A field guide to faster-than-light travel.

Explore it live: https://superluminal-ftl.netlify.app

Twelve ways to beat the speed of light — drawn from famous fiction and from the peer-reviewed physics literature — flown on a single test route and judged by the same clocks. The route never changes: Sol → Proxima Centauri, 4.2465 light-years. That fixed distance is what makes the comparison honest. A photon takes 4.25 years. Star Trek's warp does it in twelve hours. A Stargate does it in no time at all — but only because someone shipped the far gate there at sublight, ages ago. The differences are the whole point.

Each drive is an exhibit: a first-person viewport with bespoke shader visuals, live instrumentation, and a museum placard that separates what the fiction claims from what general relativity actually allows.

Baseline

• FTL-00 · Photon — the control run. Exactly c. The ship clock reads zero the whole way, because light does not age.

Fiction

• FTL-01 · Warp Drive — Star Trek (1966). Live throttle on the TNG warp scale; warp 9.975 ≈ 3,053 c.
• FTL-02 · Hyperdrive — Star Wars (1977). Pseudomotion streak into the blue dimension.
• FTL-03 · Jump Drive — Battlestar Galactica (2004). Spool, compute, relocate. Mind the Red Line.
• FTL-04 · Foldspace — Dune (1965). Space folds; a Navigator surveys the crease before you cross it.
• FTL-05 · Infinite Improbability Drive — The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979). With the canonical whale.
• FTL-06 · The Immaterium — Warhammer 40,000 (1987). Transit time is rolled, not computed — and ~2% of arrivals precede departure.
• FTL-07 · Stargate — Stargate (1994). Full dial sequence, 38-minute window.

Theory

• FTL-08 · Alcubierre Metric — Alcubierre 1994. A real solution of Einstein's equations, shown as a deforming spacetime grid, with the negative-energy budget walked from "10¹⁰ × the observable universe" down to White's contested 500 kg.
• FTL-09 · Traversable Wormhole — Morris & Thorne 1988 / Interstellar. Real-time gravitational-lensing shader with an Einstein ring.
• FTL-10 · Krasnikov Tube — Krasnikov 1995. Two legs and a live spacetime inset: you return eleven days after you left, having aged seventy-two.
• FTL-11 · Tachyon Channel — Feinberg 1967. Not a ship — an interactive Minkowski diagram. Drag the sliders until the reply arrives before the question.

A Compare view tables all twelve against four destinations (Proxima, TRAPPIST-1, the galactic core, Andromeda) under the thesis that organizes the whole guide: faster than light, relativity, causality — pick two.

The canon figures and the physics were fact-checked against primary and authoritative sources, and several common errors were corrected in the process — warp 9.975 is ~3,053 c (not the often-cited 1,721 c); the famous 2^276,709 : 1 improbability is the rescue from open space, not the whale; Van Den Broeck's 1999 result reduces the Alcubierre energy to a few solar masses of negative energy; the Krasnikov round-trip claim is sourced to Everett & Roman's 1997 abstract. Where canon is genuinely ambiguous (e.g. Star Wars hyperdrive speeds), the placard says so rather than inventing a figure. Every place the simulation takes a liberty — time compression, cosmetic hazards — is stated on the placard, never hidden.

Key physics sources: Alcubierre, Class. Quantum Grav. 11 (1994) L73; Morris & Thorne, Am. J. Phys. 56 (1988) 395; Krasnikov, Phys. Rev. D 57 (1998) 4760; Everett & Roman, Phys. Rev. D 56 (1997) 2100; Feinberg, Phys. Rev. 159 (1967) 1089; Pfenning & Ford (1997); Van Den Broeck (1999); James, von Tunzelmann, Franklin & Thorne, Class. Quantum Grav. 32 (2015) 065001.

It's a single index.html — three.js from CDN, no build step.

• Any static server: python -m http.server 8452, then open localhost:8452,
• or just open index.html in a browser.

Needs WebGL2 and a network connection (three.js and the fonts load from a CDN).

Controls: ↑/↓ select · Enter engage · C compare · Esc back · M mute · Tab toggle placard. Warp and Alcubierre have live throttles during transit.

Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Dune, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Warhammer 40,000, and Stargate are trademarks of their respective owners. This is an independent educational project — a fan tribute and a physics explainer — not affiliated with or endorsed by any rights holder.

MIT. Code only; the referenced fictional universes remain the property of their owners.