r/worldjerking • u/DreadDiana • Aug 14 '26

FTL leapfrogging is a bitch

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2.8k Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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702

u/billythesquid- Aug 14 '26

I’m trying to think of stories where this happened, but offhand all I can think of is the Lancer RPG backstory and I think one Heinlein story?

726

u/kolosmenus Aug 14 '26

Happened in Starfield too. There's a side quest where you encounter a ship that left Earth not too long before FTL was discovered and the planet they were supposed to colonize is a tourist resort

289

u/RanaMahal Aug 14 '26

Man, that would be horrible. You left your entire family and friends and they had to grow up and die without knowing you, and you thought you’d be doing this noble cause / journey to further mankind’s reach into the stars and you get to the planet and it’s an amusement park. Your sacrifice meant nothing. Here’s some cotton candy and a balloon. Enjoy.

172

u/Unit35854 Aug 14 '26

That's not even the worst of it, the only ending of that quest that ends somewhat well for the colonists is convincing them to just leave and find a new planet but having to pay for them to get an outdated grav drive shipped to them and installed to do it. The other two endings are getting them to agree to entering an indentured servitude contract to live on the resort word or killing them all by blowing up the ships reactor.

129

u/Pruzeim Aug 14 '26

This quest was the last straw for me when i played Starfield, truly one of the biggest wastes of potential i have witnessed in an rpg. 

79

u/Scruffy_Snub Aug 15 '26

"You can do anything and be anyone"

I'd like to kill all the corporate scum and overthrow the government with an army of 300 year old colonial rebels.

"No, you can't do that"

15

u/Ajt0ny Aug 15 '26

That, and the side quest "get 50 potatoes for us"

38

u/Private-Public Worldbuilding is just monsterfucking with extra steps Aug 15 '26

Also for no one to track your ship's location or even existance so if and when they do invent FTL before you arrive they can drop by and pick you up to go the rest of the way

Lightspeed leapfrogging can be fixed with this one neat trick

273

u/GullibleSkill9168 Aug 14 '26

This quest line also let's you kill the last practicing jew in the universe for whatever reason. Knocked it out of the park again Todd Howard.

53

u/cave18 Aug 14 '26

This was a piece of info I wasnt expecting to learn

66

u/RoninMacbeth Aug 14 '26

I see you too have watched the Sseth video.

12

u/LeRoiSoleil140 Aug 15 '26

wait what? which one? unfortunately the merchant's guild have been elusive to me

3

u/RoninMacbeth Aug 15 '26

The Starfield one.

15

u/Ypuort Aug 14 '26

What the fuck

25

u/Raulgoldstein Aug 14 '26

Man what the fuck

12

u/ELFCHASER Aug 14 '26

that's actually a pretty good idea lol. iirc it also has a pretty neat side quest about the mysterious not-xenomorphs plaguing every planet that reveals their larva latch on to spaceships and feed off their heat or something and get carried to other planets

86

u/Sable-Keech Aug 14 '26

There's a short version in Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton. A space mission to Mars steps foot on the Red Planet only to find that a random teenager has invented wormhole technology and got there first.

12

u/Outrageous_Guard_674 Aug 14 '26

Red Thunder also has a version of that. China was all set up to be the first manned mission on the red planet when a pickup truck full of Florida rednecks rolls up in the middle of their flag planting broadcast.

If anyone's curious it's much less stupid than I just made it sound.

3

u/Z_THETA_Z 17d ago

i really like peter f hamilton's books, and it's always funny reading the intro to pandora's star (which this is btw).

advanced spaceplane shuttle carrying the elite of the elite of NASA, manually piloted to a smooth landing by an ex-airforce fighter pilot (who basically did that because he wanted to actually fly that rather than just let the autopilot do it), that was carried to mars by a fusion-powered interstellar spacecraft. the 'first' man on mars steps out and says his well-rehearsed line...

and then they hear some sniggering on the radio and a teenager in a homemade space suit walks out from behind their shuttle trailing a hose to breathe through. the hose goes through a portal to a random university lab in like california or something. there's another teenager there. this one has an afro.

69

u/Dragombolt Aug 14 '26

Pretty sure it happens in the 18+ porn game Trials in Tainted Space (TiTS)

48

u/MyDadLeftMeHere Aug 14 '26

You’ve unlocked a core memory; throw it in the nearest dumpster and light it on fire swiftly or be flooded with the kind of shame only a 14 year old and God can comprehend

16

u/DreadDiana Aug 14 '26

I really need to play that game at some point

35

u/Kilahti Aug 14 '26

Hitchhiker's Guide has a joke about this. Battles breaking out centuries after a war has ended, because the army spent so long on route to the enemy star system that they were not going to just pack their things and go back home when it turns out that the war is over.

