5 Creative Ways to Achieve Lightning Speed in Space

Space operas would quickly lose their excitement without some imaginative means of traveling vast distances at lightning speeds. For instance, if traveling at 40,000 miles per hour—the speed at which Voyager is currently racing—Vulcans would need roughly 17,000 years to reach Earth and initiate first contact. By then, we might have already wiped ourselves out in a catastrophic war and been replaced by intelligent apes. Now, that would not make for an entertaining movie. To spice things up, here are a few fictional methods for rapid space travel in science fiction.

1. FTL Drive

Photo courtesy BattlestarProps.com.

Mr. Gaeta was undoubtedly one of the busiest crew members aboard the Battlestar Galactica. Aside from his other responsibilities, he was tasked with activating the ship’s FTL (Faster Than Light) drive and calculating jumps. While the newer and more battle-worn battlestars had sophisticated computer systems to ensure the Galactica didn’t emerge from FTL in the middle of a moon, Gaeta had a trusty protractor and a grease pen.

FTL is arguably a bit of a misnomer, or at the very least, a bit misleading. The ship itself doesn’t exceed the speed of light. Instead, it bends space, creating what’s known as an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. (Rosen, in this case, refers to Nathan Rosen, Einstein's colleague and the unsung ‘other guy,’ paving the way for later legends like José Carreras, Michael Collins, and Joey Bishop.) This phenomenon, more commonly known as a wormhole, transports the ship to a distant point in space. The end result is that the Galactica could be moving at a snail's pace but still reach light-speed travel. However, this technique introduces a few intriguing problems and possibilities. Ships with FTL capabilities, like Raptors, can jump into planetary atmospheres for tactical maneuvers—but they might also materialize within planets, which is a truly bad day. (A special tribute to the tough Raptor 612, lost during the final search and rescue mission on Caprica.) Additionally, firing up an FTL drive near or inside another ship can inflict severe damage to the ship's hull, as the space-time distortion itself is highly destructive.

It’s worth noting that long-distance travel using FTL drives requires multiple jumps. There’s no simple, ‘Set course for Earth. Engage!’ Instead, it’s hundreds or even thousands of short, hazardous jumps. (Cylon FTL drives are more efficient, though they too have their limits.)

2. Warp Drive

The standard Starfleet warp drive is officially called a Gravimetric Field Displacement Manifold, and it runs on matter/antimatter reactions. (But no, it doesn’t use dilithium crystals, which only serve to focus those reactions into electro-plasma flows. The actual reactions are powered by deuterium. Got it?) Here’s how it works: The warp drive creates a subspace field around the ship, which warps space-time and allows the ship to travel at extraordinary speeds. The speed is measured using Warp Factors, where Warp 1 equals the speed of light, and Warp 10 is theoretically impossible and infinite, despite what that terrible episode of Star Trek Voyager suggested. (Note that in various episodes of different series, you might hear ‘Warp 15!’—this is just a recalibration of the scale. It’s simpler to say 'Warp 15' than to pronounce, 'Warp 9.9999999999999923. Engage!’)

Zefram Cochrane developed the human version of the warp drive in 2063, which, oddly enough, means that today’s high school students will be alive to witness both the achievement of warp speed and first contact with the Vulcans, the latter occurring right after humanity achieves faster-than-light travel.

Safety precaution: In the event of a warp core breach—which is extremely dangerous—a starship can potentially save itself by ejecting the core. Of course, this did not go as planned that one time in Star Trek: Generations when Geordi completely forgot about that option.

3. Akwende Drive

The Terran Confederation Navy utilizes jump drives to transport ships between designated jump points along jump lines. (Each jump point is signaled by a jump buoy.) For the one reader who’s not well-versed in Wing Commander physics, here’s the breakdown: Jump lines (or jump tunnels) are scarce routes in space created by the gravity wells of celestial bodies. Think of them as interstellar highways. A jump point marks the entry location of a jump line, and space colonists place jump buoys at these points to help navigation systems find them with pinpoint accuracy. Jump lines can be bidirectional, but more often than not, they are not.

Special propulsion systems were created to exploit the potential of jump lines. The most advanced of these are Akwende Drives (also known as Jump Drives), named after Dr. Shari Akwende, the inventor of the faster-than-light Morvan Drive and the first human to discover jump points.

The strategic value of jump points is clear. Controlling both ends of a jump line unlocks vast new regions of space. This value grows even more if the nodes connect to habitable planets or other jump points. As a result, both humans and Kilrathi frequently clash over regions that hold these points.

4. Imperium Warp Engine

In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, there exists a chaotic dimension called the Immaterium, or simply, “the Warp.” It is composed entirely of the psychic energy that forms the foundation of the material universe. Scientists developed specialized propulsion systems to enable ships to enter the Warp and ride its fast-moving currents. Upon emerging from the Warp, the ship has covered vast distances in real space. The result is faster-than-light travel.

The drawback of venturing into a chaotic psychic domain is not only the daemons and dark gods that reside there, but also the certainty that the very nature of such a realm will consume the soul of any traveler. To mitigate these risks, warp engines are equipped with systems that create a protective Gellar Field around the spacecraft. However, traveling through such an inhospitable parallel universe is unpredictable at best, and ships often spend weeks journeying through the Warp only to emerge and discover that centuries have passed.

5. Infinite Improbability Drive

Here’s how the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes the Infinite Improbability Drive: “The Infinite Improbability Drive is a brilliant new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere fraction of a second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.”

For many years, scientists struggled to develop such a device, but after repeated failures, they declared it a 'virtual impossibility.' One night, a student approached the issue with a different mindset, realizing that a virtual impossibility was actually a finite improbability. He calculated just how improbable it was, fed the results into a finite improbability generator, and magically created an infinite improbability drive from nothing. He went on to win the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness, only to be lynched by a mob of his fellow scientists.

Physics later gave birth to the Bistromathics drive, which, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is “a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about with Improbability Factors.” Bistromathics takes advantage of the peculiar relationship between numbers in restaurants—specifically, the ideal seating arrangement for an indeterminate number of guests, the unpredictability of arrival times (studied under recipriversexcluson, defined as 'a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself'), and the unique splitting of numbers on a bill.

According to the Guide, once bistromathics was fully understood and accepted, “So many mathematical conferences were held in such excellent restaurants that a large number of the brightest minds of the generation succumbed to obesity and heart failure, setting the science of mathematics back by several years.”