to perform the settings magic equivalent. HOWEVER, each Catalyst is tied to its ability. If you want to go full Wizard, you will have to watch out for the Fashion Police, who have open orders to shoot you on sight for being so gaudy.

The Outsiders were pretty cool. Totally harmless but also very, very advanced. Their biology made them not a threat to anyone, and also gave them a very different environment so they had a whole different tech tree.

They also invented a reactionless drive. It was up for sale, but so expensive that no race was able to afford it until very late in Niven's setting, when the (also incredibly advanced and wealthy) Puppeteers bankrupted themselves buying it.

Niven's known space stories are fading into history, which is sad because they're fucking amazing science fiction. And they came just as the New Wave of the 60's with their literary + scientifically illiterate style had spent itself out. His fascinating stories resurrected science fiction and were fantastic both to read and to think about.

None of the above.

>Minkowski diagram

See "philosophy majors with too much time and alcohol on their hands".

Travel from point A to point B tales X seconds. Travelling back from B to A also takes X seconds. Upon returning to point A, X*2 seconds has passed. It doesn't matter that you can wait ten minutes and watch yourself arrive and depart from point B with a telescope, you have not travelled in time any more than someone who exceeds the speed of sound has travelled in time when they stop and hear themself shout really loud "over there".

Fuck off, learn some fucking physics faggot.

Faster than light travel either means you can travel through time, or that causality no longer exists.

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php

>The Outsiders were pretty cool
That is simultaneously a massive understatement, and a pretty good pun.

>you have not travelled in time any more than someone who exceeds the speed of sound has travelled in time when they stop and hear themself shout really loud "over there".
YOU GODDAMN MONGOLOID CUNT!

THAT'S STILL INFORMATION TRAVELLING THROUGH TIME!

STILL
TIME
TRAVEL

> moronic caps-lock ranting

And you're an inbred half-wit.

Time travel of that nature is one-way, doesn't violate any laws of physics or causality, and you're doing it right now, this message was typed in at a time before you saw it, and *WHOOO* you're seeing it at a later time!

> OH NOES CAUSALITY AM BROEKN!

That couldn't possibly have happened! Clearly you're just imagining this whole thing while your brain sits in a jar on someone's desk, anything else would be a violation of physics!

Well, then we've already proven time travel is possible, and in fact engage in it regularly.

Then literally everything is time travel.

Could you please send me next week's lottery numbers next time you go fly, user? I could really do with the extra cash.

I want these retarded space opera faggots out.

Yeah, that'll show 'em. Don't address anything in their post, just call them all retards and faggots.

You're just imagining us user, communication is impossible, so we don't really exist. You should probably see a therapist about that, but they don't really exist either. I guess that means you should imagine one.

>i can link atomic rockets so that means im smart!!!!1
not the user you are responding to but you are still retarded

>go to a planet at 1,1 speed of light
>turn around
>go back to earth at 9,9 speed of light
>spot exact same ship heading your way
>blow it up

Congratulations, you just successfully travelled through time AND caused a time paradox! Congratulations!

>space operafags are the problem
No, the problem is you, you mong

>spot exact same ship heading your way
>try to blow it up
>realize it's just the light from your ship and not actually your ship
>realize you're retarded for trying to blow yourself up and thinking it would work to begin with

People who can't do a Lorentz transformation are subhuman.

You wouldn't listen to a creationist talking about biology or an antivaxxer talking about medicine, why listen to someone who denies multiplication and division about math?

I like how EVE Online and Stars Without Numbers does it.

You circumvent the FTL = Time Travel problem by submarining through an alternate dimension to the location you want to go rather than actually trying to accelerate past the speed of light.

>I watched an 8 minute Khan Academy video so I think I know better than Stephen Hawking

I'm going to make a wild leap and guess you haven't taken a class in modern physics?

>You wouldn't listen to a creationist talking about biology or an antivaxxer talking about medicine, why listen to someone who denies multiplication and division about math?
I wouldn't listen to a retard on a Mongolian porn sharing website who's convinced that FTL is possible when ALL physicists in the universe are certain it is impossible either.

It was unintentionally brilliant, thanks for pointing that out.

Scientific discovery, but something so complicated and exotic that it's impossible to use it for anything else than information. For example you would need to make an Eistein-Rozen bridge using two artificial black holes made only of pairs of entangled particles and using monthly output of the Sun you could open that wormhole wide enough to send photons through and it would collapse after 13.7 picoseconds. You couldn't travel faster than light, but you could warn a planet on the other side of your galaxy that rebel forces are exterminatusing you.

