In the Bobibverse (book series) they used SUDAR for FTL. SUDAR was a gravity based communication. I believe this started coming out before the gravity wave discovery and we confirmed(/it became common knowledge) that gravity travels at the speed of light. It was a cool idea though.
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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The FTL in the game FTL.
It's not really explained or important in the game, but Christ almighty have I put hundreds of hours into that infuriatingly addictive thing; so it must be my favorite FTL.
Whatever it is, I'm inclined to like the versions where FTL is a teensy bit dangerous. Not necessarily 40k's "FTL is actual hell and frequently fails in terrible ways", but more... it's risky. It's a mundane risk, maybe. But still, there's that little bit of risk in the background and it needs to be approached carefully...
Like, Babylon 5's hyperspace is an actual place you make trips into, but it's also highly nonlinear, and so it is entirely possible to get lost or stuck if your ship malfunctions. Also, there are living things in there which may not be friendly.
Even Star Wars' Hyperdrives can be dangerous. It doesn't get played up in the stories much, but a malfunctioning or improperly programmed hyperdrive can strand you in deep space, subject you to severe time dilation, or just splat you against a realspace object.
Does a TARDIS count?
details on ftl in whoverse is pretty murkey, i think the tardis uses time vortex to travel through time and space. most species seems to be highly intergalatic ftl, since most of them travel across the universe, it doesnt really explain in a scifi way how it works like trek and sg1 does. slitheen uses a slipstream drive.
I like the version from BSG.
Andromeda was weird. Able to travel from galaxy to galaxy otherwise they travel at sub-light.
Julian May's Galactic Milieu trilogy from the '90s has a fun FTL concept involving a ship generating an upsilon field to break through superficies into a "grey limbo" hyperspace. Each translation (in and out) causes physical pain; the tighter the catenary and the longer the jump, (the faster the trip) the more pain is caused.
A hard choice, so many of them have been well done in media and text.
If I had to make a choice I would pick versions that match up with what we think could be possible. And that means anything based on or similar to the Alcubierre drive theory. The "slower" travel around a system in Elite Dangerous uses this idea of moving the space the ship is in faster than light, avoiding any relativity issues. Stephen Baxter's "Flood" and "Ark" novels (mainly Ark) use this idea and his descriptions of what it looks like from inside and departure/arrival are fantastic and not intuitive (Elite Dangerous gets the leaving right, but not the arrival maybe because it would look weird). When the ship arrives it would suddenly appear from nowhere, but then its virtual image would move away into a point as the light catches up.
For a great video of it, here's a wonderful collection of potential future interstellar ships with the Alcubierre drive as the final solution to .
