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?
A hard choice, so many of them have been well done in media and text.
If I had to make a choice I would pick versions that match up with what we think could be possible. And that means anything based on or similar to the Alcubierre drive theory. The “slower” travel around a system in Elite Dangerous uses this idea of moving the space the ship is in faster than light, avoiding any relativity issues. Stephen Baxter’s “Flood” and “Ark” novels (mainly Ark) use this idea and his descriptions of what it looks like from inside and departure/arrival are fantastic and not intuitive (Elite Dangerous gets the leaving right, but not the arrival maybe because it would look weird). When the ship arrives it would suddenly appear from nowhere, but then its virtual image would move away into a point as the light catches up.
For a great video of it, here’s a wonderful collection of potential future interstellar ships with the Alcubierre drive as the final solution to
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What an amazing video! Thank you so much for sharing that. I’d never seen it before. Beautiful production quality.
Erik Wernquist has a short list of amazing CGI films he’s done. You might be familiar with the short “Wanderers”, set to one of Carl Sagan’s excerpts from A Pale Blue Dot.