"I created the Event Horizon to reach the stars, but she's gone much, much farther than that. She tore a hole in our universe, a gateway to another dimension. A dimension of pure chaos. Pure... evil. When she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back... she was alive! Look at her, Miller. Isn't she beautiful?"
— Dr. William Weir, Event Horizon
In fiction, traveling faster than light is often child's play. Just grab your Applied Phlebotinum and zip off to the other side of the galaxy in time for rip-roaring Space Opera adventures.
But sometimes, to give the world a set of rules to play by, a writer can infuse a bit of risk into the early testing of the new technology.
It isn't that Hyperspace Is a Scary Place in this world (though that's still possible). It's just that mucking about with the laws of physics are not without some risks, and they're still learning to iron out the bugs.
Even in worlds that have well established FTL tech, there can still be problems with imbalances in fuel mixtures, or someone trying a new variation of the technology that supposedly will improve it.
Some of the most common issues encountered are
- Hyperspace being far more dangerous than anticipated
- Unexpected environmental interactions, such as destabilizing a star, creating a massive Electromagnetic Pulse, damaging your planet's atmosphere, or just taking a large chunk of the surrounding area with them. (which is why you should never test these in atmosphere)
- Release of some kind of radiation that can produce any of the many Radioactive Tropes.
- Portals/Wormholes destabilizing unexpectedly, either turning into a variant of Unrealistic Black Hole, cutting through anything going into them at the time, or just exploding, and sometimes leaving anyone who went in trapped in hyperspace or a Void Between the Worlds.
- Any of the varieties of Teleporter Accident
- Finishing the jump/emerging from hyperspace inside another object, sometimes with explosive results
- Failure of Inertial Dampening, allowing extreme g-forces to annihilate the squishy meatbags aboard.
- A good old fashioned explosion.
Compare Teleportation Tropes for related technological potentials for disaster.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Cowboy Bebop: The first experimental Astral Gate had a little...incident. Which blew up the moon, made Earth largely uninhabitable due to constant meteor impacts and sped up humanity's exodus into space significantly.
- Robotech: Captain Gloval orders the SDF-1's untried spacefold system be employed while still in Earth's atmosphere, and deep in her gravity well. The end result is that they manage to transport the entirety of Macross Island, a significant chunk of ocean water, and themselves, into orbit around Pluto, instead of just shy of the Moon, where they were aiming. What's more, the jump caused the spacefold engines to fold themselves out of existence, meaning that the SDF-1 takes two years under conventional power to return to Earth.
- Space Battleship Yamato 2199: The Yamato's first warp test has them come out of warp early due to running afoul of Jupiter's strong gravity well. The drain on the power has the ship tumbling out of control, and only concentrated effort keeps them from crashing. Subsequent use of the warp technology go smoother.
Comic Books
- Tales of the Jedi: Jori and Gav Daragon attempt to strike it rich charting hyperspace routes, as they would be able to earn fees the more ships use their path. Their first hyperlane, the Goluud Corridor, proves to be a disaster, as it crosses too close to a red giant star and thus destroys a freighter. Their next attempt ends up at the Sith world of Korriban, creating a route that allows the Sith to invade Republic space undetected, triggering the Great Hyperspace War.
Films — Animated
- In Lightyear when Buzz tests a method of FTL that could get them home, he returns to the planet and finds that Time Dilation has made four years pass for everyone else. Due to Buzz doing a new test flight every day (from his perspective), he has to keep watching his friends aging and eventually dying.
Films — Live-Action
- Event Horizon: The eponymous Ghost Ship is discovered to have been testing an FTL drive when it disappeared. The trip seems to have taken them through a Hell-like dimension, and the entire crew were killed, though not before being driven insane first, and the ship itself corrupted.
- In the short film FTL, the test pilot ends up way off course and encounters some Starfish Aliens.
