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What’s the fastest spaceship?
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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8353505" data-attributes="member: 6790260"><p>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 <em>made up of</em> 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.</p><p></p><p>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 <em>try</em> to, it'll cause a devastating energy buildup and explosion that would prevent actually <em>succeeding</em>.)</p><p></p><p>So: there are multiple different ways (wormholes, gateways, <em>Heart of Gold</em>-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 <em>all</em> of them means excluding a number of non-instantaneous methods as well, potentially skewing the results heavily.</p><p></p><p>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 <em>so close</em> to instant that it's <em>effectively</em> instant, or could eventually be <em>made</em> effectively instant with sufficiently advanced tech. In Asimov's <em>Foundation and Earth</em>, 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 <em>could</em> make just a single jump between any two points, it would just be so fantastically difficult a calculation as to be impractical.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8353505, member: 6790260"] 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 [I]made up of[/I] 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 [I]try[/I] to, it'll cause a devastating energy buildup and explosion that would prevent actually [I]succeeding[/I].) So: there are multiple different ways (wormholes, gateways, [I]Heart of Gold[/I]-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 [I]all[/I] 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 [I]so close[/I] to instant that it's [I]effectively[/I] instant, or could eventually be [I]made[/I] effectively instant with sufficiently advanced tech. In Asimov's [I]Foundation and Earth[/I], 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 [I]could[/I] make just a single jump between any two points, it would just be so fantastically difficult a calculation as to be impractical. [/QUOTE]
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