FTL | The types of FTL, how their used in Sci-Fi and what they offer to writers and creatives. 

I'm a fan of sci-fi that realizes even the space between planets is enormous and adds an in-system transit drive. Games mostly do this because they can't just have people bunk out while the ship moves. See LDS in I-War, in-system subspace in Freespace, and FSD in Elite Dangerous.

The type I came up with is basically instant teleportation in a straight line, so you actually have to aim the ship at whatever place you want to jump to and you'll always appear facing that direction, but there's no actual travel time. I picked instantaneous travel because I figured that way there wouldn't be any issues with time dilation or causality being broken. The main limitation of this mode of travel is that it messes with your sense of space and time which can cause a sort of temporary psychosis, so it's risky to make too many jumps in succession.

You should do a lore video on the Lancer RPG, it has some insane lore that I think you would enjoy

Personally my favorite use of FTL in games would have to be Stellaris. You start with a naturally occurring Hyperspace Network and then Evolve into Space Highways with the Hyper Relays. To Instant teleportation with Gateways and Jump drives and Quantum Catapults, as the technology progresses. With mods like Gigastructural Engineering. Allowing you to Use tech like the Maginot Worlds to forcefully create choke points by disrupting the use of jump drives.

As a note on mass effect ftl, it works on the idea of “if you halve the apparent mass of everything in an area, the speed of light is doubled in that area”, which allows ftl velocities with minimal relativity issues, though conventional engines are still needed to actually move, and if the field is turned off in ftl the ship snaps back to sunlight and sheds excess energy as Cherenkov radiation, killing everyone on the ship.

Honestly my absolute favorite use of FTL in science fiction would have to be the Adama maneuver. From the reboot Battlestar Galactica during the battle of New Caprica.

shouldn't it be "how they're used in Sci-Fi" ?

The Infinite Improbability Drive is the best form of FTL

You should talk about the most awesome and terrifying super weapon in sci-ci. Mega-maid from spaceballs. Having the atmosphere of a planet sucked away would be devastating.

(FTL type 1) 1:46 Other dimensional travel (FTL type 2) 4:00 Teleportation (FTL type 3) 6:47 Reality sidesteping (FTL type 4) 9:00 Wormholes

My thought? If you want to be able to see exoplanets and still be able to come home to your family at the end of your deployment, you need FTL.

Fun fact FTL could have hilarious side effects. One I like is time lag. For example Macross unrefined drives have a time lag of 1 day in FTL to 10 days in real space. Or Babylon 5 where Telepaths get over exposure of signals necessitating the need to lock them in rooms without windows.

Mass Effect ship ftl drives rely on using the mass effect field to mess with the speed of light, in addition to lowering the mass of the ship, *inside the field* so that the ship travels FTL without actually traveling FTL. It's the mass relay that creates a completely mass free corridor to accelerate ships along instantaneously to another mass relay.

If I remember right, in BSG if you were too close to a jump point either incoming or outgoing , you ended up with a HUGE dose of rads and needed to go through decontamination as well as antiradiation medication

Dune Heighliners aren't wormhole type FTL. Guild Navigators Foldspace which is the second type of "teleportation" FTL you have described. They are so large to accommodate large groups of passenger/small fleets of lesser vessels.

The single biggest reason Writers use FTL Travel is so they can create a Functional Interstellar Nation...Without FTL Travel, Messages to another star would take at least a decade to get to it's destination and return...Alpha Centauri is 4.5 Light Years from SOL (Earth's Home Star System) so a message would take 4.5 YEARS to get from Earth to Alpha Centauri and another 4.5 YEARS for their answer to get to Earth...Rigel on the other hand is 860 Light Years from Earth...so a one way message would take 8.6 CENTURIES to get there...we'd be long dead before they even got the message and they'd me long dead before we got their answer 860 YEARS later... In Science Fiction, multi-star Nations/Empires/Republics are IMPOSSIBLE unless we have the ability to travel faster than light one way or another simply because we cant even TALK to another star in a reasonable time frame let along actually visit another star in our Lifetimes...