- Solo: The Kessel Run is a risky coaxium smuggling route, due to the danger of carrying a volatile fuel across a path that takes multiple stops to ensure the ship's hyperspace flight doesn't get brought to an end by the Akkadese Maelstrom's black holes. During a heist, Han Solo attempts to save time before the coaxium explodes by charting a new route directly through the Maelstrom, though it runs into numerous hazards of carbonbergs, Imperial patrols, predators in the Maelstrom, and the infamous black hole "The Maw". When the Millenium Falcon gets caught in the Maw's grip, only a careful dose of coaxium gives the boost they need to escape it.
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture: The USS Enterprise has just undergone an 18-month long refit, updating and improving most of her systems. But they haven't ironed out all of the bugs yet, including the warp drive. The new engines aren't properly calibrated, and Kirk orders that they employ the new warp drive while still in the solar system. The imbalance in the engines creates a wormhole that shorts out their subspace communications and has an asteroid trapped with them heading straight for the ship with deflectors and shields disabled. A photon torpedo destroys the asteroid, and the use of animatter in the torpedoes warhead destabilizes the wormhole, freeing the Enterprise. Scotty warns that it will happen again if they don't finish calibrating the engines.
Literature
- In Common Time by James Blish, the protagonist is the test pilot for DFC-3, the third experimental FTL ship using the Haertel Overdrive. The previous two missions ended fatally for their pilots, and nobody knows why. What he finds is that the hyperspace drive affects the pilot's perception of time, varying between their mind running thousands of times faster than their body, and thousands of times slower. In a later book, Mission to the Heart Stars, humanity has an improved Overdrive that doesn't do this, but in a Call-Back one character realises that this feature of the original, flawed, Overdrive would have allowed them to escape from the ships pursuing them.
- Honor Harrington: While hyperspace was already known for centuries at that point, Dr. Joseph Buckley believed that his newly invented gravitic impeller drive could make travel through it both a lot faster and safer. With the fortune earned from his numerous patents he built a test ship and took it on its first journey. That was how humanity first learned about what happens when an impeller wedge makes contact with a standing gravity wave. It took one of Buckley's surviving colleagues making significant modifications to his design to make impeller-powered hyper travel feasible and Buckley's fate has remained proverbial as an object lesson in "look before you leap" ever since.
- Lensman: In the first test of the inertia-neutralising "Bergenholm", it turns out that the neutralisation field extended far beyond the hull of the ship, which results in every nearby object being flung through the air at extreme velocity when the ship takes off. Between the resulting chaos, and the fact that the departure was too rapid for sensors to track (reaching faster-than-light speeds instantly, with no period of acceleration), it appears at first as though the test ship was simply destroyed. Fortunately the ship and crew are fine in the end, apart from suffering the equivalent of severe space-sickness when inertia is removed.
- Revelation Space Series with it's hard sci-fi setting sees few attempts at going FTL during Stern Chase in interstellar space. These do not end well. Results either just destroy the ship, or the involved people might have been Ret-Gone from the timeline.
- Robot Series:
- "Escape!" has an attempt to have AI design a proper FTL ship. The first AI assigned breaks down at once. The second one goes a bit nuts, although it does deliver the ship (with a few practical jokes built in). That's because the AI were both Three Laws-Compliant, and FTL travel involved the human passengers not being technically alive while in transit.
- "Risk": Early tests of Hyper Base's new hyperspace drive reduce the transmitted matter to fine powder. After this issue is resolved it is tested on animals and while the animals are physically unharmed they come back completely mindless and unresponsive. Even worse, when they try a robot-piloted ship, the drive fails to engage at all. A human engineer has to board the ship and identify the malfunction so they can disable the hyperdrive, knowing that at any second the drive could engage and destroy his mind. It turns out that the robot had simply broken the control lever by pulling it too hard.
- The Ship Who...: The Federated Sentient Planets have a well established FTL drive, but they're never able to use its full capacity due to a lack of sufficient fuel. Then they encounter the Corviki, a species with expertise in stabilising unusual isotopes, which opens the possibility of building a fuel source that will really allow ships to cut loose. However, the system needs some refinement; the first test sends a ship so far away from known space before they can disengage the drive, that it will take years for them to fly back. Which is why Helva is sent to meet with the Corviki and try to get their help in improving the Federation's implementation of the technology.
