It is the far future

interuniversal automatic stairway:

in universe ftl is impossible, so instead you translate into a parallel universe whose points in time and space relate with ours following a predictable pattern dictated by extrauniversal laws; you get off from earth into the alternative universe coordinates, wait for the universe to align with the other in the right way and/or move yourself to reach those coordinates then translate back.

thinking about it, it's like warp travel in 40k, but without chaos and daemons.

>Faster-than-light travel is possible but is a highly destructive process. Massive generators are required in order to sustain the protective measures for the duration of a journey at FTL speeds. This means that all FTL-capable ships are large and expensive.
>Despite this, being on board a ship going at FTL speed is hazardous for mundane humans. The symptoms are similar to that of severe decompression sickness and it's almost always fatal. The only away around this for mundane humans is heavily shielded cryonic preservation. The procedure of preparing a person for this sort of preservation takes a little over a week and the process of (safe) resuscitation takes up to a month, making it highly inconvenient.
>An expensive form of in utero gene therapy allows for the development of humans that are able to withstand the exposure to the elements involved in FTL travel, experiencing little more than vertigo. In addition, their physiology is adapted for interfacing with ship systems. They are vital on board FTL-capable ships that cannot rely on the decision-making of AI and require human input, such as military vessels, science vessels and cargo vessels that carry valuable contents. Attempts to breed with mundane humans always fails and never produces a live birth. They are capable of breeding with each other however, creating dynasties of pilots.
>FTL-capable ships are very expensive and someone that is able to pilot a FTL-capable ship without dying horribly is either a long-term investment and expensive or it's hereditary. As a result, you end up with bloodlines of pilots that act as the faces and the swords of isolated communities, putting them in a position of power as the sole couriers, merchants and guardians of their colonies and habitats.

Use naturally occurring faults in space time created by the interactions of massive gravity wells to create wormholes. The stronger the fault line, the better the wormhole.

Then probably get into a war with some space dolphins that use bullshit teleportation to move through the void.

Ideally i'd go for "turns out we found a way to make alcubierre/warp drives work cheaply with a minimum of exotic materials"

A bunch of gravity technobabble born out of the black holes and other great gravity wells in the galaxy. In practice, it behaves like a sea in space, with its weather and wind currents and waves and shit.

Smaller ships better learn to follow those currents, and get a good forecast of the warp weather before they go, lest they get thrown around and in the worst case torn apart. But a good pilot with a good navigator can ride the waves and get around really fast.

Bigger vessels, meanwhile, can push right through without a care of these currents, but they are obviously slower. In an adverse weather they will be the only ones that can just keep on going, but they can't take much advantage at all out of favorable winds.

As it turns out the universe is both a closed cycle and perfectly deterministic. Specifically, everything always happens exactly the same way every time, ad infinitum.

So FTL travel actually doesn't involve going faster than light at all. You simply program your ship to slowboat itself to your destination and generate a pocket of warped space-time once you arrive, while you enter a stasis pod. You then wait out the remaining lifespan of the universe in a pocket of artificially accelerated time. Once the next universe has aged to the equivalent point you started from, you get out of the pod and go about your business.

Ironically that's almost the opposite of how ships work in reality. Small craft reach their danger zone under less intense conditions compared to larger ships, but when a real mother of a storm rolls by they're actually much better off. They just get shoved around and pitched hard, which can be compensated for with certain hull designs and low windage, and just need to ride in the direction of the waves until it dies down. A long craft in very high seas is in danger of cracking in half if it ends up suspended between wave peaks, leaving air under the keel, or capsizing, which is infinitely less survivable on large craft than on small boats.

Literally going through hell.

5a. Someone on the space-internet decides to give you a futa body, now you spend out the rest of your new life as a voluptuous futa.

Bonus points
>shortstack
>everyone else on the planet is a futa

the universe rotates on itself on 2 points at a very high speed, all you have to do is to isolate your ship in a pivate spacetime folding to not get pulled along and then unwrap yourself once the place you want to visit rotates towards you

there's a but, the universe is symmetrical and you can't really know if you landed on the right slice

not that it matters or does it?