9:44 Wormholes can still violate causality cause they are spacetime constructs, they don't just transport you through space but also time. In practice what this means is that different ends of the wormhole can experience different amounts of time passing due to time dilation if one end is moving fast or experiencing higher gravity than the other. From the wikipedia article on Wormholes "If traversable wormholes exist, they might allow time travel.[30] A proposed time-travel machine using a traversable wormhole might hypothetically work in the following way: One end of the wormhole is accelerated to some significant fraction of the speed of light, perhaps with some advanced propulsion system, and then brought back to the point of origin. Alternatively, another way is to take one entrance of the wormhole and move it to within the gravitational field of an object that has higher gravity than the other entrance, and then return it to a position near the other entrance. For both these methods, time dilation causes the end of the wormhole that has been moved to have aged less, or become "younger", than the stationary end as seen by an external observer; however, time connects differently through the wormhole than outside it, so that synchronized clocks at either end of the wormhole will always remain synchronized as seen by an observer passing through the wormhole, no matter how the two ends move around.[35]: 502  This means that an observer entering the "younger" end would exit the "older" end at a time when it was the same age as the "younger" end, effectively going back in time as seen by an observer from the outside. One significant limitation of such a time machine is that it is only possible to go as far back in time as the initial creation of the machine."

Forgive me for being late, but i believe Dune's Heighliners are closer to quantum teleportation. They're like massive freighters, but the individual cargo boxes are a separate ship.

You know, I like how GURPs classifies FTL types. They don't classify FTL types based on the underlying physics because at the end of the day, the physics is just technobabble. GURPS classifies FTL based on the macroscopic effects, aka, how it impacts the setting and story/game. For that. FTL boils down to three types: Teleportation drives: Travel is instant point to point with no crossing of the in between space. This could be done via wormholes, quantum technobabble. folding space, or whatever. But what matters is that the characters don't experience any time passing - or so little time passing as to make no difference - when ships travel via FTL. "Warp" Drives - Named after Trek's Warp drive, this type of FTL moves you through normal space (somehow) at faster than light speeds. Or at least, that's what it appears to do. Travel takes a perceptible amount of time and may have to deal with obstacles that exist in normal space like planets and stars. "Hyperdrive" - This method of FTL takes you into an alternate space that's not the same as regular space. Babylon 5's hyperspace is the prime example, You still have perceptible travel times, but any obstacles and hazards you have to deal with may or may not be related to objects in normal space. Gateways like the titular Stargates of the Stargate series isn't treated as their own FTL class, but as a modifier of the three existing classes, aka, a method of implementing an FTL type. A gateway after all might open up directly to your destination (teleportation), or to an alternate space you must trek across to reach your destination (hyperspace), or fling you to your destination through regular space like a catapult (warp drive).

Jumping from earth to Mars only to keep on going would absolutely become a sport. Very dangerous, very illegal, very popular. Who can get to pluto first? Try not to fly through Jupiter or Neptune if you decide to slingshot around them. And if and when you overshoot Pluto then you'd better have working inertial dampeners. That includes all you Ironman Mode racers out there. Really, you make the sport what it is. Now... 3,2,1...JUMP!

Wormholes, Warp drives, and the Musha Jump drive are the most likely and possible pieces of FTL while we can't do a warp drive because of 6 problems it still has like the Vid from Cool Worlds yet pretty much all those problems go away if you do slower than light warp drive even if we can't do FTL yet it's still a massive achievement in itself still as time dilation and such can be avoided including not needing negative energy and such unlike FTL which it still does even if you see the papers claiming they solved that they actually didn't as a physicist on YT told about it she's very well known.

What about slip-stream from Gene Rodenberry’s Andromeda? (I like that show, but damn does everyone just straight up forget about it!)

Ah yes.. EvE and its Cynos... That brings back memories from when I used to play that game - until I ran out of stuff to do about 8-9 years or so ago - and before CCP (from what I have heard since) kinda shot the economy to shit... Got a few fun memories of my time there. Including a logistics run with bridging through half a dozen titans and then back again with 30 or so freighters full of stuff. Or sitting in an asteroid belt mining, with a Hel-class Supercarrier as watchdog... Nullsec was fun like that. Or taking a Bhaalgorn out for a PVP-Fleet-OP for the fun of it (and then losing the bloody thing because the FC did underestimate how sluggish that bugger was). By the time I quit there were only three ships left in the game which I could not pilot and operate - and that also only because I couldn't be arsed to grind the cash needed to buy the skills for them... The "Patron Saint of Duct Tape" was good enough for me.

