New(er) Battlestar Galactica FTL

[Axaday]

I never quite got or got used to the concept of FTL in Moore's Battlestar Galactica (maybe copied from the original. I don't know). The F has to stand for "Faster", but they don't seem to go at a speed. Doesn't the ship just teleport?

It is like a limited range spore drive that doesn't require spinning upside-down or hybridizing a person with a gummy bear?

 

[Dvandom]

Jump drives are a fairly common type of FTL. Either done as teleports or as fixed gates (a la Stargate), with travel time being either zero subjective or very very short.

---Dave

 

[Dekafox]

The original never covered their drives in any fashion.

The jump drive in the newer BSG is teleport-based, so likely a spacefold drive. You take the fabric of space over there, put it next to the fabric of space where you are, then move across the gap, and release the fold, snapping everything back to how it was. Instant transport between places, but presumably the further away the space you're folding, the more energy it takes, which provides a reasonable limit so you can't just instantly pop across the galaxy. You never technically break the lightspeed barrier the entire time. The Adama Maneuver really shows that the ship movement is teleport-style as when they do the jump in atmosphere, suddenly there is a void where the ship was, and the air rushes in to fill it.

Wormhole-based travel works similarly, except you're not folding space you're basically punching a tunnel form one part of space to another and moving through it. Again, the ship itself never goes FTL in the process, but would appear to to an outside observer.

The Star Trek spore drives are more like hyperspace drives honestly. It basically moves you into another realm where the laws of physics are different or points in space are closer together compared to your home space, so you again effectively move FTL without actually moving FTL.

Warp drive as a name ahs been used for a few different descriptions of drives that manipulate only the space around you without taking you out of it entirely - one of which basically involves disassembling the fabric of space in front of you and reassembling it behind you.

One novel I read used the cosmic string theories as their basis - I want to say the trick was rotating around a cosmic string takes less than 360 degrees, and that was leveraged to move them along it between systems, but it's been years since I read it.

Another kind of drive I heard discussed but that I've not seen(and IIRC was one way people have thought of for how the Trek warp drives work at one point?) involves putting a field around the ship that raises the speed of light within that bubble. This allows you to go FTL compared to those outside the bubble, while still not breaking the local speed of light. Now make that bubble move with the ship, and away you go. There was an odler article I once read that explained how this might work: basically the tehory is that potons are basically constantly splitting into virtual matter-antimatter particle pairs that annilhate immediately, but for the instant that it's split, those particles can't move at the speed of light, so it slows every so slightly. Put two plates close enough together that the photon of light can't form those virtual particles, and the speed of light goes up. The article in question

 

[Copper Bezel]

I honestly think Star Trek's subspace was originally meant to work exactly like Star Wars's hyperspace, a layer of reality where light just goes faster, the difference in name being presumably one of directional convention. That's why signals can be shifted into subspace, travel superluminally, and then be received at great distances and much faster than light could travel the distance by a detector capable of accessing subspace. What that has to do with the warp field bubble I don't know; even if the bubble is the thing that slides the ship into subspace, whether fully or by degrees, it doesn't explain how the warp field actually accelerates the ship, regardless of the lifting of speed limits, because we know that warp engines are only spacetime distortion machines and not true drives, even reactionless ones.

It also doesn't really jive with the warp 10, infinite velocity nonsense, because communications are already sent as massless light fully within subspace, I.e. simply at subspace's much more generous value of c, and no ship should be able to travel faster than that except when they do, barring transwarp conduits and wormholes that operate much more like the jump gate convention and bypass the intervening space.

Star Trek has more lately (Kurtzman Trek) adopted the Alcubierre Drive idea that the warp field bubble creates a density of positive energy on one end and negative energy on the other (like a black hole / white hole scenario) to expand and contract (not create and destroy) space, creating a spacetime people-mover with a speed determined presumably by the strength of the energy gradient. This is consistent with the concept of warp bubbles and the nature of warp engines. The problem with that, of course, is that it doesn't explain communication and sensors at all, and those should realistically require a big continuous bubble all the way to the target.

I don't think the Casimir effect should help. I find it mind-rending to consider in real life - everything in the universe, even virtual particles that only exist in the scope of chance interactions, seems to be transparent to gravitational waves, so wouldn't gravitational waves travel at the Casmir-corrected speed of light? But an undetectable fraction of the speed of light doesn't help us solve FTL.

Edit: Oh, and as for OP's actual question, yeah, "FTL" is just the conventional name for all science fictional or science speculative superluminal transit. It applies no matter what the nature of travel, so long as you're moving from point A to point B faster than light can.