>not befriending the Liir

fucking scrub

This is what I go with as it seems the most likely outside of stable wormholes

So your consciousness is terminated and replicated every time you travel? Neat.

dunno. maybe your mental self is uploaded to the space internet as well? and if you dont make it over safely then a damaged you is uploaded to your new physical self

That's not how it works.

The Redefinition Drive

The drive tells a story about you to the universe where you are somewhere else, it's such a wonderful story that the universe is willing to overlook the small plothole of you not being where you were and moves you. It has the disadvantage of taking a highly variable amount of time for the Scribe Chargers to find inspiration so anywhere between 2 minutes to a day and everyone near your destination has a vague sense in the back of the mind of who just arrived.

FTL is impossible. Everyone takes expensive and slow relativistic ships everywhere.

Nonlinear quantum mathematics. Through the power of MATH, hyper-intelligent computers can calculate equations that can be applied to warp space around a ship. Of course, seeing as these equations are so complex that no human mind can fathom them and storing them permanently would require immense server power and burn out equipment, they need to be recalculated each time, which can take hours depending on the quality of the computer, the distance of the jump, and the size and material components of the ship

>He doesn't have even a basic negative mass fueled wormhole generator.

Look at this pleb.

Go play in traffic faggot

this sounds like a garbage young adult novel

I like how people who watched that series don't understand the joke. They just think that it is funny because memes(!), but futurama was a lot more clever than that.

It's actually a joke about the early response to general relativity, like, the actual Eisenstein theory. The joke in Futurama is that everyone is so sunk into their pre-existing notions of how the universe works that they can't accept that Farnsworth is literally just espousing an idea that has been around for more than a thousand years now, but in different terms. It's a joke about the fact that people are always going to be ignorant of concepts in science that are pretty fundamental regardless of the era. It's not funny because it's goofy, it is funny because it's actually obvious but nobody seems to grasp it in the far-flung future.

The warp drive creates a bubble of spacetime around the ship and a second entangled bubble at the destination point, and they swap places. It's just long-range teleportation. It's easier for site-to-site if it's between two teleportation machines, but it can be done without one if the ship has a powerful enough reactor to supply that kind of energy. As such, warp gates exist in major shipping lanes so that ships can travel between various nexus of gates to get swapped around the network.

I like what they do in Endymion after they lose their mcguffin instant teleport FTL. They have clerics embedded with these parasites that will no-shit reincarnate them from atoms with memories intact, and they just accelerate up to a sizable portion of the speed of light with big fuckoff engines and shit and their their crew be turned into red jelly only to reincarnate once the ship arrives at it's location.

Mankind discovers our simulation's console command and increases the speed of light x1000. FTL travel is still impossible but at this increased speed a fraction of the speed of light is still tens or hundreds of times faster than the current speed of light now.

FTL is powered by ORGASMS. At first, it was thought that women will finally lead human kind but in the end, NEETs who jack off 16 times a day were found to be more efficient. These NEETs eventually formed the Guild of Mastubrators which became one of the triumvate of the Imperium. The other two powers are The Chad Royal Family and The Sorority of St. Stacy.

The lizard psychic pope from a galaxy far far away ends his thousand - year golden age reign on the planet of the lizard psions by creating giant portals connecting sentient - occupied galaxies together.
>But how do they work?
Psychic power, fuck you. We space opera now, motherfuckers.

Wait. But in this case, space internet needs to be FTL itself. Right now we're limited to electron speed which is definitely not FTL. Halp.

holy shit.

Forbidden love between an Astromancer and a Lantern? And then for the climax or conflict, one of them is trapped in Subjective Space and they have to figure out a way for their love to work?

Einstein was wrong. Tesla developed a working interstellar drive based on electrogravitic principles back in the 1920s but the US government suppressed his work until its collapse in the year 21xx.

The universe is instantly replaced by something even stranger and more inexplicable.
There is evidence this has already happened several times

I actually read a book with this premise. Military ships harness the aggression and their crews. Merchant ships run on the bonds of family affect between the clan/crew. Scouts are powered by horny teens fucking into infinty

So your original self is destroyed and you are replaced with an exact copy of you. But it is not really you, isn't it?