Just curious, what are you thinking of when you say "FTL"? Are you thinking of a ship that physically moves faster than light? Or are you thinking of a method of travel in which the ship arrives sooner than it would take light to travel that distance unaided? Because it seems like you're thinking the former while everyone you're arguing against is thinking of the latter

That doesn't circumvent it. If you had a fantasy Newtonian universe like Spelljammer, or a science fiction Newtonian universe like the Culture, and they were parallel to a relativistic universe; plane shifting from RL to magicland, going FTL there, and plane shifting back still results in time travel here.

FTL = time travel has nothing to do with the details of how the plot device works. It's an inherent trait of a relativistic universe.

>when ALL physicists in the universe are certain it is impossible

So you've met them all and asked them in person? 'Cause I've asked a few who've said otherwise, I work with them on a daily basis. There's a difference between "impossible" and "would require more energy than earth can currently produce". It's subtle, but it's there.

Traveller does it also. Actually sometimes it has 6 fast lanes in Subspace.

>'Cause I've asked a few who've said otherwise, I work with them on a daily basis.
And my dad works for Nintendo.

You can shut up and stop being a massive autist, time travel-kun

Relax normie. It's ok to learn high school science.

>Whine about causality
>Use wormholes

>normie
/b/ is that way, faggot

I don't like FTL.
It's absence improves games.

>Travel from point A to point B tales X seconds. Travelling back from B to A also takes X seconds. Upon returning to point A, X*2 seconds has passed.
Holy fuck lemme break it down Barney style for your dumb ass
>Jimmy hops on a spaceship going at 99.whatever% c
>John stays on Earth and waits 3 years
>from John's perspective Jimmy ages about 6 weeks
>from Jimmy's perspective John ages about 2 days
>John FTL travels to Jimmy and now shares Jimmy's frame of reference
>John looks back at Earth and Jimmy tells him it's rotated about twice
>John FTL travels back to Earth
>John arrives back on Earth 3 years minus 2 days before he left and beats himself to death with a baseball bat

Ah, so you fall into the "terminally bad at math" category.
Got it.

I read this post with the mental voice of a very angry drill sergeant.

10/10 would get mentally yelled at again.

Not if they're using a wormhole to travel. They could reach a destination any distance away while from their own frame of reference only travelling a few feet.

>understand special relativity = terminally bad at math

Wormholes aren't Aperture style portals

"Understand special relativity" doesn't involve losing track of frames of reference in your own example. That's called "being bad at math".

I haven't lost track of any frames of reference fuck tard.

>tfw you realize a traversable Kerr metric would need to be multiple AU outside the solar system to remain stable so even FTL interstellar travel still takes years

>Totally harmless
They fucking weren't. They could accelerate from a standstill to nearly lightspeed INSTANTLY, and back down just as instantly. They sold engines to the Puppeteers that could move planets, or shatter them into gravel if used wrong.

Eric Christian, who works for NASA with a doctorate in physics and a major in astronomy, describes wormholes as "a short cut, so that something that was far away is much closer".

But hey, I'm sure you know way more than he does.

My last Space Campaign Starred Spaceman Spiff and his ship was powered by Imaginanium-infused Cardboardium.

Actually, Humans used Colony ships and settled close enough together that the game didn't need FTL,
Traveller without Jump Drives.

Yeah you fucking brainlet moron. "Much closer" doesn't mean "instantaneous transportation."

>I just confused an abstraction for reality

I never claimed it did. I only claimed that your arrival at the destination would be sooner than it would take light to travel that distance unaided (i.e. the definition of "FTL")

Sounds like someone forgot the Kzinti lesson.

>man dumbs down math for innumerates
>innumerates turn around and tell other people who actually read the math it's not that complicated

Social trivia: the IQ communications gap is real and kicks in at a 2 standard deviation difference.

Ask your next wormhole teacher about mass balancing versus nonlocality.

You said "traveling a few feet" which is wrong.

It's like you were dropped on your head repeatedly as a child.

Jimmy hops in a spaceship going at 99.whatever%c

John stays on earth and waits 3 years

Jimmy's experience of that time is 6 weeks.

From John's experience, looking in a magical telescope, Jimmy has aged (and moved) very slowly the whole time, and looks about 6 weeks older after three years.

From Jimmy's experience, again looking in the magical telescope, John was moving very fast indeed, and got older.

John then undertakes the same distance journey at FTL speeds, and finds that Jimmy is very angry that he wasted all that fuel on a slow-boat ship, but hey, those three years still happened, even if he only felt like it was 6 weeks so what are you gonna do?