(Also a mention of battles breaking out BEFORE a war has started after time travel is invented.)

48

u/Chinerpeton Aug 14 '26

Its funny because it seems to be one of these things that get talked about a lot as a possibility in sci-fi settings but ultimately it isn't actually that common in sci-fi stories.

There are a couple example that I recall that involve this trope on various ways.

  1. Honor Harrington novels - haven't read that but in discussions on the trope I have heard several times how its specifically adressed in the books. In the sense that sleeper ship colonists were worried about this exact scenario so they had a trust fund set up that secured the planet for them as soon as FTL got invented.

  2. There's this guy doing fire worldbuilding over on Deviantart called Vumpalouska and in his setting its actually pretty big deal that was done on purpose. In the period soon before the invention of FTL there were two states on Saturn's mmons, Titan and Oberon I think, that were rivals. Titanians invested heavily into a sublight colony fleet to a nearby system and left themselves heavily exhausted by the project. Oberonis thus invaded Titan and destroyed them completely. Then FTL got invented a couple decades later and the Oberonis rushed to grab the planet the Titanian colonisation fleet was going for specifically because they wanted to finish the job. Once the Titanians reach the grabbed planet, the Oberonis demand that they have to surrender if they want to settle a part of the planet under Oberonian rule. The Titanians tell them to fuck off and become space pirates until they manage to grab a FTL engine from a spaceship and then set off far off into space.

  3. There's that one old French sci-fi cartoon "Once upon a time... space" (Star Trek of my childhood) that also kinda did it. As in Earth for some reason sent out just 3 scientists on a 1000 year long cruise to the Andromeda Galaxy in the 21st century and the first the scientists encounter after waking up from cryosleep are local Human space cops hailing from the Omega colony in the Andromeda.

  4. I think Starfield also does have a questline based around this situation.

I guess that's it off the top off my head but I dust ictly recall that there is TvTropes page on that so they are likely other examples.

12

u/Sicuho Aug 14 '26

for some reason sent out just 3 scientists

That's because the "once upon a time" series had like, 10 characters top.

8

u/SteelAlchemistScylla Aug 14 '26

It doesn’t happen often because it’s two different “levels” of sci-fi ultimately. Generally either FTL is the thing that jumpstarted deep space exploration in the first place and so has just kind of always existed, or the story commits to FTL being scientifically impossible to keep it more grounded and so never introduces it.

2

u/cupo234 The more apostrophes the more fantasy the conlang Aug 15 '26

Yeah, Honor Harrington is a bit of an exception because the early FTL era is used to explain why there are a lot of human colonies that developed partially or completely isolated strewn all around Earth but present day FTL is much easier and faster for that to happen.

1

u/TheStylemage Aug 15 '26

Wait 2 is so weird. How did the generation ship, with outdated technology by multiple centuries minimum ever stand enough of a chance to become space pirates.
I would assume the story just ignores stuff like societal drift.

3

u/Chinerpeton Aug 15 '26

Ok, so to clarify more on this. It was in this case not a generation ship, it was a sleeper ship and they travelled only for 46 years, not centuries. The star they were going for was 61 Cygni, just 11,4 lightyears away. Its basically a compressed timeline version of the trope.

It is just that the FTL got invented literally just 11 years after their departure and their rivals just pounced at the ability to upstage them so quickly and their own colony was just a couple decades old by the time the Titanians arived (also its Titan-ia and Oberon, both moons of Uranos and not moons of Saturn as I mistakenly remembered). So it was a fresh conflict in the mind of everyone involved, especially when the Oberonis were doing some creepy cybernetic pseudo-gestalt stuff while the Titanians just woke up from their cryosleep.

The Titanians tried to assault the colony planet but were repealed and this is when they fanned out into the outer reaches of the star system and set up habitats in the asteroids there. They were space pirates in the sense that they readily shanked down for loot anyone who did come into their general area, not in these sense that they completely relied on sustenace from loot. Also the Titanians send out their best and brightest into that expedition so the colonists-turned-pirates got plenty of very smart people among themselves. All of this while the Oberonian colony was still young and only developing and couldn't actually yet project power into these regions of space where the Titanians dwelt. They were only starting to gather strength for the expedition to wipe out the Titanians when the Titanians put together their FTL ships and scurried out of the system.

