So the Alien Invasion is between you and the Portal Network, or the Hyperspace Lanes to the enemy homeworld are sure to be full of Space Mines, or you're in a Run or Die situation and want to make sure the Omnicidal Maniac can't find you. Or, for that matter, you just want to explore a No Warping Zone, or need to get somewhere (relatively) close without a working jump drive. What to do?
Well, just forget about Faster-Than-Light Travel and get there the old-fashioned way: point the ship where you want to go, give the engine a nice long blast, and wait, possibly a...very...very...long time. It may be necessary to become a Sleeper Starship or Generation Ship.
This trope is any situation in which a trip through space, in a setting in which it would normally be made with some form of FTL travel, is made through regular space, or with a much slower variety of FTL. This could be to gain a tactical advantage, save resources, avoid pursuit, or just because your warp drive broke and there's no chance of rescue. Depending on the situation, this can result in Lightspeed Leapfrog. See The Slow Path for the temporal version of this.
Examples:
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Fan Works
- Post-reboot works in The War of the Masters state that ships traveling at higher warp factors are easier to see with subspace sensors. Kanril Eleya several times accomplishes Stealth in Space by reducing speed, and even exiting warp altogether and using retained velocity and Spaceship Slingshot Stunts to sneak up on targets and surprise them.
Film - Live Action
- In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millenium Falcon's hyperdrive is disabled in a battle, so they have to travel from Hoth to Bespin in normal space. The explanations vary: Star Wars Legends introduced the concept of a backup hyperdrive to explain the scale issue, but the Disney-era EU appears (based on The Last Jedi and The Mandalorian) to indicate that stars in the Galaxy Far, Far Away are simply much closer together than they are in real life. Another possibility is relativistic time dilation, which would explain how Luke was able to complete his training under Yoda in that time.
Literature
- In Ark Royal the possibility is discussed when the Ark Royal is deep in enemy space and all the human-accessible tramlines are known to be blockaded by the aliens. The crew make some insinuations to the useless bunch of reporters on board that they might need to feed some people into the food processors. They end up hijacking an alien ship, which can use other tramlines, instead.
- The Lost Fleet: The Syndics are between the Alliance fleet and the hypernet gate through which they entered the system, and badly outnumber them. Geary, now in command, orders the fleet through an ordinary jump point.
- The Forever War: The narrator, who really does not want to go fight in said war and probably die, considers attempting this as a way to desert ("once outside the chain of collapsar jumps, you'd be practically impossible to track down"). Unfortunately for him (and most of his soldiers), that part of the ship's navigation is preset.
- Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch: The Romulans do this to sneak into human-held systems. Starfleet figures out how they're doing it when Captain Archer does the same thing during an exercise.
- Another Romulan War novel has Trip and a Romulan agent doing this in a ship with a broken warp drive. Due to time dilation, they don't run out of supplies, but months pass and the war situation has dramatically changed by the time they're rescued.
- Ciaphas Cain's ship has to quickly leave the Warp, and is attacked by Orks. Cain and Jurgen make it to the escape pods, but the trip to the nearest planet (which is also the destination) takes weeks.
- In Honor Harrington, the only way to sneak into a system is to come out of hyperspace hundreds of billions of kilometers past the heliopause and come in slowly over weeks or months.
- Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs has the protagonist returning to his home planet of Thrintun in a starship. After his ship completes a hyperspace jump, it needs to recharge before making another jump. Unfortunately for him, the ship's power plant suffers a disastrous malfunction and is destroyed. The remaining stored energy can't support a hyperspace jump, but is enough for it to travel through normal space for two hundred years to reach a Thrint planet.
- At the end of A Fire Upon the Deep, the protagonists activate a superweapon that, among other effects, entirely disables the hyperdrives of the fleet the Big Bad has sent after them, stranding the fleet in deep space light years away from the planet where the protagonists have taken refuge. However, this only buys them time to prepare, as the fleet can and does eventually still reach them at sublight speed.
Live-Action TV
- Stargate Atlantis: An Ancient warship stuck between the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies with a broken hyperdrive was able to accelerate very close to the speed of light, so a voyage of thousands of years took much less time for them.
- One episode of Star Trek: Enterprise has Trip and Reed stuck in a shuttlecraft without a warp drive, and believing incorrectly that the Enterprise has been destroyed. Reed suggests that they might be able to reach a planet without a warp drive, but Trip replies that doing so would take months, much longer than their air supply.
Tabletop Games
- In Eclipse Phase, the Pandora Gates allow faster-than-light travel, but the Titanian Commonwealth launches a conventional probe to Barnard's Star in case the Gates are a trap or otherwise have something wrong with them.
Video Games
- Star Control 2: This is half-seriously suggested in the novelization as a way to travel between Vela and Zeeman, but it's concluded that it would take too long.
- In Sword of the Stars humans rely on Hyperspace Lanes for FTL travel. On the rare occasions when a fleet doesn't have enough fuel to reach a system through a long circuitous path via the nodespace network, they can try STL travel. The Hiver race has to reach new stars at sublight in order to set up their Portal Network.
