What’s the fastest spaceship?

[Enevhar Aldarion]

The problem with a lot of the movie and TV starships is that they seem to go faster and get places sooner than they actually do, if you read the novelizations, because all that travel time would be boring for the viewer. I am pretty sure the Star Wars books have the travel takes days, while the movies have it happen in hours. But anyway, I would say some of the ships in The Fifth Element.

 

[MarkB]

The problem with a lot of the movie and TV starships is that they seem to go faster and get places sooner than they actually do, if you read the novelizations, because all that travel time would be boring for the viewer. I am pretty sure the Star Wars books have the travel takes days, while the movies have it happen in hours.

Well, Luke gallivants around the galaxy in his X-Wing. That's a long time to sit around in a jumpsuit.

 

[Eltab]

Larry Niven's later Known Space novels feature a single research ship (named Lying Bastard iirc) with an experimental Mk II Hyperdrive, which moves the ship so fast the pilot can barely swerve to avoid colliding with stars' gravity wells. It also has no speed control; the drive is either On or Off.

As far as piloting the ship and arriving at a destination is concerned, "the fastest ship" is reached when your reflexes are not fast enough to control your vessel. (One feature of Known Space hyperdrives is they require a conscious mind to control; no autopilot possible.)

 

[Zardnaar]

The problem with a lot of the movie and TV starships is that they seem to go faster and get places sooner than they actually do, if you read the novelizations, because all that travel time would be boring for the viewer. I am pretty sure the Star Wars books have the travel takes days, while the movies have it happen in hours. But anyway, I would say some of the ships in The Fifth Element.

Star Wars depends where you are in the galaxy. At least it did.

After RoS hyperspace skipping it's even faster now it seems.

 

[Bohandas]

*The Heart of Gold from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy basically instantly teleports. It takes a while to set up and recover from each jump though.

*The Super Heaven-Piercing Gurren Lagann mech from Gurren Lagann is the size of a galactic cluster but able to throw a punch in about the same amount of time a person would take, despite the fact that this entails crossing intergalactic distances in the blink of an eye

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The line between "teleporting" and "really fast travel" is impossible to settle cleanly. Asimov's hyperspace, for example, is a form of stutter teleport; despite not being instantaneous from one star system to another, it's made up of a sequence of instantaneous jumps. "Folding space" on one end is literally teleporting (you merge your destination point with your starting point), and on another just travelling through a faster/distorted space (B5 hyperspace, Mass Effect's relays) while using normal engines.

As others have noted, physically speaking, FTL travel is all inherently a bit dodgy when compared to time travel too, so that's a thing. (Even the IRL-theoretically-possible Alcubierre drive is subject to "possibly enables time-travel" concerns, but there's a conjecture that if you try to, it'll cause a devastating energy buildup and explosion that would prevent actually succeeding.)

So: there are multiple different ways (wormholes, gateways, Heart of Gold-style "visit every point in the universe" stuff, "folding space," instantaneous hyperspace travel) that produce zero-time translation between points, aka instantaneous travel/"infinite" speed. Slapping down all of them means excluding a number of non-instantaneous methods as well, potentially skewing the results heavily.

Long story short? There are a lot of sci-fi methods to travel instantaneously. And even if you don't consider ones that allow instant travel, there are a bunch that are so close to instant that it's effectively instant, or could eventually be made effectively instant with sufficiently advanced tech. In Asimov's Foundation and Earth, for example, Golan Trevize's fancy-shmancy ship has a state-of-the-art jump calculation system, allowing it to do things hyperdrives couldn't do before--among them, making fewer, longer jumps between locations, giving it utterly unprecedented speed. In theory, if you had an advanced enough computer, you could make just a single jump between any two points, it would just be so fantastically difficult a calculation as to be impractical.

 

[Janx]

Perhaps what's needed is a better delineation between ships that make the contest moot (no real limit to travel) vs. those that don't (some kind of distance/time constraint).

Literally hopping to anywhere everwhen ala the Tardis or Heart of Gold, is in the former group.

Ships that teleport hop like the Battlestar Galactica could be measured against a Trek ship if you set the distance far enough (as the BSG has to recharge, calculate and hop repeatedly). They both have to work for it, and thus could be compared for determining the fastest.

Within that set of ships/shows, how many of them actually give us their speeds/distances they can go? Because almost all of them travel at the speed of plot.

 

[MarkB]

Perhaps what's needed is a better delineation between ships that make the contest moot (no real limit to travel) vs. those that don't (some kind of distance/time constraint).

Literally hopping to anywhere everwhen ala the Tardis or Heart of Gold, is in the former group.

Ships that teleport hop like the Battlestar Galactica could be measured against a Trek ship if you set the distance far enough (as the BSG has to recharge, calculate and hop repeatedly). They both have to work for it, and thus could be compared for determining the fastest.

Within that set of ships/shows, how many of them actually give us their speeds/distances they can go? Because almost all of them travel at the speed of plot.

The TARDIS is capable of impressive speeds even when not travelling via the spacetime vortex. It's capable of traversing thousands of lightyears within a few minutes, while towing a planet.