Often times ships are equipped with a deflector shield or something similar, to help divert such obstacles before they can strike the ship, but with as many uses as your average deflector dish has, I’m not so sure I’d be willing to trust it. Traveling dozens of lightyears, you’re bound to hit a small pebble or speck of dust at some point maybe the family you left behind on Earth will be able to see the flash of light from your ship exploding into a miniature supernova in a few years. Sure, space is very, very big, and things are much farther apart than people tend to think, but you’re also covering an enormous distance to get from place to place. Now consider that for FTL travel, you’re going much, much faster than that. An object traveling near light speed, colliding with something as seemingly insignificant as a 1 kilogram space rock, can create an explosion 75 times more powerful than the largest nuclear weapon ever created. Obviously, this is still a problem even if you aren’t traveling FTL, but it’s one that gets exponentially worse–and I mean that literally. Sometimes crashing into a star is a feature, not a bug, though.Įven if your ship’s drive is functioning perfectly, there are other dangers out there… like hitting something. The less fortunate among us might have their molecules scattered to the solar winds… or worse. And violating those laws can be messy in ways you can’t even begin to imagine if you’re lucky, your ship will just slow down so immediately that the G forces the crew experiences will turn them into a thin red paste on the walls. If even a tiny component goes wrong, your warp field can collapse, and suddenly you’re bound by the same laws of physics as the rest of the universe. You can accomplish this through warp bubbles, subspace, or hyperspace, but no matter the method, that’s the goal.īut these are by their very definition unnatural states, and require immense amounts of power to maintain. The simple fact that FTL travel takes place in space would seem to be enough, but it goes beyond that–FTL, by our current understanding, is going to require some way of circumventing the basic physical laws of reality. But if your car suffers from such a failure, there’s at least a chance you could survive. If you’re lucky, someone else might be able to help you…Īlright, so technically speaking, catastrophic failure is always a possibility in any vehicle, from cars to the starship Enterprise.
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