Through the Void

Space travel! Man would I love to do it. I recently listened to an audiobook that I borrowed from my local library call 'Of Monsters and Mainframes.' It follows a ship AI that travels from Earth to Alpha Centauri and on various different trips the humans on board get killed by Dracula, then a werewolf, and then a mummy attacks and then a bunch team up to kill Dracula. It's not the kind of book I read, but it is already one of my favorites. It doesn't take itself seriously, but isn't silly for sake of being silly. It's just realistic sci-fi with cryptids. 

One of the features of traveling between the stars is that there isn't faster than light travel. While it's going very fast, it still takes a few years for a one way trip using your typical chemical based fuel that we all know and love. It just tastes better.

This is the method of transport that current humans have, and as far as physics shows, could be our only method of travel forever. I love the time of the travel though. It adds a lot of uncertainty to any story. What are the conditions going to be like when you get to the destination? It does limit the scope of the story a bit though. You can't have a galaxy spanning story when it takes that long to travel. Another book I'm working on has a similar thing where transport is more rare so the people flying go into hibernation for decades and the planets don't have any contact with the other planets. Just a bunch of solo planets that trade with any ships that happen to drop by. This makes it difficult when a certain ship is trying to find a certain person.

Having some time for travel is always better as far as I'm concerned. Star Wars always had super fast lightspeed but one side of the galaxy to the other still took weeks. With the latest movies they more or less removed that and it takes away some of the anxiety of the story. Not a problem for Star Trek that's maintained the warp speed but if they need to get farther they can introduce a worm hole for special cases. Or so Janeway claims. I think she just got REALLY drunk one night.

My favorite method of galactic travel, by far, is Battletech (Aside from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, I suppose). There are a thousand or two star systems, so it's still a very small part of the galaxy, but there is instantaneous travel, with a hitch. Special ships can make a jump upwards of twenty light years in an instant, and then they have to re-charge with a solar sail for a week. Or, in special cases where there is an existing station where they come out, they can hook up and charge faster. This allows for some delay, but also a method of skipping that in special cases.

And besides that, the jumpships have to stay a certain distance from a star or else the gravity of it will mess with the jump. This means that once you arrive in system, a separate ship breaks off and then flies to the planet. This can take a week or so, depending on how many G's they want to submit the crew to. This all allows for the delays of chemical based transport around a galaxy, but with the greater ability to communicate, travel and expand to other worlds. And the jumpships us the super realistic science of *redacted* so you'll actually believe they are doing it!

What's your favorite method of space travel?