That, in and of itself would make for some neat story possibilities when the ship does finally arrive. Heck, played right, that “slow” ship could even be saviors of the people who beat them to the planet.

Picture this: ship A, a suspended animation ship, is outfitted with the best that human society can manage at the time. The most deadly soldiers, most brilliant scientists, most talented terraformers, and most shrewd diplomats earth can spare are packed onboard, along with the best we have of weapons, terraforming equipment, medical technology, vehicles, and communications gear.

The ship is loaded, the crew says their final goodbyes, and it is launched into the void at the location of where the nearest planet deemed to be habitable is.

Millenia pass and so do several much faster ships loaded with colonists, who beat the original ship by several thousand years. However, by the time the old ship gets there, things have degenerated very badly. The colonies fragmented, warred, and eventually blasted the planet into a post-apocalyptic steam-age hellhole. Then the old ship shows up.

It’ll take us a very long time to break this “new” barrier – long enough that we can only dream of the complications that might arise from attempts to do so.

> These models — and others I haven’t covered — tend to have two major problems.

Three problems, actually. The third is that *any* FTL system is, by it’s nature, open to the possibility of causality breaking time travel. http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3v.html#causality

The applicable aphorism is “relativity, causality, FTL, pick any two.” Unfortunately, we already appear to be in a universe with relativity and causality …

– Pat

That’s full of the distilled wisdom of many people speculating on future space missions and combat, many of the contributors it’s drawn from are professional high energy physicists, astronomers, rocket scientists, military weapons systems contractors, and the like. Ergo, the level of professionalism and information is quite high. Almost everything I’ve seen talked about so far by just skimming your posts so far is addressed in depth.

Hope you find it useful!
– Pat

One of the aspects of sci-fi is that it usually tries to be hard scifi so that what works today can work in the scifi setting. If it is too soft, you break the immersion too much with things that have already been proven incorrect. So you stick to hard scifi and only break the rules where it is absolutely necessary, then you try to limit the damage. So, if you damage physics by introducing one FTL technology, it isn’t so impactful if you then expand on that with variations on a theme. Thus, you tend to have everyone using the same premise.

There’s also a wikipedia article on the subject.

That issue is also another reason to think through your technology, applying consistency to your handwaving. In my own fiction, I set a limit on the technology such that an FTL field will collapse if it encounters any significant mass, while handily displacing smaller masses just to the side of the field. That keeps ships from being used as weapons — intentionally or inadvertently — or obliterating themselves on wayward screws.

If you opt for the sleeper ship or the generation ship, you’re presumably doing it out of a sense of realism. Realism will also dictate that there really isn’t anything out there in the vastness of space between systems. So, the game is basically closed system set on a city floating through space. That may as well be an island. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of a self supporting system like you need in a generation ship, you may as well make it a space station so that you have the occasional ship docking to add flavor.

I understand the point of discussion is about FTL, but why does the setting have to expand beyond the borders of our solar system as it stands. Even at sublight speeds, movement within the solar system could be measured in days, months, or years similar to those of old age sailing ships. The solar system is actually a rather large place and I think people often forget how massive that exactly is.

And I love how Battlestar Galactica has been handling it in the recent reworking of it. Totally unexplained but consistent.

Do we live a contradictory existence or are these problems hurdles we are meant to leap?

“And the ship itself may get passed on the way by far more sophisticated ships we’ve built since then.”

That line right there just makes me depressed. What was the point of building the first one, then? A necessary sketch in our science books to learn how to improve on the old design?

… I guess.