Basic Trope: Travel faster than light in spaceships
- Straight: Bob travels faster than light in a spaceship, which can take minutes to travel a distance of several light-years.
- Exaggerated: Bob can travel across the observable universe in a split-second.
- Downplayed: Bob travels slightly faster than light.
- Justified:
- The speed of light is faster, sometimes even infinite.
- Bob's spaceship uses futuristic non-Newtonian propulsion that can break the lightspeed limit.
- Inverted:
- A ship travels ridiculously slow.
- Everything travels faster than light except the ship.
- Subverted: It appears that a spaceship travels faster than light, but it is because of Time Dilation.
- Double Subverted: It turns out that spaceships can travel faster than light, but it's expensive to do so, and it wasn't deemed necessary for that specific journey.
- Parodied: Alex can fly at superluminal speeds by farting extremely powerfully.
- Zig Zagged: ??
- Averted: The work is a hard science fiction, and thus deems FTL travel impossible.
- Enforced: The greater wants interstellar travel to happen within a reasonable length of time.
- Lampshaded: "Why can spaceships travel faster than light?"
- Invoked: Alice, a very intelligent scientist and inventor, discovers an easy way to transfer matter faster than the speed of light.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice destroys Bob's FTL drives as well as her own as soon as she realizes going faster than light is tearing the fabric of the universe apart.
- Discussed: "If this was science fiction, our ship will be traveling faster than light."
- Conversed: "Why do spaceships travel faster than light in science fiction when it is impossible to go faster than light?" "It's just a show."
- Deconstructed: Did you really think there wouldn't be consequences for breaking the rules of reality?
- The FTL method violates causality and causes the laws of physics to break down across the universe after a successful jump, effectively dooming the FTL starship and all of reality.
- FTL is possible, but because it is more or less fundamentally a form of Time Travel by its very causality-violating nature, any advanced interstellar civilization which developed it is almost guaranteed to end up retroactively erasing themselves from existence by accident, thus providing another solution to the Fermi Paradox.
- Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: you better be prepared to face the immense risks, dangers and costs of messing with the laws of physics, because they range from being destroyed by hostile natural phenomena unique to your FTL-space to opening the way for horrible, incomprehensible inhabitants there to subject you and your destinations to a Fate Worse than Death.
- Reconstructed: Yes, but they can be mitigated.
- The FTL method used would not violate causality it involves tunneling through space-time between two locations and traveling through it at subluminal speeds. The impossibility of faster-than-light relative speed only applies locally.
- The universe is much more paradox-resistant than previously speculated. While you DO travel back in time, when you arrive reality literally prevents you from doing anything that could violate causality until you catch up chronologically. Or the drive will simply not make the jump at all until probability for paradox goes down to zero.
- "The HMS Troper's Reality-Bubble-Generator (RBG) Mark 41 is a refinement of the staple artificial real-space envelopes that protects the vessels travelling in FTL-Space from its hostile environment and hostile inhabitants. Whereas previous models still carries a substantial risk of causing a 'Realspace Incursion Event' inside starships and at the planets they leave or arrive at, the Mark 41's refinements through further understanding of the principles behind the Predecessors' ancient relic star-drives is expected to reduce these risks, already miniscule compared to the early days of FTL travel with Mark 1 to 15 RBG, by another order of magnitude at only a fraction of the costs in credit and energy previously required..."
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