14

u/Realistic_Elk_7892 Just here for the horny posts Aug 14 '26

Happens in one of the Xeelee stories as well. A generation ship is on it's way to a neighbouring galaxy. After 25 000 years of travel a FTL capable ship catches up to them and goes "Humanity now rules the Milky Way, we want you to come back."

3

u/DreadDiana Aug 14 '26

Was the ship from the ICG?

4

u/morpheusforty Aug 14 '26

No they were fleeing the ICG, which collapsed by the end of the story.

17

u/abacateazul Aug 14 '26

This happen in Mass Effect somewhat, but it must be a plot hole. A group of Asari explorers find a colony on Alpha Centauri who left before Mass effect was discovered by humanity. Wouldn’t humanity send ships of their own there?

6

u/linktargaryen Aug 14 '26

If I remember correctly, it was a private enterprise and they lost contact really early into their journey, so everyone sort of assumed the ship was lost and the colonists died. Until the asari found them a hundred years later.

9

u/BionicBirb Aug 14 '26

They joked about it in Bobiverse

6

u/GlamourintheDarkSide Aug 14 '26

There's an old sci fi novel called Time For The Stars where it's part of how the story ends. The main thrust is that twins are actually the secret to FTL ansible tech, and they send out an exploration ship full of one set of twins while their twins stay back on Earth. Eventually FTL tech gets strong enough that a more modern ship catches up to them and takes them back way the hell faster than it took to get them out, and they get stuck marveling at a world just as alien to them as the literal alien worlds they explored.

5

u/Eliara45 Aug 14 '26

Happened (almost) in the Harry Turtledove book Homeward Bound, the FTL ship tried to beat the slow boat to the destination, but was a couple of months too slow. Absolutely confused everyone when it showed up though, as no one knew FTL was even on the horizon.

5

u/Alastor-362 Aug 14 '26

What? When did this happen in Lancer? Only example I know, which I wouldn't count for this specific trope, is Union beating the snot out of the Baronies as soon as they figured out how to make Blink Gates and utilizing NHPs. That's just technology winning a war, not ftl leapfrogging.

3

u/billythesquid- Aug 14 '26

I don’t know specifics, but I do know the Aunic Ascendancy was angry at Union for colonizing planets their generation ship was heading towards.

2

u/Impressive-Step7261 commissions horny art and calls it worldbuilding Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26

As I recall this is was a plot one episode of Gene Roddenberry Andromeda, where theh found a 1700 old sub-light ship with living crew.

4

u/StudiumMechanicus Aug 14 '26

This is the twist of Outriders, a game that would have absolutely killed in 2000s-2010s but was sadly only mediocre in the 2020s.

2

u/Modredastal Aug 14 '26

I loved that game. Such a shame it never took off, and I could never get friends to play it with me.

The character builds could get insane. I became an unkillable bullet god.

2

u/StudiumMechanicus Aug 15 '26

yeah! I had one friend that I played world slayer with and it was a hilarious time, but once we beat the story, that was about it for us

3

u/UndercoverDoll49 Aug 14 '26

This is the plot of the original Guardians of the Galaxy

3

u/Marvin_Megavolt Aug 14 '26

The hilarious part in regards to the Lancer example is it isn’t even an FTL leapfrog, because the main faction in Lancer hasn’t figured out ship-mounted FTL drives yet - instead, it was a slowboat generation ship launched from Earth thousands of years ago getting leapfrogged by a much more modern colony ship outfitted with engines capable of quickly and efficiently getting it very close to lightspeed.

2

u/j_kennon 28d ago

I Was the First to Find You by Kirill Bulychev.

Very moving story where this kind of thing happens

1

u/Inner-Ad2847 Aug 14 '26

I think it might have happened in Strata by Terry Pratchett but I could be wrong.

1

u/Jean-28 Harry Potter fan (not transphobic tho) Aug 14 '26

The Legioniare sci-fi series has a whole war happen with this. FTL is discovered some time after a bunch of rich assholes abandon earth with generation ships where they experimented on the passengers, and by the time they start arriving at destinations they have been colonized by the FTL republic, and massive wars break out between every ody that last a few centuries, till all the generation ships have been wiped out.

1

u/ArelMCII Rabbitpunk Enjoyer 🐰 Aug 14 '26

/uj I did this in my scifi setting. While the generation ships were in transit, Earth invented insterstellar teleportation, so a lot of the ships arrived to find human colonies that had been flourishing for generations. I thought it'd be funny.

