Sandurz: Prepare ship for light speed!
Dark Helmet: No, no, no, light speed is too slow.
Sandurz: Light speed, too slow?
Dark Helmet: Yes. We're gonna have to go right to... ludicrous speed!
Dark Helmet: No, no, no, light speed is too slow.
Sandurz: Light speed, too slow?
Dark Helmet: Yes. We're gonna have to go right to... ludicrous speed!
A rocket ship was launched tonight
to unimaginable heights
A dozen times the speed of light
it will arrive at six... of last night.
to unimaginable heights
A dozen times the speed of light
it will arrive at six... of last night.
— The Strugatsky Brothers, translated from Russian.
Nobody wants to think about Kirk and Spock bravely going to some alien planet while everyone they've ever known dies of old age!
Deploy the... uh, I think it's the yellow button. It's usually flashing. It makes the engine go "WHOOSH!"
— Duck Dodgers, Duck Dodgers
Secrets of the blackest voids
Known only to the ancients
Freedom from the planetoids
And the gravity that chains us
To make a fold in space and slip between the curves
Sacrifice of the sisterhood, to do for those they serve
To cross the universe in hyper-spatial flight
We ride the warp of space into the womb of night!
Known only to the ancients
Freedom from the planetoids
And the gravity that chains us
To make a fold in space and slip between the curves
Sacrifice of the sisterhood, to do for those they serve
To cross the universe in hyper-spatial flight
We ride the warp of space into the womb of night!
— The Sword, "Warp Riders"
186,000 miles per second: it's not just a good idea, it's the law!
— Common nerd saying averting this trope, but related to it.
This is a Singh-Jenkins relay, allowing transport (via a loophole in some cosmic mandate) across the sunless wastes to a far-flung district of heaven
She pushed herself off of nothingness, and speeded towards one of those moons, quickly passing light velocity several times over.
In the reaches of outer space, a green-glowing globe floated, undisturbed for 31 years. The three beings inside it were numb, in suspended animation, as they had been for almost all of their imprisonment.
A female figure appeared, lancing in from a point unknown, laying her hands on the globe, and propelling it before her in the direction of Earth's sun. She was black-haired, beautiful, and colder than the emptiness about her. She wore a strange green dress with red trim, had Roman-style sandals on her feet, and wore ornate jewelry on her neck, her wrists, and her earlobes.
Her top speed was far in excess of light.
A female figure appeared, lancing in from a point unknown, laying her hands on the globe, and propelling it before her in the direction of Earth's sun. She was black-haired, beautiful, and colder than the emptiness about her. She wore a strange green dress with red trim, had Roman-style sandals on her feet, and wore ornate jewelry on her neck, her wrists, and her earlobes.
Her top speed was far in excess of light.
Earth had shrunken to a bluish dot behind them. There was only the star-dotted blackness, the sun blazing before them, and another world growing nearer by the second. Their speed exceeded that of light. Only their great power could move the mass their bodies had accumulated now. They did it without seeming effort.
The cold pinpoints of distant stars had blurred into incandescent blue lines streaking across the telescreens, while the rearward-pointing electroscopes showed those same lines shifting to a crimson red before vanishing into a blackness darker than the far reaches of the void.
We're moving so fast that light-waves can't catch up, thought Janeway, stunned at the implications. That's impossible... WE'VE CROSSED THE THRESHOLD OF LIGHT SPEED!
"Yes, look at its power...power to drive a ship through space...power to tear your Earth apart! You know how long we worked on this? A thousand years of reaching for the stars! Now at last we've conquered Space. Ahh, the dreams we had of knowing other worlds..."