Incorrect assessment on Battlestar's FTL. Quantum teleportation involves the instantaneous link of the quantum states between two or more entangled particles regardless of their locate, distance and speed. Battlestars travel instantly between two locations using wormholes the way that Stargates work. In the episode "Blood on the Scales" we actually get to see one of the Battlestar's FTL drives and it bares a striking resemblance to a Casimir device, albeit huge and using magnets, but it's exactly the sort of thing you'd need to generate an area of negative energy, which is what you'd need if you wanted to hold open/widen a wormhole.

The Big Damn Hero's moment of a friendly battleship stabbing back into Realspace as its weapons all roar to life, creating the Holy Wall of Flak, hallowed be its name to take the pressure off a beleaguered Hero ship is so underrated it's criminal.

The problem with gates is that they require multiple centuries, if not millennia to set up if you don’t have any other FTL methods. So most examples seem to involve some sort of precursor civilization (i.e. the Ancients). Personally, I like STL travel so gates make the perfect “exception” in my fictional universe.

In the hard-science genre?What would happen to your body at light speed? How long would you have to slow down without coming to sudden stop? Because that would kill you😮😮 I like "The Expanse" when it comes to hard-science Sci-Fi. The Rings are cool.

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I like the bab5 jump space as most civilian ships use the jump gate and most military fleets have at least one ship with jump drive to open the other ships a hole to enter jump space. Used a similar system in a rpg I ran

David Weber's Series of Books Starting with Crusade, Starfire, Book 1. Each Star System is Linked with 1 or more points to 1 or more star systems like Earth ONLY has 1 Jump Point linked to Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri has 7 Other links to other systems. This creates a Chain of Jump Points that will be Spread across a star system and needs to be found with a survey.

WH40K also has the interstellar subway of the Webway, for those clever enough to travel great distances without traversing Super Hell. Good luck getting either the Eldari or Drukhari Transit Authorities to actually maintain anything, though.

My favorite system is presumably Tesla based. (Lost in Space?, Forbidden Planet) Basically the presumption that Tesla actually was right and electrogravity is a thing. And yes, yes, I know modern science poo poos it, Then again, our science can't really reconcile Einsteinian/Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics without serious nonsense and didn't even know dark matter existed until relatively recently, so its not like we have all the answers. Considering how much of our modern world came from the head of Mr. Tesla, it wouldn't surprise me that he would be vindicated one day.

Trans-warp Drive in Star Trek (USS Excelsior) uses a "pocket dimension" to FTL

Homeworld FTL is pretty great. There's clearly travel time in hyperspace, but it's also clearly much faster than normal space. There are also gate networks built by a precursor race which establish safe, permanent hyperspace corridors for mass transit without requiring hyperspace cores aboard a flagship vessel for a fleet. Finally, if you go into the dark places of hyperspace, such as the intergalactic void, you might just pick up something scary (insert The Beast nanovirus here). My science fiction setting using gravity field generators for propulsion (aesthetic is galleys! IN! SPACE!), which eventually allow them to repurpose the space-warping effects of the gravity fields to generate a pseudo-FTL drive that uses space warping (your Type 3) to allow a ship to travel at sublight speeds but cover superlight distances.

The way amazon ended the expanse with a season where every episode opened with a sort of promiss for the next season that they would go back to all the cool space wizard stuff then just ended the show instead is just criminal.

How does your FTL work? STAR TREK: "We create an artificial distortion in space-time fueled by matter-antimatter reactions." STAR WARS: "We enter hyperspace and desperately hope to avoid mass shadows." WARHAMMER 40k: "We take a shortcut... through hell."

