Line #31 Main/LightspeedLeapfrog


1	->''Ten years we had been on our way when they found a hyper-drive''\
2	''And man spread to a thousand stars while we were half alive''
3	-->-- "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA1sA5MD8J0 Space is Dark]]", Bill Roper
4
5	The brave explorers or colonists set out in their spaceship to [[SettlingTheFrontier spread humankind to the stars]]. You can't travel faster than light, so they're going to spend most of the trip on a SleeperStarship as {{Human Popsicle}}s, or it's a GenerationShip and it'll be their descendants who step out at the other end of the trip. Either way, they're saying goodbye forever to everyone and everything they know. Decades and centuries pass, and eventually they arrive at their destination--
6
7	--and there's people there waiting for them. Turns out, FasterThanLightTravel (or at least sublight travel that is vastly faster than theirs) ''is'' possible, and it got sorted out while they were in transit. Now the same trip that took them centuries [[CasualInterstellarTravel can be done and be back in time for Christmas]]. And that planet you were all set to colonise? Done already, and actually we're not sure there's any room for you...
8
9	[[UnfulfilledPurposeMisery Expect the brave pioneers to be upset about this.]]
10
11	An in-universe SubTrope of ScienceMarchesOn. Can also be related to HumansAdvanceSwiftly. See FishOutOfTemporalWater for a comparable situation.
12	----
13	!!Examples
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15	[[foldercontrol]]
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17	[[folder:Comic Books]]
18	* This was the origin of Vance Astro in ''ComicBook/GuardiansOfTheGalaxy''. He was cryogenically frozen and sent on the first manned space mission to another star. When he arrived, he discovered that Earth had invented faster-than-light travel and had colonised the world he was heading for. He was hailed as a hero but found he had arrived in a world where he no longer had a place.
19	* Marvel's ''ComicBook/{{Micronauts\|MarvelComics}}'' basically cannibalized this figment of Astro's backstory and gave it to Arcturus Rann. Like Astro, he went into stasis for most of a space voyage only to find that the rest of the universe (well, Microverse) had discovered warp travel while he slept.
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22	[[folder:Fan Works]]
23	* ''Fanfic/NoStarsInSight'': When the crew of the ''Rancis Olytus'' began hunting the Locus of Communion through uncharted space, they were always one step behind their quarry due to having no knowledge of where their target was headed, so the best that they could do was blindly follow the trail of breadcrumbs the Locus left behind. However, once Ikharos learns which star system the Locus was heading towards (thanks to coordinates provided by Elsie), he has the ''Rancis Olytus'' perform an FTL jump to get there, arriving at their destination ahead of the Locus's ships that they had originally been chasing.
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26	[[folder:Literature]]
27	* Creator/ElizabethBear used this device in ''Machine'', which features a team of rescue specialists intercepting a combination generation and cryogenic ship that has been missing for 600 years (Bear was inspired by the ''Literature/SectorGeneral'' examples referenced below).
28	* Downplayed in ''Literature/{{Coyote}}''. In 2070, the [[OppressiveStatesOfAmerica United Republic of America]] launched the URSS Alabama, a SleeperStarship driven by a RamScoop towards 47 Ursae Majoris, which will arrive after 230 years of travel. Midflight, the URA collapses and the [[DirtyCommunists Western Hemisphere Union]] replaces it, then launches their own colony ships powered by an extremely efficient thruster, allowing them to arrive at Coyote only a few years after the Alabama, despite being launched over a hundred years after it. The conflict of interest between the WHU leaders and the original colonists drives the plot in later novels.
29	* Creator/SamuelRDelany's ''The Ballad of Beta-2'' has an anthropology student sent to investigate the culture of a fleet of GenerationShips which had arrived at their destination long after it had already been colonized by FTL. By that time, the descendants of the original crews had no interest in living off their ships or interacting with anyone else so the fleet was set aside as a reservation for their odd culture.
30	* Narrowly averted by the ''LDS Nauvoo'' in ''Literature/TheExpanse'', if only because the Belters building it hijacked it and tried to ram it into Eros in an attempt to stop the Protomolecule, which ended up creating [[PortalNetwork the Ring]].
31	* Creator/AEVanVogt's "Literature/FarCentaurus" is about a group of people who are trying to be the first to reach Alpha Centauri, but along the way somebody up and goes and discovers FTL travel.
