FTL travel

[Elsecaller_17.5]

First off I don’t like faster then light travel. It breaks to many rules and I’d rather see near light speed travel, but I also don’t see how bendalloy would achieve either effect. It has to have a way to anchor a bendalloy bubble on it self but that requires a bendalloy savant, massive amounts of bendalloy and/or harmonium, and a bubble big enough to fit a space ship in. It just doesn’t make sense. But there’s another metallic ability that could do the same thing but better. The reason light goes so fast is because it’s massless making it take no energy to accelerate f-iron has the effect of reducing weight. I suspect that near light speed travel will be achieved by using       f-iron to drastically lighten spacecraft and occupants so relatively minuscule amounts of energy can propel them to otherwise impossible speeds. What do y’all think?

Edited August 11, 2019 by Truthwatcher_17.5

[Ripheus23]

As far as I know, the natural speed of light does not limit magic in the cosmere absolutely... I think the suspicion is that Scadrial spaceship shenanigans will end up Alcubierre-y, in part per WoB iirc due to a step we don't know yet.

[Weltall]

Brandon has said that we're getting actual honest-to-God-Beyond FTL in the series so the fact that you don't like the idea is kind of moot. As for how it's going to be accomplished, you can't just think in terms of the magic that we've seen so far as Brandon has confirmed that we're looking at a three-step process over the course of the Cosmere's history and we're only just starting to get to stage two:

Quote

So, I tried to build the cosmere magic-- For instance, how the Bands of Mourning work. We are getting away from Step 1, which is, "Metals push or pull." We can get that. Into Step 2, where we are building complex machines out of the interactions between the magic. And we will then get to Step 3, where it's like, we can explain the principles, but you need to be a computer engineer to understand exactly how the computer is working. And I wanted to be able to build to get to that point. With the philosophy of, "What is the power, what is the individual, what is the intent," and things like that, we're kind of going that direction, in a philosophical direction. What does it mean? What are the answers? JordanCon 2018 (April 21, 2018)

However Allomantic FTL (and any other form of Cosmere FTL) works is pretty much going to require us to be at Step 3, meaning that while we can guess at how it might work we simply don't have enough of the big picture to hit on the ultimate solution except by complete accident. By the time we get to that step, we'll have some rules in place that will limit (but not eliminate) the causality-breaking aspects of FTL.

[cometaryorbit]

On 8/11/2019 at 1:20 PM, Ripheus23 said:

As far as I know, the natural speed of light does not limit magic in the cosmere absolutely

Definitely not.

Spanreeds are already technically FTL communication, it just isn't noticeable since the distances are only a few thousand miles at most, so far.

And you can effectively travel between solar systems FTL by worldhopping using the Cognitive Realm... not really the same thing, but you still end up traveling light years in days or weeks.