Shoutout to Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga where the wormholes are set up such that there are just railway networks between planets like it's a modern country rather than a galaxy-wide network, also that the first wormhole is used as mankind lands on mars, so the actual astronaut is in full gear and finds a dude in a makeshift space suit sat in front basically going "So, how was the flight?"

Then there's Dan Simmons' QT. You are scanned. A copy of you is sent to what is essentially a printer. Your data is printed. You are disintegrated. All pretty much simultaneously. A very nightmarish thing to contemplate, and people still used it knowing what it was. I think Star Trek is the same, and trekkies are in denial.

And the series that have multiple types, and shows how vastly different they are. Thr Lost Fleet series is a good example with the "standard" jump drive thst takes them into a alternate Jump Space, and theres Hyper Net gates

A good example of worm-hole gate travel is Peter Watts' Freeze Frame Revolution. A non-spoiler part of the story is that the slower than light ship is travelling around the galaxy seeding jump gates.

the ftl in homeworld is kinda weird, it's somewhere between quantum teleportation and sub-dimensional travel "hyperspace" is described in the mainline games as a "state" that an object is in, rather than a different dimension, essentially the ship is enveloped by a "quantum wavefront" that causes the ship to become ethereal (unable to be interacted with by normal matter except via gravity, kinda like dark matter) and able to move at faster-than-light speeds. Being in or out of hyperspace is more akin to having a positive or negative charge or being "in motion" or "at rest" than being in a different "location." This is somewhat contradicted in Cataclysm when the Somtaaw scientists theorize that the beast is "native" to hyperspace The solution I found to this contradiction is that the beast (or rather, what became the beast) was something that's natural state was "in hyperspace" and coming into contact with the ancient ship caused it to "fuse" with the ship, changing its "natural state."

Bit of a personal take but I think 'teleportation' is just a sub form of either wormhole or dimensional travel. The difference being that the wormhole or crack is on a quantum or minimum nano level. This creates the teleportation because the data of the ship traveling through the wormhole or alternate dimension is inverse to its speed. The smallest being quantum encoded data. Primitive versions might not use disassembled data but remove the space between atoms essentially squeezing the ship.

Mass Effect uses 0 mass, I think. From what I've heard, you don't want negative mass, shit gets weird with it.

Aw man you didn't bring up my favorite category brute force either approaching light speed like in enders game or just fucking folding space itself in half using gravity and punching a hole through like in macross

Interesting channel you got here. Have you tried A.Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" series yet? It's the most interesting scifi i've come across in a long, LONG time. FTL didn't appear in the series till... Oh wait, that would be spoilers. hahahah! Yeah, won't tell.

Again...full of wrong info. Example., flight pods would not be ripped off or left behind...when pods move in and out for structure, as other ships have non moving pods. Stargate makes TWO points in space into ONE point.

Existence of "no consequence" FTL or FTL at all depends also on the vibe and story the author wants to tell- Expanse as you mentioned takes it's time with travel to set up character relations, give reader anxiety as tensions build between planets and portagonists or the threat is still visibly in motion: as example the cammo asteroid bombardment of Earth. The other story that utilizes travel for story is Forever War- travel between destinations rips one from time through relativity (amongst other physics rules) making the main character a man outside of time as he's deployed on the other side of galaxy and return home unaged, just to see that ages passed at home, his family gone and memory of war he was deployed in long faded. It builds up the feeling of pointlessness and abandonment. I also read a few short stories that used side effects of FTL and relativity to tell some quite depressing stories- like a story of a bar for spaceship pilots, many of which were these time-split people who left Earth for a second just to learn ages passed, or that because so much time passed they have no home to go back to: scene in the story described a distrought pilot messing with one of many clocks at the bar, one with time and date for when Earth stopped existing. The other was about a special pilot for one of the FTL ships- story by Exurbia titled The Lantern (if you are familiar with Dune and 40K you might see from where he was inspired for the pilot character there), but I still recomend a read/listen

"Lower energy state than the vacuum of space" should be cause for concern... that is, if it possible, then vacuum decay is possible, and we'd literally never know what hit us.

