I’d love to hear about your favorite concept or idea you’ve read about or seen in scifi media.
My personal favorite is the Conjoiner Drive out of the Revelation Space series. These ship drives are dual drives on either side of a lighthugger and have a living being inside the drives to act as a supercomputer, which holds a wormhole open inside the drives. The wormhole links far in the past to the big-bang and uses the energy from the big-bang for propulsion.
In most scifi I’ve come across wormholes are used for FTL travel, and I thought this was such a unique and creative use of a wormhole it has stuck with me for years after reading about it.
So what are your favorite devices or ideas that have come out of scifi media?
Elite Dangerous’s Frame Shift Drive having both modes of operation with the standard Alcubierre drive which allows you to do FTL by contracting spacetime around your ship (hence frame shift) or near instant system travel by creating a wormhole to travel through.
The catch is that while supercruise has been around for a long time and works just as you expect, the wormhole hyperjump is new reverse engineered tech by captured Thargoid technology.
The drive uses mass to guide the ship to the destination, meaning it can only work by locking onto primary stars of a system. You can only make wormhole jumps between systems but must use supercruise to get to where you actually need within the system.
Also that mass affects its operation:
I don’t play Elite anymore, but I’ve always really appreciated how elegant the FSD is and wanted more games to copy it. The physics of it just feels sensible. It explains away the lack of FTL ramming while simultaneously being a safety mechanic for the player. Looking at it as a pure game mechanic, it self-balances travel times so that distances many orders of magnitude apart are compressed together into a much more practical range.
My friend always complained that that jumping between systems is unnecessary. That you should just be able to to fire up your FSD and go between systems that way. I don’t know if this would be better, I think we all understand that the wormhole is just a loading screen that makes you wait longer than loading the actual system. I don’t play Elite anymore either, I did all 5 of the activities it offers lol.
I just did the math, and using the FSD presented in-game to travel from Sol to Alpha Centauri would take 20 real life hours, so I think it’s fine to say that, yes, FSD can technically be used for interstellar travel in lore, but it’s so impractical versus jumping that it might as well not exist.
Also, yeah, the game doesn’t offer a lot of variety. I only still want to pop in occasionally, because the immersiveness in VR is something special. It makes combat really fun and space trucking really cozy. Unfortunately, there’s not much else going for it. I just don’t get how all the faction war stuff is supposed to be appealing.