History Main / LudicrousSpeed

* Inverted in ''GrimFandango''; at the beginning of year four, the ''lack'' of speed is slowly killing Glottis.
** JustifiedTrope - Glottis is a spirit who was created expressly for the purpose of driving cars. This is both his purpose and sole desire in life, but he was created too big to fit into any of the Department's cars, so when you meet him he's kinda-sorta ekeing out survival by working as a mechanic instead.

** Then there was Richard Hammond's experience driving a Formula One car. The car was basically so much faster than anything he'd driven up to that point, not just in straight-line speed but in cornering response, acceleration and braking, that he couldn't keep up. Trying to cope with its speed was akin to sensory overload.

** Then there was Richard Hammond's experience driving a Formula One car. The car was basically so much faster than anything he'd drive up to that point, not just in straight-line speed but in cornering response, acceleration and braking, that he couldn't keep up. Trying to cope with its speed was akin to sensory overload.

* There is a rumor that anyone who drives a Bugatti Veyron or comparable super-super-car to its top speed will achieve a form of Buddhist enlightenment. There is an episode of Top Gear where James May does just this - you can see it in his eyes.

* Inverted in ''{{Grim Fandango}}''; at the beginning of year four, the ''lack'' of speed is slowly killing Glottis.

* A RunningGag in LoonyTunes, usually when a plane is plummeting, the speedometer starts spinning up ever faster, before displaying a message like "unbelievable, isn't it?".

* StephenKing wrote a short story called "The Jaunt" which has a future humanity easily colonizing other worlds thanks to a mass-produced teleportation mechanism. The only catch is that any living thing that goes through the transport while ''conscious'' either dies or comes through [[GoMadFromTheRevelation a gibbering lunatic]]. Ironically, the story implies that this is because the brain experiences everything in the "warp" as going so slow that it takes [[AndIMustScream an]] ''[[AndIMustScream eternity]]'' [[AndIMustScream to finally arrive]]. So in a way, it is a subversion, as instead of the high speed teleportation causing the madness, it is the time that the brain perceives it as taking.

** actually, no. while you DO become shorter, you would ONLY become infinitely short at an infinitely high speed; there's no time traveling. you WILL turn into energy though, obliterating anything in a very large radius.
*** um...no. He was mostly right, though "infinitely small" is probably not the best way to put it. As a body approaches the speed of light, all lengths approach zero, mass approaches infinity, and the rate of time approaches zero. Mathematically speaking, if the rate of travel of the body were to exceed the speed of light, the local rate of time would reverse itself. Although, I do wonder if the dimensions and mass would do something similar? Negative dimensions? Mass [[ToyStory to infinity...and beyond?]]

** Time dilation isn't the only wackiness: The faster you travel, the shorter you become; at the speed of light, you become infinitely short. If you were somehow able to continue increasing your speed such that you were travelling faster than the speed of light, you would start becoming longer again -- while travelling ''backwards in time''.

** actually, no. while you DO become shorter, you would ONLY become infinitely short at an infinitely high speed; there's no time traveling. you [i]will[/i] turn into energy though, obliterating anything in a very lage radius.

[[folder:Comic Books]]
* One of the threats ''TheFlash'' faces is going so fast that he gets absorbed into the speed force that gives him his power.

[[folder:Manga & Anime]]
* In the ''SpeedRacer'' two-parter "The Fastest Car in the World", the legendary GRX engine was dug up from its banishment to the Phantom Zone (or some such). A newly built car, powered by this ancient {{Sealed Evil in a Can}}, could only be driven safely if the driver had inhaled "V-gas". Speed tried to drive it without V-gas, and the speeds that the car attained drove him insane. And of course, V-gas has the downside of making the inhaler extremely thirsty- and if they drink water, they'll become terrified of even the slowest speeds (which Pops has to condition him out of).
[[/folder]]

**** This may be partially because some of those planes went supersonic by accident, and the laws of aerodynamics change dramatically when going above the speed of sound. Hence, the planes began to handle very strangely and may have indeed begun to break apart before they slowed back to a speed they were meant to operate at.

A cousin of SpaceMadness. Taking DrivenToMadness to its literal extreme. Can overlap with GoMadFromTheRevelation if the person discovers something mindbreaking about the universe.

->"No, no, no, light speed is too slow! We're gonna have to go right to...[[TropeNamer Ludicrous Speed!]].

->"No, no, no, light speed is too slow! We're gonna have to go right to...[[TropeNamer Lidicrous Speed!]].

* In one two-part episode of ''SpeedRacer'', the titular hero drives a racing car the bad guys have built that uses the infamous GRX engine. The speeds are so ludicrous that our hero begins to hallucinate and go insane. (So insane he can't even work the brake pedal.)

** A [[YourMilageMayVary less]] {{egregious}} example is the sound barrier, which was believed to cause G-forces high enough to prevent any plane from breaking it intact.

* One of ''[=~The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy~=]'' novels mentions something called the R factor, which is a measure of how fast somebody is traveling based on their psychological perception of speed. Anything going at a speed of 1 R is going "too fast", by definition, although the actual value of ''1 R'' varies by individual and species. The crew of the starship Bistromath end up traveling at 10^17,000 R, i.e. 10-with-seventeen-thousand-zeroes times faster than an appropriate speed would actually be.

* One of ''[=~The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy~=]'' novels mentions something called the R factor, which is a measure of how fast somebody is traveling based on their psychological perception of speed. A high R factor is too fast regardless of what actual speed it represents. The crew of the starship Bistromath end up traveling at 10^17,000R, i.e. 10 with 17,000 zeroes, times faster than an appropriate speed would actually be.

* ''TheAnimatrix'' contained a scene where a sprinter ran so fast he was on the verge of breaching {{the Matrix}} and waking up into the real world.