From Jimmy's perspective, earth has rotated three years worth of times in six weeks, because earth wasn't moving with him.

From John's perspective, it's only turned about twice since he left earth, but then there was also that three years of turns that happened while he was building his FTL ship.

John FTL travels back to earth, and arrives four days after he left, then three years later can watch himself arriving at Jimmy's place in the magical telescope, because that's how long the light takes to arrive.

>What is hyperbole

U R being quite rude u know. It's uncalled for. U should expect brainlets on Veeky Forums.

What? That's not relevant here. My point is that the Outsiders aren't harmless because there could be a rock heading towards your homeworld RIGHT NOW at near-lightspeed, or could be one at any point if there's an outsider ship around.

But the light of an object is not that object. If you travel to a location with FTL, you are at that location and not where you left. It may LOOK that way, but you are not in two places at once.

I watched "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" once and wondered whether that technology could be used for something else. So I came up with Szalinski Drive.
You have to make an assumption about the way the shrinking and enlarging beams work: that the action (shrinking/enlarging) is "centered" on the point of contact of the beam with a body, which works from the outside observer reference frame. Then you make a long spaceship. On one end of the spaceship you place the enlarging beam. On the other end - shrinking beam. When you want to go fast, you engage the enlarging beam, which makes your ship really big. Like, millions of AUs big. Your ship somehow doesn't get crushed by gravitational forces (just like the giant kid could move at all). Since the enlarging effect is centered on the point of contact of the enlarging beam, the other side of your ship is now millions of AUs away. Then you engage the shrinking beam and return to normal size. However, to an outside observer the shrinking beam made contact with your ship millions of AU away and after shrinking, the beam is still in that exact spot in space. In result you have "moved" through space without actually moving. Since you had zero velocity, there was no problem with breaking the speed of light. Enlarging and shrinking fast enough could make you "move" arbitrarily fast.

Nobody said it isn't complicated, but we're talking about sci fi here.

All travel takes place in spacetime, not only space.

Travel back in time to before you left, and now there are two of you. Loop until there are as many clones as you need.

This is like when dumb people talk about rotating a lightyears long pole in space. It's wrong.

>From Jimmy's experience, again looking in the magical telescope, John was moving very fast indeed, and got older.
No you moron, that's the opposite of "relativity". Jimmy's and John's frames of reference are equal and unprivileged. From Jimmy's perspective Earth is moving away at 99.fuck% c and fucking slows down. It doesn't speed up just because you feel like the Earth is special.

10/10 user

best method of ftl i've seen yet

No, dipshit, that's not how physics works. Have you actually read A Brief History Of Time?

The Kzinti Lesson:

No matter how much science you put in your Science Fiction, there will Always be catgirls.

if dark energy is constantly injecting space in between everything y cant light energy be used to suck space out in front of you're ship and decrease the distance you need to travel

Dark energy ain't the opposite of light u dumbass.

no-one is saying you can't do an alcubierre drive.

just that, if it's used in a realistic setting, you'll never lose a lottery again.

Is this a troll post? Why would you recommend a history book when you're talking about physics?

Listen nigga, I you have literally faith in science but the speed of light is merely the fastest speed we've observed, it doesn't mean it's the possible faster speed that will ever be reachable.

I'm ; and you're the troll.

A Brief History Of Time was cutting edge 30 years ago. It's understandable that since I'm simplifying the hell out of math, there will be friendly fire.

Not sure whether the people who deny temporal cloning are for serious though. It's a bit of a given once you admit information transfer.

Think of the speed of light in vacuum as the bandwidth cap of the universe. Light happens to go that speed because that's the fastest anything can go.

Maybe he is pointing out that the book doesn't mention anyone with dozens of clones.

You mean that's because our current technology can only reac that maximum cap, likewise we can only observe a limited part of the particles that make universe and how they interact.

See it under another light, if you were to explain to a medieval man that you can easily split the atom he wouldn't believe it because they didn't even develop the instruments to observe atoms and of course our science is based around what we can actually observe and rules are made around that, that is to say that rules of physics are bound to change the more we discover like quantum physics throw out of the window "classic" physics.

>

Generally in science you know or suspect something is possible long before you do it. We knew fission was possible before nukes. Everything we know about information transfer and physics in general says "you can't do this" when we look at FTL.

There are many people pursuing theories to get to a FTL drive, mostly they just end up with the conclusion that we don't have yet the tech to build such a thing.