Hm. Mass Effect is one of the few ripoffs of the OG Space Opera author E. E. Doc Smith’s Bergenholm drive that neutralized inertia. James Blish’s Cities In Flight used the spindizzy which enveloped a city in a force shell that could drive the city at hundreds of times the speed of light. That wasn’t fast enough to get places within a human lifetime so he also had life extending drugs making scenes In transit necessary. Not quite an Alcubierre drive but close. There’s an FTL drive in a story that I read many years ago- it’s the only thing I remember about it. It was a limited teleportation system that allowed a ship to jump maybe a couple times its own length, but it did so instantaneously and could do so thousands of times a second. From the point of view of the crew they were moving FTL but between jumps they had zero velocity relative to their launch point. That means they had to match velocity with their destination by various means from rockets to solar sails. I’m pretty sure it was called the stutter drive. Ring any bells?

technically removing something mass is simply a matter of removing the Higgs boson if you have means to hold matter together other then gravity you could make something massless and still tangible. Massless things do exist they're all over the place you're looking at some right now.

Mass effect FTL works with mass effect fields (dark energy fields created by exotic element zero). A mass effect field can raise or lower the mass of a bubble of space time around the ship, allowing for greater acceleration, but it doesn't give it negative mass. Ships achieve FTL thanks to the light bending shenanigans of dark energy. Light moves slower through glass than through vacuum, similarly, light moves slower through vacuum than through a mass effect field. This allows a mass effect field to reduce the mass of a ship while simultaneously raising the speed of light around it, allowing for FTL travel without actually going faster than light. This does produce interesting side effects. The most notable being the doppler shift. From the perspective of the ship, everything outside the ship redshifts as the change in light speed makes all the radiation in regular space appear to stretch out into lower frequencies. At a certain point, all visible light outside the ship redshifts to the the point where objects only become delectable by radio telescope antennas and are instead replaced by x-ray, gamma ray and eventually, cosmic ray sources. Like black holes and pulsars, which are pushed into the visible spectrum. This effectively makes the ship blind while at FTL, relying on an FTL course plotted before the trip began. On the other end, from an outside source, the ship itself appears to have blueshifted and all emissions produced by the ship are pushed into higher frequencies. This starts out by producing a blue or purple glow around the ship as all visible light takes on higher frequency colours, but as the strength of the field increases, so does the blueshift. A mass effect field that allows for twice the speed of light would cause the ship to produce twice as much radiation emissions. At 200x the speed of light, the ship emits it's visible light as X-rays, while it's infrared signature has been pushed into the visible spectrum or higher. This is why certain forms of thermal-based stealth technology don't work during FTL. But, by far my favourite thing about mass effect FTL is the limitations. Though FTL travel exists in mass effect, FTL sensor do not. Which leads to interesting detail about the lore of Mass effect FTL. Such as the fact that most sensors don't work at superluminal speeds and those that do are greatly distorted. Or the challenges of trying to pursue an FTL ship with lightspeed sensors. But my favorite is that ship-based FTL is relatively slow. It's impossible for a ship-based FTL drives to cross hundreds of lightyears in an instant. How the only way to achieve long-distance FTL travel would be through mass relays. FTL jump gates with 5 km diameter FTL drives that create powerful mass effect corridors between themselves and another mass relay, allowing for instantaneous travel across hundreds, or even thousands of kilometers. Though mass relays are simple and straightforward to use, their design and capabilities are so far beyond the understanding of humanity that the closest they could get to building their own are the rather primitive ship drives.

Both ST Warp Drive and Element Zero(Dark Matter) Mass Effect Drive are work by severe the ship own local space time continum from the whole space so GR nolonger bother them Normal gravity cause negative curve space time, but warp drive cause positive curve, and it have to be complete self confine to severe regular space time continum

Quantum Teleportation- you’re wrong about things needing space around the object or it’ll get ripped to shreds. I thought that too but in series finally of BSG at end they jumped with flight pods extended and the ship and pods were both not torn apart. Maybe go back and check your lore?

