So we all know that realistically, casual interstellar travel, especially FTL, should imply such a leap in power that's hard to coexist with the rest of the standard scifi setting (which, let's admit it, is kinda on the weaker end of scifi), but we do it anyway for the sake of the narrative
That's all well and good, but I wonder if anyone tries to embrace the OP-ness of it? If so, does your setting exercise restraint or go all out with the shiny new toys? How much do you buff them?
As for me, growing up with Star Wars, I first leaned toward the safer standard civilisation scale but I've been quite hooked on Star Trek and Orion's Arm lately, and correspondingly, my setting has slowly crept up in scale; and yes, powerscale does play a role i must admit, i do want my lads to low-diff the imperium and trisolaran scum
In my setting Hoshino Monogatari, the Earthling Sphere by the 40th century is rather OP: the 120 Earthling states span across 400k systems and 4m worlds (not counting colonies) across the Orion-Cygnus Arm, they have condensed megastructure projects like Dyson swarm to a mere Von Neumann probe, and each states' expeditionary fleets boast tens of thousands of ships (not counting the much bigger defensive fleets)
In terms of FTL, while by itself rather humble, only reaching a max speed of +40c in the ship's frame, Earthlings ships leverage the Lorentz transformation to boost their jump all the way to infinite speed by simply accelerating the ship to -c/40, or 2.5% of the speed of light in the opposite direction before flip and warp (for more details you could check this out https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/1ntju3k/fellow\_scifi\_writers\_with\_ftl\_how\_do\_you/)
Weapon-wise, Earthlings have a class above superweapon called eigenweapons, which includes: the pp-wave "Thunderbolt" shipborne cannon (beam a linear singularity that catastrophically tidally disrupts matters in its path), the weaponisation of wormhole (drive catastrophic fluid flow between mouths due to delta-p) and via which, the manipulation of quintessence, the tampering of established simultaneity via superluminal traffic's chronology protection, as well as black hole bomb
And while dethroned as the strongest, Earthling's superweapons are still incredibly destructive/disruptive, which include but are not limited to: a ship's own drive plume or the laser arrays propelling one (which is powerful enough to propel a ship to 2.5% the speed of light just for jumps on a daily basis), antimatter-tipped warheads, kugelblitz, mass drivers, and, of course, the classic colony drops, among others. Even surgical and personnel weapons would still sting with foglets and drones as the norms
Thankfully however, the Earthling Sphere has been enjoying close to 2 millennia of peace by now, though that's not to say tactical conflicts among themselves and strategic conflicts with hostile aliens don't happen; the latter notably constituted the few times Earthlings actually employed their superweapons and eigenweapons to terrifying effectiveness
You can have it both ways - building an FTL vehicle in my setting isn't that much more difficult than building a car. The limitations come from vehicle size and travel time. Travel between stars takes weeks, and as your vehicle size increases linearly, your power requirements for FTL go up by the 4th power.
This results in small fighters and cargo transports, being possible, but larger ships get rare very quickly until only the largest governments can manage to launch something the size of an aircraft carrier - and that's going to tap out a planetary military budget.
That's your FTL yes, what about the rest of the setting? Based on your comment i presume it belongs to the former? And again i have nothing against weaker setting
The economics of FTL in my setting mean you can have interstellar war but it's not a casual thing. On Earth a major power might spend months building up forces for an attack, but my setting requires years of planning before launching an interstellar assault. The 'OP' is there, but it is cost-limited.
Cheap access to space is a lot more threatening than cheap access to FTL, though. If you don't guard the space around your star it's not difficult to bump a bunch of rocks onto an intersecting orbit with a planet. The fact that the ship doing that can come from light years away is almost irrelevant.
What I haven't explored yet in my setting is that vast difference between in-system and interstellar travel. Anybody who discovers the underlying FTL technology essentially just made travelling around their own backyard about as difficult as a trip to the Antarctic even without getting up to relativistic speeds.