- "Time Fuze" by Randall Garrett: Alpha Centauri goes supernova as soon as the first FTL spaceship arrives nearby. On the way home, they realize that the ship's exit from hyperspace must have somehow caused it and desperately hope that entering hyperspace doesn't do the same — only to see the light from Earth's sun flare a hundred thousand times brighter.
- Xenocide: Faster-than-light travel becomes possible through the means of an artificial intelligence who resides outside the known universe (Jane) taking control of a transport ship and moving it from one point in the universe to Outside and then back to its destination. The travel is instantaneous, but on the first trip residual matter in the Outside is accidentally formed into what the travelers are imagining, resulting in the creation of new people. Miro, who is paralyzed, imagines his pre-crippled body and exchanges into it while his old body dies, while Ender, who has long felt overshadowed by his brother and sister, creates clones of them that share his soul.
- A Wrinkle in Time: Meg Murry's father, a physicist working for the government, is a Disappeared Dad at the start of the book. The inciting incident of the novel is Meg and her brother, Charles Wallace, finding out that their father has been successful in using a tesseract for FTL travel—but it's Gone Horribly Wrong and he's stuck on a Stepford Suburbia planet where Individuality Is Illegal (enforceable by horrific means) and is unable to escape.
Live-Action TV
- The Expanse: Downplayed. The series has a Sub-Lightspeed Setting, but it features so-called "Epstein drives", which allow rapid transit within Solar system that would take decades with modern tech. However, the first time an Epstein drive was test-run, it was far more powerful than expected; its inventor and test pilot Solomon Epstein died from the resulting high-G acceleration and was forever lost in space (though he wisely left his designs and patents with his wife before taking off, hence why the engine bears his name). Several scenes show the crew being injected with a drug cocktail in order to withstand the G-forces associated with Epstein drive use.
- Farscape opens with one of humanity's first FTL tests Going Horribly Right. The test craft opens a wormhole and is thrown into a distant sector of space, but test pilot John Crichton is unable to reproduce the results and return home.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Original Series: "The Naked Time" has Spock and Scotty performing a Dangerous Forbidden Technique to restart the Enterprise's warp engines after they'd been shut down. It was an untried technique, with the possible consequence of blowing up the ship, but not doing it would guarantee crashing on a collapsing planet. Fortunately, the only consequence of the forced restart was that the Enterprise was flung three days back in time, introducing the idea of using the warp drive for time travel to the series, which would feature in other episodes and the franchise as a whole.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation:
- "Remember Me" has Wesley testing new warp field equations to create a stable warp bubble. Unfortunately, he ends up trapping his mother in a collapsing parallel universe and spends the rest of the episode working to get her out before the warp bubble collapses completely.
- "New Ground" has a scientist propose a new method of warp that would avoid the dangerous use of antimatter/matter warp reactors aboard ship. Using a series of field coils on a planet, a ship would be pushed into warp using a generated soliton wave, and ride to a target destination on that wave, which would then be scattered by dispersion units at the destination planet, dropping the ship out of warp as it arrived. It would have been faster and more economical than standard warp drive, but a flaw in the experiment generated a wave far too powerful, which destroyed the test ship, damaged the Enterprise, and would have destroyed the planet at the other end if the Enterprise crew hadn't intervened, using photon torpedoes to dissipate the wave before it could arrive.
- Star Trek: Voyager:
- In episode "Threshold" Paris figures out transwarp travel, which might get the ship back to the Alpha Quadrant. After a seemingly successful test, he has an allergic reaction to water and starts de-evolving into a salamander/lizard/catfish creature. And then things get very weird.
