What’s the fastest spaceship?

[Umbran]

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

Yeah, well, what they fail to tell you is that FTL travel equates to time travel for all of them anyway.

I am not sure there's a valid measure of sci-fi speed other than "It start at point A and arrives in point B in X time units by some person's clock" - which is actually a measure of travel duration, rather than speed. And if you want to quibble over "teleportation", there's so many other quibbles we could introduce....

 

[Morrus]

Yeah, well, what they fail to tell you is that FTL travel equates to time travel for all of them anyway.

I am not sure there's a valid measure of sci-fi speed other than "It start at point A and arrives in point B in X time units by some person's clock". And if you want to quibble over "teleportation", there's so many other quibbles we could introduce....

I predicted that you, specifically, would say that, specifically.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this thread, I'm ruling out teleportation and time travel.

 

[Cadence]

I predicted that you, specifically, would say that, specifically.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this thread, I'm ruling out teleportation and time travel.

So anything involving jump gates is out?

There are a lot of them where they go to some where else (hyperspace?) where the distance is shorter. Is teleportation just going to a hyperspace where the distance is zero?

 

[Umbran]

I predicted that you, specifically, would say that, specifically.

Professional hazard.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this thread, I'm ruling out teleportation and time travel.

As noted above, Einstien tells us all FTL equates to time travel, but I'm guessing that's inconvenient for the discussion.

So, do you want to speak about instantaneous speed vs average speed, then? Speed Buggy and Speed Racer are in a race. Speed Buggy takes a short cut, and gets to the finish line first. Which is faster?

Take two ships. Both have solar sails, puttering along at sub-light speed going from Sol to Alpha Centauri. One takes a shortcut thought a wormhole in space. Which is faster? In the sense of instantaneous speed, they are the same.

But the average speed between Sol and Alpha C depends on which path you use to derive speed. This complication holds for lots of drive systems - wormholes, "hyperspace", and so on, bring up the question of what the length of the path the ship actually travels is.

 

[Morrus]

Professional hazard.


As noted above, Einstien tells us all FTL equates to time travel, but I'm guessing that's inconvenient for the discussion.

So, do you want to speak about instantaneous speed vs average speed, then? Speed Buggy and Speed Racer are in a race. Speed Buggy takes a short cut, and gets to the finish line first. Which is faster?

Take two ships. Both have solar sails, puttering along at sub-light speed going from Sol to Alpha Centauri. One takes a shortcut thought a wormhole in space. Which is faster? In the sense of instantaneous speed, they are the same.

But the average velocity between Sol and Alpha C depends on which path you use to derive speed. This complication holds for lots of drive systems - wormholes, "hyperspace", and so on, bring up the question of what the length of the path the ship actually travels is.

I don’t think you quite grasp the spirit of this conversation!

 

[Blackrat]

Alright, a couple more I could think of. The Guild Highliner from Dune, travels by folding space, and can travel across the galaxy immediately.

Planet Express from futurama is ridiculously fast. It can travel the lenght of the entire universe in a matter of days.

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

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.

Asgard ships as well as human and Wraith ships with a charged ZPM.
Both can make the trip from Earth to the Pegasus galaxy in a surprising time. Which is much, much faster than travelling about a galaxy in a few days, like Star Wars, which is the next fastest.

 

[Imaculata]

Folding space, like Dune's Guild Highliner and the Event Horizon, means making a hole in the fabric of space so that no distance needs to be traveled, and start and destination exist in the same location. But doesn't that basically equate to teleportation, thus disqualifying both?

Likewise, Babylon 5's ships use Jump Gates to travel through hyperspace. They still need to move, but a much shorter distance. Again, this seems like a form of teleportation.

 

[MarkB]

Folding space, like Dune's Guild Highliner and the Event Horizon, means making a hole in the fabric of space so that no distance needs to be traveled, and start and destination exist in the same location. But doesn't that basically equate to teleportation, thus disqualifying both?

Likewise, Babylon 5's ships use Jump Gates to travel through hyperspace. They still need to move, but a much shorter distance. Again, this seems like a form of teleportation.

And Star Wars and Stargate ships jump into hyperspace, while Star Trek ships warp space around them. So are they really moving fast, or just changing the frame of reference?

That's the problem with these fictional modes of travel - once you start making exceptions to the rule, you quickly realise that there are no rules.

 

[RangerWickett]

"It was the year 2021. Russell Morrissey, a humble website owner and game publisher, had just realized that red things go faster than blue things, so he painted the front of a rocket red, and the back of it blue. The front would keep accelerating, out of a desire to go faster than the back half, but since they were connected that could never happen. Thus the rocket would accelerate infinitely, and within a matter of minutes it would travel across the entire universe. Indeed, one could say the speed level would only go up. Russ named the rocket LevelUp, which made sense to him but turned out to be kind of hard to search for in Google.

"Russ had cleverly written on the side of the rocket, 'This rocket isn't affected by time dilation,' so that was one bullet dodged. However, when he wanted to slow down, he had to climb outside the ship and paint the nose blue and the back red. It was very hard to actually get the thing to stop.

"An associate of Russ's named Ryan realized it would be smarter to just have a dial inside the ship labeled 'front,' and whichever direction it pointed would be become the front of the ship. It became much easier to make the ship accelerate or slow down. But Ryan was super cool about it, and still let Russ take most of the credit. All of humanity's resource needs were solved, and everyone said that Russ guy was pretty neat."

There you go, Russ. The fastest ship is LevelUp.