FTL Travel

There are many Science fiction games, movies and series that have FTL travel or another Possibility to travel between solar systems. But i’ve never seen a game, movie or series that includes many different possibilities to reach out to other stars. I find this most depressing. Most likely in the real world there are different FTL possibilities, and isn’t Thrive to be a scientifically correct game? I hope that in the End Game you can fold space, fly through Hyperspace or travel in Warp bubbles. This topic is for Ideas of all the types that could be implemented in the Game.

P.S.: Sorry for the bad English :slight_smile:

Stellaris reduced the number of FTL methods some time ago to make the game more balanced. So that could be a reason why often there is only one FTL method in a single setting / game

There is this huge list of FTL methods I found some time ago:

Here are three possible types that I thought of:

1: Hyperspace
Well I did not really have the idea, but how can it be implemented?
Advantages: Every Ship can use the Gates, even if its not big enough to create its own.
Disadvantages: You would propably need to build Hyperspace Gates, so you need to reach your destination by other means for at least one time.

2:Warp Bubbles
Warp bubbles shorten the space in the front and stretch the space behind them, so the ships can move faster.
Advantages: You could activate it everywhere.
Disadvantages: I think it would either use a very big engine or very much energy. Or both.

3: Ultraspace
Sort of Hyperspace without Gates, when you get faster than light, you get “teleported” into a Hyperspace- like dimension.
Advantages: You can use it everywhere too.
Disadvantages: You get crushed by the acceleration.

Any more Ideas?

Yea, but I still think it would be a cool attitude

I tried to find a good clip from stargate showing entering hyperspace but I didn’t find one. So here is some animation some guy made of it:

The beginning sorta looked like a ratchet and clank cutscene, but nice example!

What about using gravity assists with black holes? black holes have massive gravity and are smaller than some other astronomical objects (in some cases) so could you potentially use them for FTL?

Probably, yes. But if there is a “border” for speed at light speed then you cant get past that, even using a black hole for speeding up wouldn´t work, you would just not get faster and be pulled into the gravitational well :joy: . If you enter the “Ultraspace” that I mentioned above at light speed, then you could just fly into the hole with a high enough velocity and go FTL because it speeds you up. This could be good if its defined that nothing can get FTL by itself, but can use the gravitation for speeding more up. Good idea!

Oh no, my weird ideas are unleashed lol

Here’s my two cents on FTL travel: I don’t care about space chokepoints, and this game isn’t going to make it easy to conquer the galaxy. There are already plenty of Space 4X games out there, and we should strive to be different.
If Stellaris, betraying its theme of randomly generated galaxies, decides to axe two ftl types because they turned space into a game of cat and mouse where the two animals move in completely different ways, Thrive should not follow.
Voyager and Enterprise were both pretty good at running away from fights, which in a realistic space setting, should be done over vast distances. No sense getting within manual aiming range when you can just not. FTL artillery can solve that problem.
In any case, FTL should take up a lot of energy, with speed and freedom being the biggest hogs.

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:eagle: I am a merican you can not take away my Freedom!!! :eagle:

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I’ve found something cool on YouTube today…

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Necro time, I thought Stellaris balanced the three well (when it had all three), except for wormholes because the AI are cheating Belgiums. However wormhole is probably the most advanced an hardest to achieve form of FTL travel. Warp or hyper lane is probably going to be the starting FTL options which both have advantages and disadvantages. Warp should have a long cool down due to it taking more power to activate the warp drive while hyperlanes take 3/5 the time (half seems OP).

Now a message from the Emperor: “PURGE THE FILTHY XENOS BROTHERS, LET NOT ONE LIVE!”

i like how the first search result is an excerpt on interstellar drives from spore wiki. maybe it could be powered by spice like in spore? just an idea.

I was thinking faster than light, like space folding tech that compresses the space in front of you and stretches the space behind, causing space to flow around you and you to move without moving.

Well I personally would like if any interstellar drives were very late game/very limited, as I really want to, say, start sending out Orion-type/nuclear-ion ships well before I achieve world dominance, fusion-powered ones when my domenance becomes clear, and officially declaring myself leader of my home planet and the ten nearby star systems, skipping any useless linear bits. Then I’d keep spreading and dominating my star system, until I finish up out in the Kupier belt, just as I develop FTL, and declare myself a K-2 nation, at the same time as I declare myself ruler of a thousand stars, a feat that is now sustainable, as FTL drives or even messages can crush rebellions in a way sub-luminal travel just doesn’t. My brand new FTL ship would beat the message telling rebels I had FTL and reconquest them. At this point I’d go into a cold war with the neighboring powers lasting centuries over my spiral arm. This sounds so much cooler than “only colonize habitable planets, never far from your colonies, get to ascension in a thousand years, never get more raw firepower than planet destruction.” With limited FTL war would be too ridiculously destructive and slow for nukes or even relativistic kill missiles or anti-matter to be considered war crimes or worthy of MAD. And people, being people, really like their war crimes, so they’d be “forced” to build pulsar or kugelblitz black hole based weapons, the former just erasing life from solar systems at a time, and the later being literally unblockable world killers. A world with little FTL is a far cooler one then with unrestricted FTL.

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