#Spore ds tv tropes series#

#Spore ds tv tropes series#

Macross Frontier reveals that all Fold technology in the series is derived from a space-faring species known as the Vajra, who are able to do it naturally, without the aid of technology.Space folding is done by going into 'superdimension space.' Later series introduce 'Fold Faults', which are obstacles in superdimensional space (implied to be warped space-time of some sort), and establishes that space folds have limited range: long distance (on the order of thousands of light years) folds eat up a lot of power, such that ships need to spend weeks recovering the resources to make such a jump again. FTL travel in the series itself seems to be a combination of Jump and Hyperdrive types.note For comparison, the real life probe New Horizons was launched off of Earth at extremely high speeds and used a gravity slingshot around Jupiter, and it still took nine and a half years to reach Pluto. The latter is quite plausible, as the outer Solar System is big. The SDF-1 travels from Earth to Pluto's orbit in minutes, but needs two years to get back to Earth using a gravity-assist technique through normal space. The original Super Dimension Fortress Macross (and its Robotech adaptation) uses the title spaceship's jump drive as a major plot point, and actually demonstrated that if you had an FTL drive and could safely use it within a star system, you probably would, because even interplanetary distances can be inconveniently large.In Outlaw Star, as a clever nod to science fiction's past, the 'sub-ether' drive is powered by a 'Munchausen reactor'.Rather, it transfers the consciousness of whoever is inside the ship into their same body in an alternate universe, with the only difference in the entire universe being that the ship and the people inside happen to already be where they wanted to go.

In Space☆Dandy, it is explained that the warp drive on Dandy's ship doesn't actually move the ship at all.Like a lot of things in Bebop, it was never fully explained. They created subspace of some fashion where things went faster and ships could get stuck in if they didn't leave in time. Cowboy Bebop had the portal variety called Gates, which were apparently dangerous because something called the 'Gate Incident' made the moon explode.No relation to FTL: Faster Than Light, although it does use the trope heavily. It's the speed of light in a vacuum that's the limit. If light is not in a vacuum, it gets a little slower in certain cases (see Cherenkov radiation ). note It's the same everywhere, so the metre is actually defined by reference to c rather than the other way around. For even more information, see Rockets and Propulsion Methods.įor the record, c, the speed of light in a vacuum, is defined as 299,792,458 metres per second. There's a whole bunch of stuff about this on the analysis page. The problem is that as far as present-day science is concerned, going faster than - or even just as fast as - the speed of light is, for all human intents and purposes, impossible. Thus, in order for the protagonists to be able to plausibly visit a new Planet of Hats every week, they need to travel through space at speeds faster than that of light. Other planetary systems are so far away from us that it takes even the fastest thing in the universe - light itself - years, decades, or millennia to reach them. Nowadays, we know that the rest of our solar system is almost certainly devoid of other life forms - so we've got to go to other stars.Īnd that's where the 'space is honking big' part comes in. This has been an issue for writers since The '50s or so before then you could get away with having your aliens come from Neptune without totally losing the audience. Faster-Than-Light Travel is a staple of Space Opera that allows an 'out' to the unfortunate fact that space is honking big, making it impossible (within physics as we understand it now) to get anywhere remotely interesting within the average lifetime of a civilization.