32	* Played with in Creator/LarryNiven's short story "[[Literature/KnownSpace Flatlander]]". The Outsiders (a race of StarfishAliens who are the ultimate HigherTechSpecies in Known Space) sell the location, trajectory, and velocity of a lost colony ship to the humans, who later use their FTL technology to rescue the crew and colonists on that ship, all of whom were in stasis.
33	* In "Founding Fathers" by Creator/StephenDedman, the first FTL ship shows up after the colony's been established for a few years, but it's still a shock and an upset to the colonists, who had actually embraced leaving everything-and-everyone behind because it meant they'd be left alone to do things the way they think things ought to be done.
34	* Played with in one of the stories in Evgeny Filenko's ''Literature/GalacticConsul'': a human and alien diplomats engage in a kind of TrialByCombat by playing a [[VariantChess Space Chess]] to decide who would get the colonization rights for a prospective planet, which prospector teams from each civilization reached almost simultaneously.[[note]]Galactic laws technically allowed each of the teams to race to claim the planet, but that would've inevitably soured the interstellar relations, which both civilizations wanted to avoid.[[/note]] While the alien is an undisputed master of the game, the human diplomat is a total noob, but the catch is that he doesn't actually need to win: he's just stalling for time, because they found that a slower-than-light explorer ship was sent there several centuries ago from Earth, and its crew, not informed about the situation, could legitimately claim the planet for the humanity without causing a conflict. The human diplomats are not entirely cynical about it, though, as they immediately offer another recently discovered planet as a consolation prize to the aliens, which is more suitable for them, anyway.
35	* Sergey Snegov's "Galactic Reconnaissance" (from the "The Men Like Gods" trilogy) features crew of the "Devourer of Space" Star Plow (FTL-capable ship) rescuing surviving crew of the "Mendeleev" photonic starship, which suffered the meteor strike and, later, attack of the Destroyants' cruiser during its journey.
36	* ''Literature/HonorHarrington'':
37	** Happened to several groups of colonists in the backstory of the series, as the big push for colonization started before FTL travel was safe for mass transit. On at least one occasion, this lead to a planet being home to two distinctly different cultures with separate governments.
38	** In Manticore's case, when the colony ship for the founding of what became Manticore left FTL travel was possible but extremely dangerous prompting them to travel sub-light. However before leaving they invested their remaining money with instructions that when safe FTL travel was invented the money should be used to contact them and if necessary prevent other people from establishing a colony on their planet before they arrived. Consequently when they did arrive they found a small squadron of warships guarding their home and all of the equipment and teachers necessary to bring them up to speed on 800 years worth of scientific advancement.
39	** The "Haven Quadrant" as a whole is full of this Trope, as it was settled by a mix of early and slower sleep ships, later sleepships with more efficient engines, and hyper colony ships. Haven itself was founded about a decade after the discovery of the Warshawski sail made hyper colonization possible, with Haven being founded more than 100 years before the Jason arrived at Manticore. At which time, Grayson has already been colonized for over 400 years.
40	* Acknowledged and intentionally, if somewhat insultingly, averted in ''Mayflies'' by Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. The ColonyShip ''Mayflower'' has it's ramscoop engines shut down early, turning it into a GenerationShip on a millennium-long one way trip to Canopus. 700 years later, Earth develops an FTL drive and sends the following message to ''Mayflower'':
41	-->"“Initial tests of FTL Drive unqualified successes. We have met the stars and they are ours. Sympathetic to your tortoiseplight, we will not attempt to reach Canopus before you. Following find technical specifications, blueprints, and circuit diagrams."
42	* In ''Literature/MostlyHarmless'', we're told that one of the things making Galactic history so confusing is the armies that were sent out in sleepships to fight wars with distant civilisations, only to awaken, discover that diplomats travelling FTL arrived before them and hammered out a peace treaty, and damn well fighting their wars ''anyway''.
43	* Played for laughs in the Creator/RobertSheckley short story "The Native Problem"; a man who wants to get away from civilization stakes a claim on a distant tropical planet using a FTL ship, only to have a sublight (or at least much much slower) colony ship turn up occupied by a society of religious fundamentalists. He eventually marries into the new colony as the "last" member of his tribe of "extinct" natives.
