What are ways to have faster than light travel in a space opera setting besides warp travel, hyperspace, teleportation, and stargates?
>>47042755
"Space lanes" are fairly common, and featured in Star Ruler 2 I believe. Basically you drill some kind of go fast hole between systems with a sublight ship and then any ship can move FTL through the lane.
>>47042842
Naturally occurring spacelanes.
Artificially occurring spacelanes that degrade and have to be erected and maintained.
Stutter-teleportation, used to teleport a vessel a few centimeters thousands of times a second. Faster in deep space, away from gravity wells and more intensive requisite calculations.
Flock-warp, that tosses up a warp-bubble and goes faster the more ships you have inside said warp bubble.
Acceleration gates that gun you for a couple lightyears at FTL speeds, necessitating railways of acceleration gates be built in deepspace.
Folding space-time so that two different points in the universe overlap and you travel the distance instantly like in Dune. Unlike a lot of other FTL methods in sci-fi this is is allowed by our current understanding of physics.
>>47042893
Playing Sword of the Stars I see.
You can't go faster than the speed of light, that's why scientists raised the speed of light in 2208
>>47042755
Wormholes able to be expanded using ordinary matter are found, however they're extremely rare and there are only a hand full per solar system if that. Everything else is done sub lightspeed.
>>47042755
>SG-1 over Cowboy Bebop
Here's your (You).
>>47042755
Macross has 'space folding' as their FTL system of choice.
Basically, you warp spacetime and create a bubble of space around your ship. Then, you select a target area of space that you want to be in. The bubble of space you are currently occupying, and an equally sized area at the target destination, swap locations.
In space, this is functionally the same as teleportation aside from a few specific instances. but in the show, the very first time it is used is from the surface of a planet because they don't know how it works yet. The result was an island, and some of the ocean around it, ending up floating near pluto. Lots of people died.
I, personally, like the idea of using an absolutely massive supercomputer to calculate pinching together space around the ship in order to create a sort of temporary spacelane, dramatically shrinking the distance that the ship actually moves through. However, these calculations have to make a bunch of predictions and assumptions, and as soon as one of those proves false the corridor gets interrupted and you end up floating back in unmodified space. From there, you have to recalculate the next leg of your trip.
So short trips between two nearby systems can probably be made in one or two 'jumps', but the longer you are trying to go, and the more shit in between you and it, the more likely you are to have to recalculate on the way.
Pirates and naval forces will set up artificial gravity mines in space specifically to fuck up navigation through that area and force people passing by to drop out of FTL so they can be intercepted.
Calculating your next jump is an immensely complex and time consume process, which can take hours to days to complete. After that, the jump itself can be done in a couple hours or less. In theory you could cross the galaxy in a week, but that would require a 'perfect jump', which is a pipe dream.
>>47043312
>Outlaw Star that low
>SGU below Atlantis
Seriously, I'm saying this as a diehard SG1 fan that went into SGU with the full intent to hate it: The show is actually not that bad.
>>47042755
Riding Gravity Bubbles
But honestly, other than Going Really Damn Fast, Going Really Damn Fast In Another Dimension or Taking A Shortcut, there really aren't that many options. The interesting part is the implementation. Space Lanes? Folding Space? Does it still take really long? Does relativity apply? I really really love Gunbuster just for the Time Fuckery.
>>47042964
fuck you Farnsworth your version FTL is basically just making the rest of the universe around your ship move really fast
>>47042755
You just go really, really fast
>>47044477
I can second this. It always works for me.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a plane to catch.
>>47044143
SGU is way too slow to become good and it also have a problem of trying to attract new audience at the expense of pre-existing. In the end, they gave up and made it proper Stargate, but it was too late.
Would what Mass Effect did qualify as its own thing? It basically turns matter into tachyons.
But in principle, it's warp.
>>47042755
I got pissed at my players once and threw a type of FTL at them and refused to explain how it worked and made it purposefully inconsistent as fuck. I called it the "Slide Whistle" and it was invented by an insane musician. Any attempts at figuring it out resulted in insanity. They were produced by automated factory designed by the resulting insane engineers.
Your external travel time was completely random (I literally rolled a d100) regardless of the distance traveled, but it was instant for everyone inside the ship.
>>47042755
Paint your ships really, really, really red?
>>47044741
Da red ship might go fast, but red wavelenght goes even fasta. Learn physics, boi.
>>47042755
Infinite Probability Drive
