Bring the Main Drive on-line!

From a suggestion by guido on another thread, what're your favourite ways of exceeding the speed of light?

Bob Shaw once commented that he always tried to think of a different way of exceeding light speed in every novel. In Who goes here? (which was admittedly a comic novel), he came up with a matter transmitter with an effective range of only about 60 feet. So you built a 60-foot-long spaceship, put one matter transmitter at the front, another at the back, and had the thing transmit itself to itself in sixty-foot jumps all the way to the stars. More seriously, in his earlier The palace of eternity, BoSh gave a hazy but very elegiac description of 'butterfly ships' using tachyons to exceed light speed.

David Langford in the space eater had a nasty matter transmitter with an effective portal radius of about 1.5 centimetres, and the problem was to get a starship and crew through this to persuade a lost colony at the other end that they were really in a ship with an ftl drive, so as to get them to stop using matter transmitters that had the side effect of making nearby stars go nova. The practical considerations of getting crew through this were REALLY nasty.

Trek has actually got quite detailed in their descriptions of how the warp drive is supposed to work - blame those extensive writers' guides - but there's a lovely story from the set of TNG, where Pat Stewart innocently asked one of the producers about this and was treated to the canonical explanation. After about ten minutes his eyes began to glaze over, and he said "It's much easier than that to make a ship go faster than light. All you do is say 'Engage'."

Frederic Brown had a short story where the scientists worked for years to break through into hyperspace in the hope that they could shorten interstellar voyages, only to find that when they did enter hyperspace, the speed of light there was even slower than 186,000 miles per second...

I quite fancy a big elastic band. Mind you it would have to be a bloody BIG elastic band!;)

In Mindbridge, Joe Haldeman has a method involving teleporting from a transmitter. Only stars beyond a certain range are reachable; the explorer snaps back to the transmitter after a time determined by energy expenditure and distance; anything brought back from the destination will then snap back to its origin after a like time passes; energy goes up and time on station goes down with increasing distance. Coordinating departures and arrivals at the expensive transmitter is a split-second, life and death affair - can't let two arrivals occur at the same time. Planets where expedition time is greater than 9 months can be colonized by gestating and delivering a baby on that planet, who will then stay when her mother snaps back to earth. All very complicated.

3> Amazing. I really liked Mindbridge, but I had forgotten all those details.

I liked the work around in Tau Zero where the time slowing down when you approach the speed of light, as explained by the theory of relativity, allowed the travelers cruise enormous distances. Others on LT have dissed the level of expertise in the writing but as I remember from the reading years ago I enjoyed the introduction and elaboration of the science concepts. The book postulated time dilation increased exponentially perhaps as you approached the line marking the speed of light asymptotically.

At sub light speeds and possibly FTL speeds it takes just as much time to slow down as it does speed up - an interesting fact I gleaned from Physics of Star Trek I believe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

5> there's a short story by George Gamow about a world where the speed of light is about walking speed, but they can get anywhere as fast as they like because of time dilation...

In Bios by Robert Charles Wilson, FTL travel requires building elaborate machinery inside an asteroid. The spacecraft is placed in the center of the machinery, and nuclear explosions are set off around the asteroid's surface, destroying it and the machinery but supplying the energy to transport the spacecraft to the vicinity of another star. Needless to say, this procedure is expensive and not often used.

Dugsbooks,

Tau Zero might be my favorite SF novel of all time. Anderson's writing skills are a bit more limited than I'd wish, but the scale and execution of the idea are marvelous. From memory, it seems to me that the original novella version ("To Outlive Eternity") was better than the novel; however, I haven't read the novella since 1967, so can't say for sure. It was available free at baen.com for a while, but seems not to be there now. It's collected in one of their Anderson books.

I find the Alcubierre drive derivative, after carefully reading through the link in PaulFoley's #6 post.

To quote: " In general relativity, one often first specifies a plausible distribution of
matter and energy, and then finds the geometry of the spacetime associated with
it; but it is also possible to run the Einstein
field equations in the other direction, first specifying a metric
and then finding the energy-momentum tensor associated with it, and this is what Alcubierre did in building his metric."