44	* In ''Nemesis'' by Creator/IsaacAsimov, the reclusive spacers of an orbiting colony ship decide to ditch Earth after developing a near-lightspeed drive and discovering a previously-unknown star system closer than Alpha Centauri. They take nearly 20 years to arrive at their destination, confident that no one can follow them due to lacking the knowledge and technology. This leads to quite the surprise when another Earth ship arrives shortly after they do, sporting a shiny new FTL drive.
45	* Mentioned in the Creator/StrugatskyBrothers' Literature/NoonUniverse. No FTL travel actually exists there at this point (it's XXI century, and they only discovered FTL in that verse in the XXII century), but one character mentioned how terrible it would feel to be an astronaut on a relativistic ship sent to explore a distant star only to find a colony there established by an FTL-capable ship developed after you left. Additionally, by using high acceleration on a relativistic ship, a crew manages to ''reverse'' the effects of TimeDilation (i.e. six months passes on Earth, while years pass for the crew).
46	* "On the Road to Tarsus" by Creator/SeanWilliams is a variation involving long-range {{Teleportation}}: the first generation where the signal travelled at light speed and the later SubspaceAnsible refinement that meant people could cross light years in a matter of days. Tarsus is Earth's first extrasolar colony, thirty light years from Earth, founded using the newer system while the original set of colonists were still en route at light speed; as the story closes, the planet is preparing itself for the imminent arrival of the original colonists-to-be.
47	* "[[http://www.sfwriter.com/stshould.htm On the Shoulders of Giants]]" by Creator/RobertJSawyer would more accurately be called "relativistic leapfrog", since no FTL travel occurs. The colonists arrive in a sleeper ship at about 1% of the speed of light. and find out their intended planet is already colonized and thriving. Fortunately, they manage to convince the colony to give them a relativistic ship to carry sleepers to head for the Andromeda galaxy.
48	* In the second book of the ''Literature/OutOfTheDark'' series, [[spoiler:Vlad and several others take the dreadnought captured from the Shongairi and embark on a 40-year trip to the Shong System to pay the aliens back for killing over half of humanity. Almost immediately after arriving, they're overtaken by a much larger (and more advanced) vessel sent from Earth a mere six years ago and that has actually been waiting for a month for it to arrive]].
49	* ''Literature/PandorasStar'' by Creator/PeterFHamilton starts out with a variation. A NASA vessel makes humanity's first-ever manned voyage to another planet (Mars), only to discover that a pair of garage inventors have discovered the means to generate stable wormholes and beat them there.
50	* In Creator/GregEgan's ''Literature/SchildsLadder'', the slower travelers are known by most of spacefaring humanity as "anachronauts". It's an interesting variant, though: by the time the story begins, most anachronauts ''choose'' to continue traveling at relativistic speeds instead of using FTL, so that they can "hop" forward through time and observe the development of civilization. It's PlayedForLaughs when ''entire planetary civilizations'' coordinate elaborate pranks on the intrepid time travelers, leading them to think the development of the human race is even more bizarre than it actually is -- which is saying something.
51	* In one ''Literature/SectorGeneral'' story, a Monitor Corps faster-than-light scout ship intercepts a human generation ship that had been lost for centuries. The crew is nearly all dead. The Sector General space hospital has to dispatch an ambulance ship when the humans on the Monitor Corps ship start getting sick; due to a centuries-diverged influenza virus that the crew of the generation ship carried. In two other stories; the ambulance ship intercepts damaged slower-than-light starships launched by alien cultures and after treating the injured, arranges for the Monitor Corps to ferry them to their intended destinations.
52	* Part of the backstory in ''Literature/{{Strata}}''.
53	* Creator/CharlesSheffield's ''Summertide'' starts with ships carrying {{Human Popsicle}}s. They are programmed to wake the people if they reach the destination, if a problem arises the computer cannot solve -- or if they receive a transmission that FTL has been invented.
54	* In ''Literature/TimeForTheStars'' by Creator/RobertAHeinlein, the protagonist is on a NAFAL ship that spends most of the book exploring the nearby stars; at the end of the book when everything is falling apart, they get rescued by an FTL ship that's been developed on Earth in the interim.
55	* Creator/SpiderRobinson's ''Literature/VariableStar'', inspired heavily by Heinlein, had the protagonist's relativistic ship rescued by the first FTL vessel, allowing them to outrun the radiation wave from earth's sun exploding.