What if souls exist? Does that replica of you have a soul? Probably not. Maybe your soul travels to that copy in an instant, provided you have been recreated immediately after you have been eliminated (in this scenario without cutting apart, just scanning), thus accomplishing faster than light travel?

But what about the people at point B? How did they get there in the first place, before this method was invented?

I like it.
Reminds me of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

What's a good explanation for certain areas of the galaxy no longer being accessible through FTL means?

They're surrounded by phenomena that rip ships out of FTL when they cross it?

Or there's a bubble of non-existence for those places if said FTL method is parallel dimension-hopping?

Ships "dip" into Fluidic Space, which is in fact a pocket universe approximately .01% the size of the universe. The ship thus uses Fluidic Space as a booster pad of sorts to go around the law of relativity (after all, they're not going faster than the speed of light, the Universe is just smaller.) Exiting Fluidic Space is quite dramatic, the ship emerging from nothingness with a creak and a groan as wispy tendrils of the partially luminescent blue-green of the space drifts off their ship.

Always wanted to figure out ways to add wakes, storms, currents, "sea" monsters and submarines (ships that can completely submerge) into this space.

Collective trips.
Everyone on board boosts a shit ton of exotic drugs.
Somedays/hours later you wake up ""close"" to your destination with the mother of all hangovers and probably pantless.

I like a pair of FTL systems - a gate system and a ship drive. The gate system is extremely fast, perfectly safe, and requires minimal energy from the ship using them, but it requires a pair of gates to use, and gates are massive, expensive to build, and basically immobile. The ship system is much slower, requires fuel, and occasionally things go wrong, but you can go anywhere with it.

Effectively, it creates a highway system, where you can travel anywhere in the network of large or important planets easily, but smaller planets or newly-settled systems are "off network" and rely on ships.

All the wormholes on the other side have closed. Nobody knows why.

teleporting between planets i understand correctly/?

mad

I've always wondered what happens if two ships with the same drive attempt to move simultaneously.

Space Cannons. The energy requirements for an FTL drive are too massive so people have to be launched cannonball style and either slow down the hard war, into a "giant cushion" or slow down the REALLY hard way on impact. It takes litteral seconds for someone to realise this can be used as a planet killing weapon, causing a cold war situation between any interstellar nation that rises.

Space-time has more "space" and "time" dimensions that we can actually perceive or commonly conceive.

FTL is achieved through taking a 'tangent' route through different space-time dimensions while putting the ship's crew in stasis. The ship may have travelled for millennia in its subjective time, but it arrives mere days or months after its departure in our common space-time set of dimensions.

Alternatively: large enough ships can just create their wormholes.

Alternatively: in the far future it is discovered that certain parts of light 'waves' actually move faster, potentially much faster, than normal lightspeed, by slipping through "quantum vacuums"; a physical body can achieve FTL speed with complex phasing technology that allows the entire body to remain a coherent set of particles while behaving like a light "wave", while a supercomputers makes it "phase" through a path that exploits quantum vacuum as much as possible.

Attempts to break the lightspeed barrier via a "hyperspace" at first dont seem to work - till they notice all the zepplins in earths atmosphere and realise they broke lightspeed In the wrong direction somehow.

>send sublight ship with cryo-capsule with wizard to target system
>he sets up a teleportation circle here when gets there

I liked Zone of the Ender's "Urenbeck Catapult".

Basically they shove tons of electricity into the setting's phlebotinum and also spin it at VERY fast at incredible hihg speeds.
There's something about compressed space mentioned, and the subject zooms forward where the catapult was pointed.

Main point is, you can use it to make jumps by having your ship's internal catapult shoot itself forward. Or tune it down a little and shoot stuff out of it.
The setting uses it for everything from cargo transport, FTL, and putting one in a pocket dimension so the main character's mech can flash step.
For some reason it's not used as a means of shooting projectiles, though one gun uses the same principles to shoot "compressed space", which I think makes physicists cry.

Hideo Kojima made it though so I guess we should be glad there's no bizarre rants about politics from cyborgs.

Seconds is ok, first could perhaps works, last one's an abhorrent mess of technobabble.