Star Trek does not use a gravitic drive that moves space around the ship. I have never encountered this in any canon works. The Physics of Star Trek is the source of this, and got this wrong. The author said, "whatever explanation Star Trek gives, this [gravitic drive] must be what they meant." (There is a fan theory that says this is how the _sublight_ drive works. There's another one that says it creates gravitational waves, and the ship rides the waves. But the sublight drives are never explained in canon.) What they do, instead, is overlay another reality on top of this one, thus altering the laws of this reality. The more complete the overlay, the more the laws change to match that over reality. They then travel at sublight... according to the new rules. The "warp field" is the bubble of overlaid space. The two space-times do not like being forced on each other, so the bubble collapses as soon as the ship stops maintaining it. This handily explains why the ship needs power to stay at warp. The effect is the same, yes: something with positive mass is moving slower than the speed of light through space-time relative to local distance markers while still moving between positions faster than light does. But the distinction is there. In this version, rather than changing the distance to be traveled, you are raising the speed of light. Also, it's "how *_they're_* used in Sci-Fi." Homophone errors screech at me like nails on a chalkboard. Stop it.

The Daedulas use’s hyperspace generator to open a hyperspace windoe

Dune's Starliners are _not_ portals. They use the "Holtzman Effect" to fold spacetime, and it's a major plotpoint in story that Guild's Navigators use the limited prescience gifted to them by the spice melange to PLOT a safe COURSE trough folded space-time. It's essentially Star Trek's Warp drive without a computer doing the math for you, but the Ships actually have to travel from one place to another: think of them as giant space-ferries, capable of transporting entire fleets from one star system to another.

Actually the galactica did jump with the hanger extended (finale to the moon terra luna to be exact) but it did break the ships pylons and back

in my universe I use jump drives and jump gates, jump drives isolate the ship in a space-time bubble that moves with it across the universe, allowing it to accelerate with it's normal engines, without gaining speed in the bubble, and thuse, ignoring the whole "you need exponentially more energy to get yet another % closer to the speed of light", it takes about 30 minutes to get to the neighboring star. jump gates use pre existing black holes, the ship partially activates it's jump drive to survive approaching and entering the event horizon, and is then blurped out to whatever it's destination is instantly trough a white hole that immediately dies out behind them, as it really doesn't want to exist. this is also how FTL communication is done, tiny jump gates with artificial singularities just strong enough to transport signals to the jumpgate network, that take care of transporting the signal to it's destination. the danger with jump gates is that jump gates act as beacons, allowing accurate travels, you can do a blind jump, but you might not arrive in the safest of spots, so be prepared. also, if your jump drive isn't strong enough or malfunctions, the black hole is gonna transform you into very hot spaghetti, just as it normally would. no fancy esoteric stuff, just gravity being a bitch.

Where do free-formed wormholes fall into this? The reality sidestepping stuff? Also, I share your complex with threes, and to a lesser extent.

I would argue that Quantum Tunneling and Wormholes are one and the same. With a slight difference rather than the ship traveling through a wormhole created by the ship or via external means, the ship generates a wormhole around the vessel. It is riskier but uses much less energy as the temporary wormhole only exists for a micro fraction of a second and everything within the drive field of the ship is moved the field collapses. At least that is the way I've always thought the the Battletech jumpdrive works, the prolate spheroid drive field creates a temporary wormhole, moving the ship and the collapsing the wormhole. The time it takes to generate the temporary wormhole also allows the ships sensors to detect feedback caused by an object at the destination and abort the jump.

7:20 … well the math says so.. so.. give it to the engineers to figure it out and if not it’s their fault bc the math says it possible.

"their use" in sci-fi or "they're used", it can't be "their used", my inner grammar purist requires corrections on this.

Unless it was intentional, you misspelled 'they're' as 'their' in your video title. 0_o

the highlighter SHIPS in Dune are SHIPS not portals

I just find it hilarious, that every planet in the galaxy of Stargate looks like Canada.

"When ships to sail the void between the stars have been built, there will step forth men to sail these ships." --Johannes Kepler.

B5 FTL is just 40k without things trying to eat your soul.

"FTL is a lazy shortcut" Can't really have an intersteller empire if it takes 20 years to get to the nearest star system.

“To baldly go where no man has gone before” - Captain Picard

I still wonder, why no jumpdrive + nuke?