The reason I set things up this way was to control the amount of interactions to track as an author - if a planet can launch a few dozen ships of significance that's nothing, but if everyone is going everywhere suddenly you have exponentially more work to do if you're trying to keep some continuity and consistency.
Interstellar travel in my scifi setting was largely done by sending a gate toward some distant star system, waiting the however many thousands of years it would take for it to get there, and then activating its twin in your own system to enable instant travel. Was.
While the gates meant for travel are still in place and functional, they have now fitted a gate onto the back of capital ships and its twin near a star to give the ship the capability for practically infinite solar thrust. If you want to be roasted by a gate to hell, you would be behind a capital ship. Also functions as a heat ray/weapon if the situation demands. For the setting up of more gates, capital ships are also used as faster ways to get the gate meant for travel to another system.
That's one hell of a way to propel a ship mate. How big it must be to require such a radical thrust output?
Capital ships tend to be between 10 and 30 kilometers in length, depending on their intended function. There's typically only 1-5 per planet though(depending on how developed the planet is and how valuable defending it is).
Interstellar travel in my setting has a full evolution, but most factions become absurdly powerful long before then. But even before humans leave the earth, they had created immortality and reliable genetic editing, stable fusion and used many experimental and theoretical fission and fusion based power systems and thrusters to expand across the solar system.
Around the 25th century GUTpower is discovered, allowing for practically infinite energy, but still no FTL travel. But by then around 20 star systems have been colonised by humanity. But that infinite energy allows for casually wielding apocalyptic firepower by weaponising GUT energy and the phenomena that happens at such energy densities.
In the 35th century, Humanity gains FTL communication via the Krynnr, an alien Hivemind that can transport data across light years, always within a few days. By then planetary engineering is something that never takes more than a millenia. Not long after Humanity creates ways to produce massive amounts of near-perfect diamond using the immense pressure and heat found in gas giants, and therefore most of their spacecraft becomes made of diamond.
In the 12th millenia, FTL travel is discovered in the form of being able to mass-produce stable exotic matter, building rings of it that are spun up to enormous speeds (plus some extra steps) to produce a wormhole that will last a few hours at most. Gamma-ray computers reach the maximum theoretical computing density physics permits. Biospheres are maintained perfectly by the human-Krynnr alliance, but a war had already been waged during the mid-late second millennium using interstellar STL weapons, and now it was able to continue. Humans already had the firepower to turn planets into slag in hours, but it rarely happened as it was not often tactically or strategically useful.
In the 30th millennium, humans would meet the Isilar as they spread across the galaxy to increase the rate they could produce ships for the still-continuing war. Their ship-based SuSy drives allowed far easier travel, and quicker short-distance travel. Reverse engineering this allowed the production of CTC computers, allowing for negative-reaction time.
In the 70th millennium, Quark Computers, using nuclear forces for their calculations, surpassed Gamma-ray computers in processing power and efficiency. Nomad Vacuum drives also became available, allowing ships to accelerate to near lightspeed within a minute.
Around the 180th millennium, Black Matter was discovered, a material using quantum gravity to both be stable, unlike neutron-star material, and also allows for greater strength.
It’s hard to explain the power of the setting, but at this point a single solar system might have at least ten thousand spacecraft as a defense fleet, while combat fleets may have hundreds of thousands. Each ship would be able to reach lightspeed in seconds, besides the largest. They would be able to detect spacecraft across the solar system and hiding behind planets using neutrino detectors, and they would have gamma-ray lasers that can cut through hundreds of meters of rock instantly, GUTweapons with yields that can reach that of large asteroid impacts, the CTC computers can react to possibly FTL combat before it ever would be able to react normally… etc.
I could go on, and I would explain the science I jammed in there (I try to make it scientifically plausible, I imagine it does not sound like it), but the comment is long enough. I don’t often concern myself with the combat yet because… it’s admittedly quite daunting.
wow cool, let me guess a fellow Xeelee fan?
Uhuh. Before I read the series I was a lot less concerned about science. Still very concerned though. I’m annoyed of how many ideas I had to nab from the Xeelee sequence, but I’ve had a hard time finding any other plausible theories that would work like it does with the Xeelee sequence.