>not putting a time wizard on board
>not havnig him cast a spell so you retroactively arrived immediately after setting off

That's also an option. Teleport circle is cheaper, though.

Yeah, basically. But only planets with teleportation systems set up on or near them.

book name?

It's not good

There are two FTL systems in my setting. Slow, steady, cheap or instant, dodgey, and cost-prohibitively expensive. Each technology filling a purpose.

>Alcubierre Drive
A traditional warp drive that solves the problems of relatively by making local space-time move faster than light instead of the object. Used by almost all shipping and even most military ships. EM waves can be "bundled" into an FTL carrier wave, allowing faster than light sensors and communication. This means that ships aren't running into eachother on the space lames, but also means pirates can detect and intercept line ships. Has the feel of Firefly or Cowboy Bebop. The downside is that it still takes days, or weeks, to travel between locations. On the plus side, it's cheap enough that it's common to see personal craft and the occasional snub fighter have a dedicated FTL drive.

>Higher Dimentional Displacement Drive
A jump drive that solves the problem of relativity by "transporting" an object between two locations without changes in spatial inertia. By folding space-time along higher dimensional axis, two spacial points are made co-locational (take two points on a peice of paper and bend the paper over so the points touch), then the object "releases" from the one location and "grabs" the other before space-time is unfolded. Truly instantaneous but astronomically expensive. The higher dimensional inertial shifts can cause severe nausea or even miscarriages. Also has an increasing level of navigational inaccuracy based if used at extreme stellar distances. Used near exclusively by government special forces, with a few individual crafts used by top percentile megacorporations. Has the feel of Battlestar Galactica and MechWarrior. Derivative technology allows cheap instantaneous communications between planets (two fixed locations and EM waves instead of physical matter).

Chrono-spacial dynamic drives, coupled with darkmatter RAM-jets.

Essentially, just as we make a craft aerodynamic to break the sound barrier, via warping of relativistic fields through their interaction with gravity and EM frequencies, a spacecraft becomes chrono-spacially dynamic, allowing it to bypass the effects of relativity and accelerate effectively indefinitely! To decelerate, all that needs to be done is slowly power down the field and let relativity re-assert itself, introducing a 'drag' factor that brings the ship back to sublight velocities. Their extreme speed in inter-stellar space is powered by what are essentially space-age RAM-jets, sucking in ambient Dark Matter, converting it to energy and spewing it out the exhaust. The faster the craft goes, the more effective this process is, making it so there is actually a point where jumping to the next system over, may take longer than a much further journey, if only be a small margin.

Used together, this method reduces a journey of say, 470 light-years to a travel time of just over a year and a half.

Would this fuck with our day-to-day perception?

Ah, the Omega-4 Relay.

I honestly like the Mass Effect way. Massive Hubs that launch your ship through space.

As stars of a sufficient size rotate, they resonate. When two stars resonate on the same frequency at the same time, the matter at their strongest Lagrange points undergoes a kind of quantum exchange. Anything at the Lagrange of Star A immediately appears at the Lagrange of Star B, and vice-versa.

A spaceship, properly equipped, can cause its hull to resonate at a sympathetic frequency, allowing it to become part of the exchange without being torn apart. The crew of the ship at Star A must wait until the moment is right, and then must engage their resonator. A moment later they'll find themselves at Star B.

Stars will sometimes resonate with more than one star, or they will only resonate with one star. The window of exchange is often very brief, and if you miss it, you'll need to wait hours, days, or even weeks for another chance, depending on the sidereal rotational speed of the stars involved. A star will often resonate with different locations at each pole, so thorough exploration is necessary to properly map your location. As stars age and slow down, they often lose connections - as the rotational period is already so brief, there's no telling when an old connection could be lost, and a new one established.

Or to put it another way:

Some kind of mysterious signal that makes the ship's computer drop it out of FTL and not engage it when in range. Weirdly enough it infects all computers regardless of what language they use.

Scouts by Nobilis Reed

How about some kind of hyperspace catapult? Insert ship, pick a target, and launch it through hyperspace with just enough energy that it coasts to a stop and reenters realspace at its destination. Incredibly fast, but one way, and dangerous as fuck if you haven't gotten close enough to a system to find a clear landing zone.

