Space is big, m'kay? Reaching another star would take longer than a human lifespan with near-future technology, even within our solar system realistic travel times would be months or years. At the speed of light though, it would only take minutes to travel between planets, hours to reach the most distant planetoids.
Some works of fiction with a Colonized Solar System or Solar System Neighbors do feature Faster-Than-Light Travel, but impose some limitation on it that makes interstellar use impractical. It might be a matter of range, or a limitation to single-digit multiples of light. If there is interstellar travel it may be combined with another FTL method, usually a Portal Network.
This is particularly popular in Space Sims, probably to limit the time players need to spend sitting at their computers.
A Sub-Trope of Faster-Than-Light Travel. Might justify Casual Interplanetary Travel.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Cowboy Bebop has a network of hyperspace gates that are used for rapid travel between planets. Given it's still the 21st century and a gate is required at the destination to leave hyperspace it's possible that there simply haven't been any gates built in other systems.
Films — Animated
- WALL•E: The Axiom has a hyperdrive, but it is only used to travel from the outer solar system to Earth.
Literature
- In "The Jaunt" by Stephen King, humanity has accomplished Casual Interplanetary Travel by dotting a Portal Network of teleporters throughout the solar system but the drone ships that have been sent to build them in other systems aren't going to arrive any time soon.
Live-Action TV
- Mostly played straight in Cowboy Bebop (2021) just like in the anime it's based on with Astral Gates only leading to other planets in the solar system. The only exception is Jet mentioning the Tannhäuser Gate off the shoulder of Orion but this was really just an excuse to use that famous Blade Runner reference.
Tabletop Games
- Hc Svnt Dracones: Lumen's proprietary FTL drive tops out at 1.5x light speed, so not that useful for interstellar travel, but it has already disrupted the interplanetary shipping industry.
- Scum and Villainy: Jump drives allow a ship to use Hyperspace Lanes for travel within a system. But travel between systems requires the Ur Gates.
- Starfinder: "Horizons of the Vast 3, Whispers of the Eclipse" has rules for setting campaigns during the early Azlanti Space Age, long before the development of Drift Drive. In that setting interplanetary travel takes 1d6+2 months with conventional engines, while Onos drive, which rapidly teleports the ship short distances, shortens that to 1d6 x 2 days.
Video Games
- In Distant Worlds, spaceships that have them will use Alcubierre Drives when travelling all but the shortest of distances, as sub-light travel is quite slow and costly in power by comparison. When beginning the game as a pre-warp empire, fully exploiting your home system will be impractical until you unlock the basic proto-hyperdrives, as otherwise you'll be waiting around for ages on construction ships and freighters to reach their destinations.
- Elite Dangerous has Supercruise for intrasystem travel, which tops out at 2001c, meaning that it takes two hours to fly from Alpha Centauri A to Proxima Centauri (0.2 lightyears but within the same star system). So hyperdrive is used for interstellar travel.
- EVE Online: All ships have a warp drive that can reach most places in a star system within minutes, but are useless for interstellar travel. The larger ships can be equipped with interstellar jump drives, but others have to rely on the Portal Network and natural wormholes.
- Freelancer has two types of Portal Network, Trade Lanes are sets of rings that accelerate ships to seemingly superluminal speeds for in-system travel, while Jump Gates and Jump Holes make rifts in space-time that lead to different systems.
- Mass Effect establishes the fact that ships travel via FTL within systems, but in order to travel across the galaxy to far-flung systems, mass effect relays are required.
- The Outer Worlds: Skip Drive allows ships to jump all over the Halcyon system, but the colony ships took ten years to Skip from Earth to Halcyon (except the Stranger's ship, which suffered a Skip Drive malfunction and drifted at sublight for 35 years).
- Rebel Galaxy: Ships have warp drives that can travel within a system rapidly, while travel between systems is only through jump gates.
- In Sins of a Solar Empire, ships use their Phase Drives to travel their starting star system. Traveling to other star systems in a map requires either one or both research items to reach other stars: Phase Lanes between stars, or wormhole travel.
- In Warframe the Solar Rail network and Railjack ships use the Void for rapid travel within the Origin System (aka Sol), but interstellar Void travel seems to have deleterious effects on human sanity.
- X
- X3: Terran Conflict and X3: Albion Prelude: Terran sectors have "Trans-Orbital Accelerators" instead of jumpgates, which accelerate ships to extremely high speeds to throw them between the planets of the Sol system (the Terrans later build some in the Aldrin system, and in Albion Prelude the Argon build them in the Albion system). Mechanically these act identically to jumpgates except that you can't use a jumpdrive to jump to them.
- X: Rebirth and X 4 Foundations have "highways", tubular areas of space that vastly speed up travel between zones of a star system. These are separate from the jumpgate network, which at the start of Rebirth has been shut down for three decades since Albion Prelude.
Western Animation
- Transformers: Prime:
- For much of the series the Autobots use the Groundbridge in their base to travel to any location on Earth instantly. Early on in the series, they manage to use it to attack the Decepticon-built Space Bridge in Earth's orbit, but they are forced to push the Groundbridge's range to the limit to do so. In the third season it gets upgraded into a Spacebridge, becoming powerful enough to even reach the Transformer homeworld of Cybertron.
- The Decepticon warship Nemesis acts as the mobile Decepticon HQ during the series' run. While it can easily journey within the Solar System simply using its own engines, to travel to other systems it has to pass through a Space Bridge to do so.