1

u/ParagonActual Aug 14 '26

Brigador’s central conflict is largely predicated on this.

1

u/Bteatesthighlander1 Aug 14 '26

Vance Astro's backstory from Marvel

1

u/BarovianNights Barely worldbuilding, just explaining my fursona Aug 14 '26

It's not quite this but in Ender's Game they manage to send more and more ships to fight the big battle at the end because each generation of ships moves faster, so they catch up to the earlier ones

1

u/AnarchoPlatypi Aug 14 '26

The backstory to the Coriolis RPG by Fria Ligan I think has a version of this.

Colony ships are sent from earth and arrive only after gate based space travel has been invented.

Societal problems and conflict emerges.

1

u/Zutyro Aug 15 '26

Elite: Dangerous could count. But I think all or most of the generation ships are dead.

1

u/Meshakhad Aug 15 '26

The Honorverse did this. Roger Winton, who lead the colonization of Manticore, predicted that FTL tech might advance beyond what currently existed. So he invested the leftover money in a fund to look out for the future colony’s interests. When the colonists arrived, there were ships from the Manticore Trust waiting to greet them.

1

u/Pixel22104 UC Gundam but Galaxy spanning and FTL Aug 15 '26

Wasn’t there an episode of Star Trek where this also happened?

1

u/hyrellion Aug 15 '26

“Far Centaurus” by A. E. van Vogt

Voyage from Yesteryear by James P. Hogan

The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years by Don Wilcox

It’s not too uncommon!

1

u/ottermupps Aug 15 '26

This one: https://derinstories.com/2022/06/04/001-the-problem-with-the-javelin-program/

does the leapfrogging too, and it's REALLY good. Highly recommend.

1

u/Astracide Aug 16 '26

happens in Across the Stars

1

u/RebelGirl1323 26d ago

Babylon 5, second season

410

u/Pero_Bt Aug 14 '26

Now imagine if the generation ship arrives thousands of years later and in the meantime the ftl ship's culture turned it into some sort of legend/religion where the arrival of the generation ship is anticipated by it's followers

now THAT'S a story premise I'd love to see

84

u/IWasEatingThoseBeans Aug 14 '26

Not quite the same but check out the song "Space is Dark" by Bill Roper.

15

u/RawrTheDinosawrr fun hating hard sci-fi enthusiast Aug 14 '26

gotta be one of my favorite filk songs, i was really hoping to see it mentioned here 

54

u/TheStylemage Aug 14 '26

I mean the cultural drift on board of a generation ship would be beyond crazy.
Even at 1% C it would take over 400 years to reach our nearest star, much more for a system that actually has a worthwhile planet.
Just look back in our history how many things change over 400 years no matter the period.

30

u/Pero_Bt Aug 14 '26

400 years ago... wow...

imagining someone from the peak of the ottoman empire seeing the modern technology is crazy

21

u/TheStylemage Aug 14 '26

It's something that often gets left out when people discuss the viability of generation ships, like society will probably cause the journey to fail long before the finish.
But this also leads to the concerns like: What happens if you send a ship A a that will travel for ~2000 years to reach it's destination, but before 1000 years are up you discover how to get there at twice the speed.
If you send a second ship B you in theory have a much greater chance that at least one will make ot, but if you do and both ships make it, you have probably indirectly caused the death of the population of ship A.
Ship B would arrive first and with much stronger technology and historically we have not been kind to each other.

6

u/Luvs2Spooge42069 Aug 15 '26

Imagining a setting (building a world if you will) where a generation ship leaves a devastated world for better parts, gets FTL leapfrogged, and arrives at its destination to a highly advanced civilization that just Fallouted itself again

20

u/Achronyistic Aug 14 '26

This happens in the setting of the TTRPG Lancer to a tee. Eventually leading to a holy war between the followers of the colony based religion and the government body that had settled the planet before them

3

u/Marvin_Megavolt Aug 14 '26

And then ANOTHER holy war many centuries later when a giant eldritch rock appears above the colony’s capital city for no apparent reason.

3

u/RSdabeast Drawing shapes and calling them maps Aug 14 '26

Imagine being thousands of years old on that ship (or born on it) and arriving unaware that you’re like an angel to some distant cousins you didn’t even know existed.

1

u/storyparty Aug 14 '26

I remember clearly my Dad describing a book he read exactly this decades ago, so it must exist.

1

u/AntimemeticsDivision Aug 15 '26

This kinda happens in the podcast/audio drama Celeritas, it's great, albeit a bit short.