Your spaceship has a machine that bullies reality into agreeing that you're actually where you want to be. Cosmic wedgies, great spiral swirlies and purple nebula nurples.

It would break physics. Everything from GPS satellites to the chemistry of gold would change.

Realistically speaking, there's not really any drag in space for that to work the way you're envisioning. At least, not without bouncing off dozens of gravity wells Third Rock From The Sun intro style. Also going 'really fast' doesn't get you through the lightspeed barrier, only up to it.

It's not bad for a space opera though.

Lagrange points don't have strengths, they're simply points where all the relevant stuff adds up to exactly zero.

They aren't somethign any celestial body can have on their own either. They are something you get when one body orbits another. The sun or the Earth on their own doesn't have any, but the interaction between the sun and the earth creates one set of them, and the interaction between the earth and the moon create another set.

...

Natural routes in hyperspace between star systems. I don't like the Stargate version of hyperspace where you can enter it anywhere and travel where you like. It takes the strategy out because ships can just appear anywhere. With natural routes, choke points can be created, and fleets are forced to go from system to system rather than just straight to the capital. Routes may not always go where you want. For example, planet A may be right next to planet B, but the route loops around planet C and planet D before it reaches planet B. Artifical routes can be created by placing probes in hyperspace, but are incredibly expensive to maintain. Entering hyperspace is not possible near planets, stars and the like because high levels of gravity strengthen the barrier between realspace and hyperspace. Hyper wakes frequently appear along well-travelled routes, particularly on artifical routes, as large numbers of ships entering hyperspace temporarily weakens the barrier separating it from realspace. Hyper wakes are windows directly into hyperspace that have the unfortunate effect of preventing hyperspace travel within a large radius around it. This occurs when hypermatter particles (The particles which make up hyperspace) leak into realspace. Like antimatter, hypermatter releases energy when it comes into contact with matter. The amount of energy produced by this reaction is so great that it destabilises hyperspace, creating a shadow around the hyper wake that prevents ships from using their hyperdrives. Hyper wakes dissapate naturally, but the time is takes depends on how powerful it is. Depending on how many ships have travelled along a specific route, a hyper wake could last anywhere from an hour to a year, and may cut off a route entirely. Ships are encouraged to take alternate routes for this reason, and those who can afford to are encouraged to construct their own hyper routes.

I'm aware of all of this, I just explained it poorly. As a storytelling mechanic, it's mostly a means of creating tension through windows of opportunity - you only have brief windows to hit your mark and get away, and the next one might be hours from now.

I have submarines in my setting. They use a phase drive (A modified hyperdrive) to partially phase then into hyperspace. Because the ship is partially in realspace and partially in hyperspace, it can't be detected by either realspace or hyperspace sensors. Unfortunately, this means it can't fire or use its sensors while it has it's phase drive active. All ships carry probe droids that periodically leave the ship, scan the space around it, and report back with the data, which partially offsets this. Sensor scopes that extend through the phase bubble also exist, but they have a very short range, and can be detected if you are close enough.

Age old discussion, indeed a good bait. Yes, the person who is transported dies. Then they're substituted by ideal copy, up to the point of the copy thinking they're original. No difference from the outside perspective but huge ramifications from the standpoint of the person transported up to the point that people would likely not use this mode of transport at least for themselves - after all, what's the point of going anywhere if you won't be alive to experience it, just letting a copy of you do it in your place?

Different user, but I'd maybe drop the Lagrange aspect.
Stars connecting to other stars is basically space magic, we don't need to understand shit about the mechanics just that it works and impacts the setting. Introducing the real world term however adds just enough actual science that it muddies everything up.

Maybe have it so you have to physically fly into the star, at least for some Resonance Gates, if you want tension. If you fuck it up, you fuck it up bad.

M8, you do know acceleration is different than going at a constant velocity right?

Time dilation technology.
Somehow speed up or slow down time around the ship relative to the rest of space. They seem to move faster than light, but in actuality they are moving at regular speed. Might also need cryostasis and autopilot.