I always thought the BSG Reimagine FTL was the Space Fold. So does that also mean the Macross universe, they actually using the Quantum Teleportation instead of Space Fold. SDF-01 did took a large chunk of the island with it when it jump inside atmosphere to Pluto. Or does it mean that Space Fold fall under Quantum Teleportation group?

What about the FTL used on Moya in Farscape?

Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension !

I can't believe you didn't mention the Adama Maneuver 😞

Warhammer 40k: different species uses different FTL

The Xeelee go 10K lightyears per second and span the entire universe

I personally prefer stargates because i actually don't really care for space travel.

What no babylon 5 or mention of hyperspace!!!

Babylon 5 is my favorite FTL!

Thank you for this interesting video!

there are only 2 types of FTL, 40k and everyone else.

Warpfuckery is a hell of a drug.

Big Papa Chungus approves! 👍

If it were me I would have FTL that is the most possible like warp drives, musha jump drives, or wormholes or FTL gates while still not having FTL communications because we are no where close to having FTL communications unlike FTL travel which the expanse did this great!

The aliens know and they ain't telling

Ok. There is one more type you really need to look into: Transwarp drive (star trek). This thing is both a proper drive that ships can use AND a gate structure. Its both yet they are separate. Id call this a "field effect" drive. Something that accelerates a ship, and depending on if it has another gate to throw that ship to or not, it will either use a similar system to quantum slipstream, or a corridor path much like a wormhole. But it cant be put into any of those 4 categories.

1:20 i love this guy

Hmm no Babylon 5

Where is Steve?

None of these feature battle at FTL. There's star trek but that's the Abrams verse.

Love the use of FTL in Battlestar Galactica, especially the Adama Maneuver where they jump right into the atmosphere of New Caprica.

Nr 2, teleportation, exists in Star Wars as well. It is however quite rare as you require a Force user to perform the feat. Folding space it is called.

RE BSG FTL:I expect that part of the calculations they have to do in order to make a safe jump is figuring and cancelling out relative velocities so that they *don't* go zooming off into the void when they arrive. That would explain things why calculating the jump is so difficult that only a handful of people can do it and the maximum safe distance (they can't do the momentum cancelling thing if the sensors can't see the target location). Also, you kind of hinted at it without explicitly stating it, another reason for FTL to exist is it allows interstellar travel on a timescale that's useful to a story. Without FTL it takes years or decades to traverse a single system. If another star system in your empire is facing a crisis, without FTL the crisis is resolved one way or another before anyone that's not already in the system can respond. This means that characters can also have an idea of what the situation is before they arrive. Without FTL, there aren't interstellar empires. Or even empires that extend beyond a single planet

Battlestar Galactica's drive is _technically_ the fourth kind, as in Deadlock its explained that the drives bring two points of space infinitely close together in a very much wormhole fashion.

Sci, there's one more type. Biological jumpships. Like Mola from Farscape. Humans co-opted a predator escape function from an animal that lives in space and turned it into a method of travel.

Everytime you say "Sc.I" I hear "Steve" and at this point I'm believing Steve is some sort of SciFi super genious and we're just here to amuse him.

Coming out of FTL and instantly opening up with everything you have was a Babylon 5 staple. And it was fucking awesome every single time.

If you want a topic idea: gene alteration. I’m especially interested in WTF happens when/if random civilians get their hands on it, with or without the ability to alter already born adults. Would everyone look like supermodels? Would we have cat girls? Would there be a genetic superhuman arms race? Do we count some people as human still? Etc. Could also go into bio mechanical tech if you want there, like in bio punk stuff.

For my SciFi story I chose a version of the 3rd type of FTL. Basically the ships are leaving the space-time plane to an artificial space-time bubble between the space-time planes of the multiverse. And then they more the artificial space-time plane to ridiculous speeds up to 2bn LY per second to make travel between big-bang-bubbles and dimensions possible. Although they are never "side-stepping" reality because all of the multiverse is a part of reality.

You forgot the 6th method of FTL. Making the engines shart out thrust at magnitudes that would realistically blow up the earth