56	* In "Literature/TheVoyageThatLasted600Years", [[spoiler:five hundred years after the original ship's launch a colony is founded at the destination, with the newer ships having taken just six years to travel there. The main character gladly accepts their offer to send over a ship to pick them up]].
57	* In the final book of Creator/HarryTurtledove's ''Literature/WorldWar'' series, ''Homeward Bound'', a human-built sleeper ship is sent as an embassy to the homeworld of the reptilian Race. The trip takes about 30 years to accomplish. The ambassadors are only at the Race's homeworld for a month when the human-built FTL-ship shows up.
58	** A more clear-cut example would be the ''Molotov'', a Soviet SleeperShip sent to the same world a few years after the American ''Admiral Peary''. It's still on the way and won't arrive to Home for a few more years to find out the truth.
59	* The backstory of Francis Sandow from Creator/RogerZelazny's ''Isle of the Dead''. He couldn't find his place on Earth and joined the first interstellar expedition on a sleeper ship. Then he found the hard way he wasn't fit to be a colonist, thus he joined the first passing ship that had a vacancy. And then he kept joining new expeditions to run to the farthest border. After over 6 centuries he found that borders outran him:
60	-->I made one more trip to get away, and it was already too late. People were suddenly all over the place, intelligent aliens were contacted, interstellar trips were matters of weeks and months, not centuries.
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63	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
64	* In the ''Series/{{Andromeda}}'' episode "The Lone and Level Sands", the crew encounters the ''Bellerophon'', a 1,700 year old exploration vessel launched shortly before Earth joined the Commonwealth and acquired slipstream drive (as in, a Perseid research ship found Earth a mere 8 years after the ''Bellerophon'' has been launched, although 30 years would pass before humans were to officially join the Commonwealth). Its mission was scheduled to last 3,000 years (on Earth - because of the relativistic time dilation, the original crew is still alive and well). The crew is divided between those loyal to the captain (who has some idea of how obsolete they've become and is keeping the rest in the dark) and their mission, and those who get the feeling that their crewmates are dying in encounters with raiders for nothing and want to leave. Partially subverted in that they aren't completely useless, because they can go to parts of the galaxy that cannot be reached with slipstream drive.
65	* In ''Series/TheArk2023'', the first Ark was launched as a SleeperStarship taking 6 subjective years to get to Proxima b. Five-sixths of the way there, it is overtaken by the later Arks with FTL drives that cut the trip to months.
66	* ''Series/BabylonFive'', "[[Recap/BabylonFiveS02E05TheLongDark The Long Dark]]": In the 22nd century, the exploration ship ''Copernicus'' set out with a frozen crew and a navigation computer set to track down radio signals suggestive of intelligent life. A hundred years later, it arrives at the source of one such set of signals -- the planet that Babylon 5 orbits. Turns out, the Centauri found Earth and gave humans jump gate technology just a few years after the ''Copernicus'' set out. [[spoiler:And also, an EldritchAbomination hitched a ride on it and ate all but one of the crew.]]
67	* ''Franchise/StarTrek'':
68	** ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'': In the episode "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E22SpaceSeed Space Seed]]", the crew of the ''Enterprise'' discovers the ''Botany Bay'', a sleeper ship from the [[FailedFutureForecast 1990s]] which has been floating in space for centuries. As it turns out, the ship is a prison colony for genetically modified superhumans, including one [[BigBad Khan Noonien Singh]].
69	** The season 1 finale of ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'', "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS1E25TheNeutralZone The Neutral Zone]]", is in part about a recovered ship sent from Earth in the pre-warp era, with [[HumanPopsicle cryogenically frozen passengers]]. Apparently it drifted out of Earth orbit at some point and traveled [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale a few thousand lightyears from Earth in a matter of four hundred years]] (one ExpandedUniverse novel fixes this by revealing it was deliberately moved by aliens, for some unknown reason).
70	* ''Franchise/{{Stargate}}'':
71	** In ''Series/StargateAtlantis'', the ''Daedelus'' detects a ship travelling nearly the speed of light, speeds their conventional engines aren't capable of reaching. They do have a hyperdrive, however, so they simply jump ahead of the ship to get a better look on the next pass and convince it to slow down to talk.