- An attempt to use slipstream warp technology to make their decades-long journey back home take only a few hours in Star Trek Voyager S 5 E 6 Timeless ends with the ship being thrown out of the slipstream and to an icy crash landing that kills all on board. It's only through time travel that Chakotay and Harry Kim, who had been in the Delta Flyer ahead of Voyager proper, manage to save the ship.
- The titular starship of Star Trek: Discovery is equipped with a Displacement Activated Spore Hub drive that lets her instantly jump across the galaxy through a network of space mushrooms. Early tests, however, prove less than encouraging; one attempt to jump to a Federation dilithium mining planet almost crashes her into the photosphere of a star.
Video Games
- Descent II gives the player character's starship a warp core prototype to travel between levels. It seemingly works fine, right up until the end of the game when it malfunctions and hurls him into deep space rather than bring him home. In Descent III, it's revealed to be a subversion — his boss triggered the "overload" when he'd outlived his usefulness.
- The backstory of Doom states that the Union Aerospace Corporation was experimenting with teleportation between the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, but instead opened a portal to Hell and caused Mars to be invaded by The Legions of Hell.
- Ixion: The final cutscene of the Justified Tutorial shows this trope in action, when the Moon is destroyed. Moreover, when the Tiqqun encounters the survivors in the Protagoras, it is revealed that every usage of the VOHLE drive results in the destruction of the nearest celestial body.
- In Starfield, the desolation of Earth was caused by the use of prototype grav drives, which emitted powerful gravitational waves that disrupted Earth's magnetosphere, resulting in the loss of its atmosphere and ultimate sterilization of the planet, the inventor of the technology, Victor Ainza, was shown by a Starborn version of himself from another future that grav drive use could lead to the loss of Earth, but believed colonization of the stars was worth the risk.
- In the backstory of Stellaris, in the late 21st century, the United Nations built a fleet of six interstellar Arks to colonize planets on the far side of a wormhole discovered in the Oort Cloud. None of the arks ever reported home after crossing through, and the wormhole collapsed soon afterward; after that disaster, interstellar travel was put on hold until the invention of the far more reliable hyperdrives. (Unknown to Earth, at least two of the arks actually survived the transit — the Hyacinth, which lost power and was stranded in a lifeless solar system where the crew starved to death; and the Chrysanthemum, which made it to a habitable moon, wiped out the natives, and founded the xenophobic Commonwealth of Man.)
- Warframe: The Zariman 10-0 was an Orokin colony ship with the intention of using the power of the Void to, in essence, teleport to the nearby Tau star system. Unfortunately, a catastrophic error occurred, leading to the loss of the vessel within the Void, now known as the Void Jump Accident. The only people aboard the Zariman that survived the incident were the children. Most adults died from Void exposure, and those who weren't were driven insane and murdered by other passengers. A select few turned into apparitions of the Void, protecting the Zariman and fighting against the Void's melody, lest they become one of the Void Angels. You can probably thank Archemedian Yonta for disabling the safeties to try and make it in one jump. Meanwhile, the children on the ship were changed into strange half-Void beings with unexpected powers and abilities. After they escaped from the Zariman back into real space, they were captured by the Orokin, and eventually became the Operators piloting the warframes. Together, they were the Tenno.
- X: Beyond the Frontier: The Justified Tutorial consists of the player character, Kyle Brennan, testing an experimental jumpdrive for Earth's United Space Command. The jump test Goes Horribly Wrong: instead of his planned destination of the Centauri system, Brennan winds up emerging in the space of the X-Universe's Proud Merchant Race, the Teladi, with the shuttle badly damaged and the jumpdrive completely destroyed. Brennan canonically ended up spending the next three games trying to get back home, even founding a MegaCorp to fund jumpdrive research.
Webcomics
- Galaxion: The titular ship is used for testing of a new experimental drive. The two previous tests having ended... explosively, the engineers claim to have smoothed the wrinkles out. They end up seven light months away from Earth. With broken engines.
- Freefall: The main character Florence's original destination was a remote space station where they would test prototype starship drives at a safe distance from civilization.