In the movie "Breaking the Sound Barrier" 1952, The pilots are stumped by the sound barrier and unable to penetrate it until , in desperation, one of the pilots "reverses the controls" which makes the plane quit shuddering and go past the speed of sound. Since then several authors have used this convention to solve problems as has the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre evidently ;-)

Given Alcubierre's credentials, I suspect he didn't actually do any nonsensical "reversing the controls" on Einstein's General Relativity. Since reversing the controls doesn't work in real supersonic flight, why would such a thing be possible in real physics?

I think the Alcubierre drive is what Michio Kaku used in his SciFi Science program. In each program he posits some SF device; FTL spaceship, light-saber etc. Then works out a scientifically feasible way to achieve it.

Ok, ya got me Ian. I was frustrated at not being able to understand the equations in Paul's link so I thought I would poke fun at it.

In the movie the pilot pulls a lever controlling the flaps back while in a dive which would cause the plane to dive straight into the dirt. It took a while, because of the movie's popularity, to convince people this was not a sane maneuver. But still, maybe Alcubierre saw the movie? ;-)

Reversing the controls sounds like Star Trek's default cop out escape plan-reverse the electron flow and everything's fine!

That was Dr Who. In one of the Pertwee episodes, he had to "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow". Pertwee apparently liked the phrase so much, he used it whenever he could.

>14 iansales:, its also been used in ST TNG a few times to get them out of a sticky situation.
"Reversing the such and such could work Captain but,well, its tricky with only a 20% probability of success!
"Make it so!"
Oh and I preferred Tom Baker myself! ;)

Clifford D. Simak's Way Station had as its operating premise the organic FTL transmitter, dispose of body, post(ed)morten.

I read a post in another thread in this group about how people don't like some SF because of the way it mishandles the science. In what way does anything about FTL not involve either a resort to pure fantasy, or a total mishandling of the science?

I seem to recall in one of 'the hitchikers guide' books a ship was powered with "bistro math drive" which had to do with the energy expended by figuring the tab at an italian eatery!

No science is better than bad science. Explain the capabilities of your FTL system but don't explain why it works.

Geneg@17,

It's fantasy, right. I strongly suspect that every physicist who speculates about FTL is a SF fan who's gotten a bit carried away. The only use for FTL is to allow plots involving extrasolar locations where the journey is not the main story.

That's why the baroque FTL schemes are fun. Why not?

Anyone read Tau Zero? Doesn't that use some exotic drive?

21> Why yes, I read about it in message #5. ;)

Oh, and there's one other "method" that hasn't been mentioned yet: the "we don't know how they work but we found them they're ancient technology we don't know who built them etc. etc." gates.

Some authors also enjoy folding space, or using wormholes. I personally liked Asimov's idea for FTL. He needed it, so he had it. Details were left ot the users imagination. Of course, we must remember Douglas Adams and the Infinite Improbability Drive.

My favorite is the Bloater Drive from Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison. You make the ship get larger until the nose touches your destination, then rapidly shrink the ship, keeping the nose at the destination.

Stormraven@25,

Nice one; I'd forgotten that.

It's been a while since I read Venus on the Half Shell by Philip Jose Farmer (originally writing as Kilgore Trout, a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. character.) IIRC, FTL was achieved by extracting some special energy from the stars - all the stars of the universe. But the stars were alive and sentient, and the process was terribly painful to them, so the crew of every FTL spacecraft could hear the distant, constant screaming of the stars, tormented by their flight. Not that that slowed interstellar commerce, of course.

Bilsh used the "SpinDizzy" field that manipulated gravity to encompass entire planets and fly them around a FTL velocities.
As I recall the same solution as in Tau Zero was invented in the closing pages of Hogan's The Genesis Machine.
The StarTrek warp field basically modified the universal Gravitational constant although that explanation doesn't really help much.
Asimov hypothesized a field that could accelerate object to FTL speed in Billiard Ball but he only used it to put holes in people in unlikeable fictional characters.
In Ninen's Tales of Known Space, he had an FTL drive but I don't recall much about it except it placed you in hyperspace which apparently was not fun to look at.

Speaking of hyperspace, Cordwainer Smith had the planoform drive and not one but two different hyperspaces, Space2 and Space3.