72	** A mild version of this in ''Series/StargateUniverse'', where descendants of an alternate version of the crew of the ''Destiny'' have a 2000-year colony on planet Novus. However, as the planet is destabilizing, they have built sublight generational ships to take them to a world their advance scout teams found using [[PortalNetwork stargates]]. The ''Destiny'' crew (not the alternate one) find one such scout group and decide to give them a lift to their destination, knowing that the generational ships will get there in about 200 years.
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76	* "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA1sA5MD8J0 Space is Dark]]" by Bill Roper is the story of a crew who awake from centuries in suspended animation, ready to seek out habitable planets, to find that humanity has spread across the galaxy using a hyperdrive invented shortly after they left Earth. [[DrivenToSuicide They don't take it well]].
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79	[[folder:TabletopGames]]
80	* ''TabletopGame/CoriolisTheThirdHorizon'': In the backstory the colony ship ''Zenith'' left Earth for Aldebaran, and by the time they arrived they discovered that the star and the local cluster had long since been colonized using a precursor PortalNetwork and seceded from Earth's empire. The game starts in the aftermath of the cultural upheaval started by their arrival, with the ''Zenith'' dismantled to build the SpaceStation Coriolis that acts as a meeting ground for the cluster's factions.
81	* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' has a variation on this: FTL travel is done by opening a temporary rift into [[SubspaceOrHyperspace the Warp]] (also called Warpspace, among a few dozen other names) and flying through until they get to the destination. That said, the Warp is [[HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace an alternate dimension comprised of forms of energy that is antithetical to most living beings, the laws of physics is a set of jokes, and it's full of demons, haunted and derelict spaceships, and several flavors of god monsters]]; and it requires a special, inbred, psychic mutant to read its tides and currents. That said, time is ''highly'' inconsistent in [[TimeyWimeyBall how time passes relative to 'real space' every time you make a jump]]. Ships are ''expected'' to not arrive on schedule because of this, although a decent Navigator (the aforementioned mutant) can usually come close (give or take a couple of months). That said, the trip can take months or even years (from the crew's perspective) but poor warp conditions can delay a ship for centuries (from the perspective of realspace) without the crew being any the wiser; more than one Imperial fleet has arrived on schedule to relieve a besieged planet, only to find that the conflict came to a close long ago. Fleets stay together by using the same Navigator's directions, although every fleet carries the expectation that a couple of ships will get lost on the way, potentially playing this trope completely straight.
82	** On several occasions a ship has emerged ''before'' it entered the Warp. A notable case involved an [[BloodKnight Ork Warboss]], who immediately [[InsaneTrollLogic attacked his past self in order to have two of his favorite gun]]. His army more or less disintegrated in the ensuing confusion resulting from his victory against himself.
83	** There is a case where a combination of this and SelfFulfillingProphecy screwed over the crew of of an Imperial ship that answered a distress signal. Unbeknownst to the crew, they had responded to their own distress signal, due to their initial warp jump sending them back in time and into an ambush.
84	* ''TabletopGame/{{Mindjammer}}'': Given the 10,000 year gap between the first slowships and the invention of Planar drive Lost Colonies are a more frequent occurrence. But pre-Expansionary slowships are on the random encounter tables.
85	* ''TabletopGame/FadingSuns'': Sol's [[PortalNetwork Jumpgate]] was discovered by a SleeperShip on its' way out of the system. In a variant, the ships that preceded it were ''[[NothingIsScarier never heard from again]]''.
86	* ''TabletopGame/{{Lancer}}'': Over the past ten thousand years as GenerationShips have given way to [[TimeDilation light-huggers]] and [[PortalNetwork blink gates]], sorting out colonial claims has gotten ''very'' complicated, causing more than a few wars.
87	** The generation ship ''Armstrong'' launched during the waning days of Old Humanity, taking several centuries to get to their destination, their original purpose turning into a religion as they went. When they finally got there, they found that [[TheFederation Union]] had sent a nearlight craft to that same world and established a colony a century ahead of them. The descendants of the ''Armstrong'''s colonists, the Aunic people, never forgave Union for its presumption.
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90	[[folder:Video Games]]
91	* The manual for ''VideoGame/{{Elite}}'' says you can encounter ancient generation ships still flying to their destinations in your {{Casual Interstellar Travel}}s. You can't, but if they were in the game, that would be this trope.
