What’s the fastest spaceship?

[Horwath]

USS Enterprise-D in TNG episode Where no one has gone before with "Travelers drive".

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[Morrus]

The Infinite Improbability Drive ship from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as it can go infinitely fast.

And for anyone who wants to say "well that's just comedy" I refer you to one of the contenders for fastest Star Trek ship, the experimental shuttlecraft on Voyager that went so fast it turned Tom Paris into a newt (he got better), and challenge you to say how that isn't also just comedy.

Yeah I think teleporting is in the same boat as time travel.

 

[Nikosandros]

I don't know if it counts as pop culture, but the spaceship in the short story by Jack Vance called "Dead Ahead", is incredibly fast, being able to circumnavigate the whole universe.

 

[Blackrat]

The slipstream drive in Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda hits close at least. I think the limits in speed had to do with the intuition of pilot rather than aspects of physics, and with the Systems Commonwealth spanning 3 galaxies, reasonable travel between them would be faster than most scifi. Travel between galaxies could be achieved in minutes, with a ”lucky” pilot...

Then there’s the Asgard ships in Star Gate that travel between galaxies in the matter of hours apparently. The Daedalus could pull an intergalactic travel in a week if memory serves.

The Moon, in Space 1999, travelled at speeds where they jumped between stars (possibly galaxies) in days, but they took shortcuts through black holes and ”space warps”...

Just some really fast alternatives. Hard to pin the actual fastest down...

 

[MarkB]

Star Wars ships are definitely very fast, able to traverse the galaxy within hours, but it's hard to quantify how fast because it isn't our galaxy. It is a spiral galaxy that visually resembles ours so we can assume it's of similar size, but theoretically it could be ten or even a hundred times smaller and still look like that, with plenty of room for all the canonical star systems.

 

[Dioltach]

Weren't there ships in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that crossed the space between galaxies (and then got eaten by a small dog)? That's got to require some serious speed.

 

[Morrus]

Star Wars ships are definitely very fast, able to traverse the galaxy within hours

Yeah. It takes Voyager 7 years to do what the Falcon can do by lunchtime.

 

[Zardnaar]

Star Wars ships are definitely very fast, able to traverse the galaxy within hours, but it's hard to quantify how fast because it isn't our galaxy. It is a spiral galaxy that visually resembles ours so we can assume it's of similar size, but theoretically it could be ten or even a hundred times smaller and still look like that, with plenty of room for all the canonical star systems.

Similar in size to our own. A few routes could do it in a few hours basically hyperdrive freeways.

Asgard ships on Stargate. Intergalactic in a few days iirc.

 

[aco175]

Yeah. It takes Voyager 7 years to do what the Falcon can do by lunchtime.

The Falcon is on the Imperial system and not the Metric.

 

[Umbran]

Yeah. It takes Voyager 7 years to do what the Falcon can do by lunchtime.

If you want to get picky... that was in a galaxy far, far away. The Milky Way is on the larger side of galaxies. Wherever Star Wars happens can be a much, much smaller place.