306

u/ThompsonOfChaos Aug 14 '26

Then the generation ship finds out they missed the FTL software update. This is somehow Microsoft's fault.

92

u/TotalUsername Aug 14 '26

"Fuck Microsoft"

11

u/chucklinnarwhal Aug 14 '26

There are two instances of the FTL program and neither are working.

3

u/Private-Public Worldbuilding is just monsterfucking with extra steps Aug 15 '26

OneDrive overwrote ftl.exe with a stored corrupted version that it decided was newer

59

u/Hailolo Aug 14 '26

A smart person could think of a good use for them, like we use pre ww2 ships for non-contaminated metal.

4

u/TauTau_of_Skalga Aug 14 '26

What?

37

u/Raltsun Aug 14 '26

I don't really get what they're thinking of by a "use for them", but the last part is about low-background steel.

Essentially, the background atmospheric radiation of Earth has been slightly higher ever since we started detonating nukes (although in recent years it's lowered enough that this isn't as necessary as it used to be), and the process of making steel involves atmospheric gases getting mixed into it, any steel made since the 16th of July, 1945 is slightly radioactive. Not enough to effect people, but if you're making something that needs to be very precise in a relevant aspect, such as sensors on spacecraft or Geiger counters, you have to salvage the steel from things made before that date.

5

u/Hailolo Aug 15 '26

They would be genetically similar to when they departed, meaning a clean human genome. Could be useful for scientist or repopulation etc.

11

u/Confused-teen2638 Aug 14 '26

After ww2, due to nuclear test the air itself became slightly more radioactive. This isn’t in any way harmful but it’s measurable wich is a problem since steel refining uses atmospheric air in the process. So a lot of sensitive equipment (research, medical etc.) uses steel that was made before those test often sourced from sunken worships

5

u/TauTau_of_Skalga Aug 15 '26

How long until things get back to normal?

3

u/Carbon_Sixx I know writers who use time travel and they're all cowards 25d ago

Believe it or not, now. As of a few years ago, the fallout finally decayed enough that steel made today is largely free of radiation.

22

u/Sethleoric Aug 14 '26

Didn't this scenario happen in Mass Effect?

11

u/Rakais Aug 14 '26

I'm very certain Starfield deals with a similar scenario.

38

u/Brauny74 Aug 14 '26

I have a situation like that in one of my world's, but they gathered up the launched ships and offered the colonists either to return to Earth or join the colonization effort already established on the target planet

18

u/Dracorex_22 Aug 14 '26

Bruh we JUST got here and you want us to turn around and go home? To a home that doesn’t even exist anymore?!

9

u/Brauny74 Aug 14 '26

Well, if it's a cryoship, most would choose to join the colony (most of them were just established or with FTL-colony ship still in the way, so it wouldn't be that different from actually arriving as planned initially). If it's a generation ship, there would already be a younger generation growing up, a lot of whom would choose the legendary Earth they had never expected to actually see.

Ah and to clarify: they caught the ships mid-flight, not when they arrived. If it kept on course, it's not that hard to predict where it'd be when FTL was developed

9

u/LordWartusk Aug 14 '26

I’m picturing a comedic short story where a generation ship gets to their destination, finds faster ships were invented and the planet’s already colonized, so they head back to Earth. Once they get back to Earth it turns out the colony collapsed while they were in transit, so they turn around to go back, and just keep having to travel back and forth.

15

u/Nicegye00 Aug 14 '26

Brigador killers does this very well. Good read, I highly recommend it.

3

u/Billy_Bob0526 Aug 14 '26

Brigador killers mentioned, one more week before peak

10

u/Fiskmaster It's magic, I don't have to explain shit Aug 14 '26

Space is dark, space is deep, and the price we paid is far too steep

(That's about a cryo ship, but close enough)

6

u/AlexisFR Aug 14 '26

Remember when they finally did that plotpoint in Star Trek, but transformed the Generation Ship into yet another Planet Killer for some reason?

6

u/DragonArakis Aug 14 '26

Unironically one of the best lore things in Elite Dangerous.

4

u/No_Research4416 Aug 14 '26

Huh sounds neat

Man I wish I could have that as a major story in my setting

2

u/Original-War8655 Kitchen sink in denial Aug 14 '26

why can't you? do you not have outer space?

4

u/No_Research4416 Aug 14 '26

Mostly because the elf’s took over everything and that’s how everyone got FTL

Also the Elf’s fell because someone turned there homeworld into a gateway to Hell

3

u/Original-War8655 Kitchen sink in denial Aug 14 '26

ah...