92	** However one of the user-made addons for FanRemake ''VideoGame/{{Oolite}}'' adds these into the universe.
93	** More recently, generation ships are now being found within a 100ly radius of Sol in the official sequel ''VideoGame/EliteDangerous''. Every ship that's been found so far has [[GoneHorriblyWrong run into much, much bigger problems than being overtaken by FTL vessels.]]
94	* ''VideoGame/VegaStrike'' has Forsaken -- whole faction formed from the settlers who arrived to their destination only to find already developed places where no one needed them. Forsaken are understandably bitter about all this, don't care about [[TheFederation Confed]] and end up as a big SpacePirates haven.
95	* A sublight version in ''Videogame/AlienLegacy''. In a last-ditch effort to preserve the human race in the face of the Centaurian onslaught, the Earth governments band together to build massive "seedships" to carry colonists to faraway stars with each ship instructed to maintain strict radiosilence in order not to give away their position to the enemy. The game starts with the crew of the UNS ''Calypso'' waking up from [[HumanPopsicle cold sleep]], as the ship enters the Beta Caeli system (90 light years from Earth). TheCaptain (you) sees messages waiting in his/her PDA. They're from Earth, informing him/her about another seedship, the UNS ''Tantalus'', sent to the same star 16 years after the ''Calypso''. Thanks to a ''marginally'' better engine, the ''Tantalus'' arrived to Beta Caeli 21 years before the ''Calypso'' (it's implied the trip took centuries, if not millennia). The other parts of the trope are avoided, as all you find are remnants of the colony with no humans in sight. Finding out just what the hell happened to them drives the plot of the game.
96	* A variation serves as the central conflict for ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda''. The initiative ships took 600 years in FTL to cross the intergalactic void. By the time they arrived, the planets they chose as their destinations through long range scans had been drastically altered by local populations/forces and were no longer the Golden Worlds they were expecting to find. The technology found on the first planet you arrive at is estimated at 300 years old, meaning someone faster arrived there when your journey was only half over.
97	* The "First Contact" side quest in ''VideoGame/{{Starfield}}'' involves a generation ship which left Earth 200 years prior to the current year (2330), and about a decade before the invention of faster-than-light travel. They eventually arrived at a planet where other humans had already built a resort. Contact is initially hampered by their outdated hardware having incompatible communications protocols, resulting in warped static signals. It is up to the player to settle the dispute between the two parties. One option is to buy a FTL engine to install on their generation ship so they can keep looking.
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101	* ''Website/OrionsArm'' does not, and will never have, an FTL drive and they still have a version of this. The first {{Generation Ship}}s were often outpaced by smaller and faster [[HumanPopsicle sleeper ships]], and when [[TimeDilation relativistic]] drives were developed those beat the sleeper ships. And finally [[PortalNetwork linelayers]] could not travel at relativistic speeds but could lay down wormholes that would bring in a flood of colonists within a few years of deployment and decrease travel times thereafter from years to months.
102	* In the Website/{{Questden}} adventure ''The Sunfish'', this is revealed to be the evil plan of the Investors: keeping FTL technology a secret, they sent crews ahead of the big sleeper ships to build CompanyTown colonies at their destination, so the settlers would end up completely at their mercy.
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105	[[folder:WesternAnimation]]
106	* In an episode of ''[[WesternAnimation/IlEtaitUneFois Once upon a Time... Space]]'', the first interstellar spaceship from Earth -- a SleeperShip [[LostColony believed lost]] for nearly a millennium -- arrives unannounced to its destination, smack in the middle of Federation space. The crew has to cope with the fact that humankind has already colonized space in their absence, and their thousand-year journey now takes about a week.
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109	[[folder:Real Life]]
110	* The so-called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait_Calculation Wait Calculation]], introduced by Andrew Kennedy in his paper "Interstellar Travel: The Wait Calculation and the Incentive Trap of Progress", published in the ''Journal of the British Interplanetary Society'', specifically refutes this idea. The author crunches some numbers and claims that it's possible to figure out an optimal departure time, which would preclude a ship from being overtaken by future technological development, assuming an exponential increase in velocity. He even claims that sudden discoveries like FasterThanLightTravel would not negate his idea.
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