None. All ships are generation ships piloted and overseen by elves caring for the shorter-lived races who can't make it in one generation.

Magic maps. No wait, hear me out it's not that stupid. Maybe it is but whatever.

Ancient magic maps, showing the stars and planets. Parchment and vellum over paper, though the latter exists too. Who made them? How do they work? Fuck knows. But they're worth their weight in space bucks.
To use one, you first need to be able to read the clusterfuck of symbols and lines trying to explain three dimensional space on a two dimensional plane. And then you place a token denoting your ship on the map, and move it where you want to be.
That's basically it.
The token has to be pretty accurate, and made of the same stuff as the ship, ideally made out of a piece of hull. And it must include something of the captain, usually a drop of blood.

With map based movement, you can't move further than your map shows, and accuracy dimishes with larger scale maps. If you find a map that only has one star system, you can park yourself in orbit easily. It yours shows a spiral arm, you're doing pretty good if you can get inside a system reliably.
Ships need star-charts, a cartographer and ship token to move. You can make a new token with time. You can make a guess without a cartographer. Losing charts is death.

Players might find a star-chart that contains stars outside the boundaries of known charts, tokens for ships they really shouldn't have the tokens for, suddenly need to hire a new cartographer when theirs dies of space-scurvy. All kinds of fun.

Bonus points if someone can justify candles and compasses (both kinds) being used in navigation instead of computers.

Oh yeah, forgot to say; you need to know exactly where you are to put the token down on the map, then move it along the map. So you sort of move at the speed as your navigator's hand and the scale of the map he's using.
Stops people just remote-controlling any ship they've got tokens for, but doesn't stop a particularly wily party from finding a way to hijack a ship.

I like it. Bonus points if ships use solar sails, Treasure Planet style.

Space battles are like submarine battles, where it's a one hit kill even with the biggest ships out there and it's all about maneuvering space

Hell, why not? Civilian vessels have massive golden sails to catch starlight and feed their capacitor banks.
Military vessels look like modern naval vessels, solar sails aren't worth the space while tucked away out of fire.

Unless of course the charts can only be read with starlight, in which case every ship needs sails...

Idea: ships can "sink" into deeper levels of FTL. They cover less distance this way, but can strike into adjacent upper layers of FTL.
So ships phase through the various layers of FTL, trying to predict what layer their opponent will be and when to have a torpedo or mine waiting for them.

Depends on if the system is occupied or not.

Ship-based "Warp" drives are kind of clunky and shitty, and at their best only get you to 11x the relative speed of light, so we're limited to years-long trips within our local stellar cluster.

On the other hand, once you have people there, or at least a legion of self-replicating robots, they can build the other end of a "Wormhole" (Not really scientifically accurate, since it works on the same principles as the Warp Drive, but fucking people man) and you can build another one in your star system and if they line up (the common pop-science simile is trying to line a needle on earth up with a needle on the moon using a sledgehammer) then they can warp the entire space between them (this requires shitloads of energy and grav lensing from a nearby gas giant, so systems without can't do it) and do up to 25x light speed.

Because when there's only three planets in your setting none of them can be planets of hats and I fucking hate that trope.

Space travel can only be done at near-light speed at best, but time travel in a fixed point in space is possible.
To get to a distant star system, you have to go to an empty patch of space where they were centuries ago, then time travel backwards until you end up back in their system.

It involves and awful lot of math, and is over all pretty miserable.

if you sent a six inch hitler over space internet, once his clone forms would you fuck with him?

Well, aren't our cells replaced at such a rate that we can say that we "die" and are "replaced" every time we sleep?

>less than 3 years until the collapse

no

there's always some continuity
we can make hypotheses on this being the reason brain cell don't get replaced that often

Neurons don't get replaced.

> what is quantum entanglement?

There's this stuff that's generated from extremely difficult particle physics called skipmatter. A ship can use skipmatter in it's drive, cling on to it and be transported to skipspace where you can use regular engines but you travel MUCH MUCH further when you eventually get back to realspace. The more skipmatter your ship can generate, the longer you stay in skipspace, the longer distance you can travel per jump.