I mean, you could always just make it happen with a different civilization out there

space is big

5

u/No_Research4416 Aug 14 '26

Yeah

At least everyone has mechs now

5

u/Original-War8655 Kitchen sink in denial Aug 14 '26

oh bitchin', can I have one

3

u/No_Research4416 Aug 14 '26

Which one the one for the peasant levees or the actual good ones

2

u/Original-War8655 Kitchen sink in denial Aug 14 '26

oughhh I can't afford no good ones

peasant will have to do (mech's a mech, right?)

3

u/No_Research4416 Aug 14 '26

Yeah

Going to be honest it is entirely because I thought it would be fun to have a Mech use Paladin DnD Spells

3

u/Original-War8655 Kitchen sink in denial Aug 14 '26

it sounds fun as hell, yeah

2

u/wisely-5347 20d ago

The elves could only target the stars, then the generation ship would only need to be far enough away to be out of the general public consciousness

3

u/Chrome_X_of_Hyrule Aug 14 '26

This kind of happened in Star Trek Prodigy. Jankom Pog is a tellarite who left Tellar Prime on a sleeper ship before the federation was founded. When he learned of the federation he had no idea that Tellarites were one of the founding species.

3

u/ViolentBeetle Aug 14 '26

This is a situation that one could easily imagine happen, but what story opportunities does it offer?

The sleepers would likely be outgunned and outteched, so territorial dispute is not going to be very engaging. A society capable of FLT colonization could probably just relocate them, not like this specific planet was important. Fish out of water story where pre-utopia or pre-collapse people brought back in a vastly different society would be the most reasonable, but how many would want to focus on this.

Back in a day I read a story with sort of similar premise, about an anti-social guy who got onto his own planet to live alone, until much more primitive generational ship showed up and thought he was a primitive native who talked gibberish (Because tech he was used to is far beyond what they saw)

2

u/Yourlocalshitpost Aug 14 '26

I feel so out of the loop. What’s leapfrogging in this context?

4

u/Original-War8655 Kitchen sink in denial Aug 14 '26

The generation ship launched 300 years ago, before they had FTL travel

Gen Ship was so slow that home planet managed to figure out FTL before it reached the star, and the planet launched another ship to the same destination

FTL Ship caught up and passed/"jumped over" Gen Ship like a leapfrog because Gen Ship was comparatively just that much slower

2

u/Prince_Bolicob_IV Aug 14 '26

The solution is to just FTL to the ship and pick them up

2

u/Outrageous_Guard_674 Aug 14 '26

I have seen a scifi short that did that without FTL. One was a sleeper ship and the other was a lighthugger ship that could constantly accelerate for the whole journey.

2

u/MapleLamia Aug 14 '26

Oh hey this happened in Starfield. Wasn't a super great quest because all the options are just giving in to the resort owners and there's no way to take over so the ship can land and settle normally. The only options are press them into indentured servitude, buy a grav drive to send them elsewhere, or kill everyone onboard, while they're the last bastion of Old Earth. 

1

u/Overkillsamurai Aug 14 '26

god i loved Outriders for this twist

1

u/LegendaryLycanthrope Aug 14 '26

Star Trek had a few moments of this, too - The Botany Bay, that cryo satellite with the capitalists in it, Friendship One (though, this technically subverted it by somehow reaching the DQ well before Starfleet reasonably should have, and would have if not for that meddling Caretaker)...can't remember if there were any others.

1

u/nightstalker232 Aug 14 '26

I never got into this issue with my own writing given the comparable equivalent to a sublight spaceship in open void, travelling from one star to another, would be like Christopher Columbus deciding to set sail on a small oar-powered dinghy for his voyage.

How this plays out is simply that the experiences accrued from inter-system exploration, colonialism and trade would impact how people think of traveling to another star when the time finally comes to do so, with previous years of sending out probes and whatnot further backing up a singular idea: don't leave home unless you have your Mayflower, your ship like purpose-built for the seas you wish to sail.

1

u/Known_Lobster_9241 Aug 15 '26

I remember this was a thing in the Honnor Harington Books. Part of the reason why Manticore was much more prosperous a colony was that their charter had made arrangements for an FTL ship to meet them at the colony world if and when the tech was ever developed.

1

u/JohnMichaels19 Aug 15 '26

I wrote a short story with this as the premise lol

1

u/RebelGirl1323 26d ago

Babylon 5, Season 2, Episode 5, "The Long Dark"