Thankfully I still managed to fit in some of my own ideas. I just need to do more research. I’ve settled with the idea that I’ll at least make my own story and explore concepts in different ways. When I first found out about the Xeelee sequence was when I realised that what i was trying to do was already done, which was a bit upsetting. My setting at least has a better ending for humanity, as I try to perfect a concept for a utopia that actually works.
I mean don't feel so bad about that, many of the concepts in Xeelee are already out there and sooner or later someone would use them for a scifi, Stephen Baxter just has a degree and stumbled upon them first
Yeah. I suppose I have at least added on to his ideas, given I was researching his ideas, like how on earth one would change the laws of physics or physical constants and managed to come up with something that at least sounds like it makes sense. But i’d need to talk to an actual physicist to have any clue if my logic has succeeded.
But in the end I got some neat stories out of it and it’s still a very unexplored part of sci-fi to slot my ideas into so it’s working out.
This was what I did for an earlier setting called A World Unshattered. It was a mess, and I don't do that anymore. That setting is now defunct, and I instead have a separate setting, The Twelfth Hour, in which FTL is easy but the realistic implications of power aren't there.
Ftl tech is rare and expensive to run. Not much time has passed from now so there isn't a crazy amount of people.
So I have two methods of FTL travel in my setting Posnan Drives and wormhole gates. Posnan Drives are definitively not for casual interstellar travel as thry require specialised fuel and need the entire ship to be specially engineered to survive FTL jumps. Wormhole gates on the other hand don't require anything on the ships part and are rather practical for casual interstellar travel.
I wouldn't really describe wormhole gates as OP though. They are enormously expensive structures that cost a lot to keep on. They require a precise position as their link with another gate can be interrupted by gravitational forces. They don't serve a military purpose outside logistics as they act as choke points. They more fill the role of economic infrastructure. My setting is large but definitely not huge as it only takes up a tiny portion of the galaxy. I often write FTL as enforcing limitations just as much as enabling the civilisation that exists in my setting today.
Use this as a bar.
https://preview.redd.it/9e81r2ydyk8g1.jpeg?width=1500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=150414278e764fda309ed827b0b6f064916d5837
This is what FTL allows at basic level. FTL travel = time travel, anyone who can't embrace it dies.
I've got two, there's wormhole gates for casual interstellar travel between established worlds and warp drive for exploration and not established worlds. Wormhole gates get you to the destination effectively instantly, warp takes time. You need a gate on both sides for the wormhole. Warp drive is limited by power supply and usually equals roughly 1000 times light speed.
FTL in my setting isn’t exactly casual, but it’s ubiquitous.
The thing is, it’s decoupled from baseline tech. The FTL systems are a black box that we don’t understand.
Spacecraft are bigger and have barely plausible drive systems, but they are still fragile and short ranged (with a few exceptions).
Weapons tech isn’t much beyond today. Sure they made rail guns work, lasers are more effective, missiles probably have more propellant than they should, mass drivers are used at short range, and point-defense tech is on par with a modern CIWS/C-RAM (but vacuum optimized).
All of those things are catastrophically damaging to spacecraft, and spacecraft are expensive. So, space combat is rare and metered. At least among humans.
The ubiquitousness of FTL has also made most “deep” space travel redundant. Low orbit, moons, and maybe some asteroids are utilized. But terraforming is a waste of time when you can go find a thousand generally habitable planets.
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The whole setting is a little weird with layered tech levels based on civilizational disruptions and some soft reboots. Old tech that survived is far better than what we redeveloped, and that has often stymied progress in certain fields. It’s a dangerous game to rely on tech you can’t reproduce from scratch, but it’s been working so far.
And just for clarification. My setting is the opposite of OP. I always wanted bigger, better, stronger, and more powerful when I was a kid in the early 90s.
Now that I’ve had my midlife crisis, I think I prefer that my setting would get its butt kicked by any other major sci-fi franchise out there. At least the one’s with multiple plot macguffins.