I’m working on some more writing this week, so it felt like time to share this:
In my own series, Rogue Tyger, the characters refer to an “FTL drive,” but they also talk about “jumps” so you can deduce that ships in the ‘Tygerverse’ use a form of jump drive. Visually, it’s probably best been represented with the recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, but a major inspiration for how the drive works and the variations between commercial and military versions of FTL drives came from Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep.
One of the reasons I went this direction is because a ship’s ability to “jump” or fold fit how I wanted ships to behave in stories. I didn’t want them to be “in hyperspace” or “at warp” for any long period of time. The distance a ship could jump and the speed at which it could re-jump also had dramatic applications I liked — as well as skilled pilots being able to execute pinpoint jumps the fraction of a light-minute versus rookie pilots.
What sort of propulsion systems do you most like (or dislike) in science fiction?