This can be anything from Hyperspace in Star Wars, Warp Drive in Star Trek, travel through the Warp in Warhammer 40k or anything else.
I’ve always liked “slow” FTL travel, where going a few light-years still takes a few days or so. I also really like travel through an alternate dimension like in 40k, Event Horizon, Witchspace in Elite Dangerous.
I wanna know your favorite versions, or do you prefer stories that obey the laws of known physics, like the Expanse or Rimworld?
Halo’s Slipspace has always been my favorite. It’s another dimension where instead of being able to move in four directions, things can move in eleven. This results in travel being faster there than in normal space.
The fun part is that the UNSC and the main antagonists- the Covenant- use the exact same method of FTL travel. The Covenant are just dramatically better at it, to the point of UNSC ships that attempt to run away from the Covenant via slipspace sometimes having the Covenant fleet they were fleeing already there and waiting on them.
My favourite thing about Halo FTL is how it handles causality, basically relying on the universe to act like a sponge and “soak it up” as it reconciles it across spacetime.
Send too much mass (aka the Halo array) and it massively slows down travel galaxy wide, as the spacetime is “sodden” and takes longer to reconcile it. Meanwhile in the days leading up to the firing of the Halo array slipspace travel suddenly became easier and quicker than had ever been experienced, as the Forerunner realise that after the firing of the array the amount of slipspace travel in the entire galaxy will be nil.
That’s hilarious and deals with half the travel time plot holes - I love it!
Early UNSC Shaw-Fujikawa drives were a brute force punch into the other dimension, whereas Covenant adopting old Forerunner tech would slip into Slipspace more elegantly and with better accuracy. This allowed Covenant ships to slip within a single system, where UNSC ships might be within a few hundred thousand kilometers of their intended target and could not realistically attempt inter-system jumps, which I always thought was a cool detail.
Post Halo 3 when the Infinity gets Forerunner Slipspace drives and Forerunner Engineers to help adapt and implement the drives drastically improve Slipspace accuracy and speed was a huge turning point for humanity. Plus the ability to have small drop ship like crafts, Condors, have Slipspace capabilities was huge for ONI ops and smaller team excursions.
God I fucking love Halo lore.