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Lightspeed Leapfrog
- 179 statements
- 33 feature instances
- 25 referencing feature instances
Lightspeed Leapfrog | type |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog | comment |
The brave explorers or colonists set out in their spaceship to spread humankind to the stars. You can't travel faster than light, so they're going to spend most of the trip on a Sleeper Starship as Human Popsicles, or it's a Generation Ship and it'll be their descendants who step out at the other end of the trip. Either way, they're saying goodbye forever to everyone and everything they know. Decades and centuries pass, and eventually they arrive at their destination— —and there's people there waiting for them. Turns out, Faster-Than-Light Travel (or at least sublight travel that is vastly faster than theirs) is possible, and it got sorted out while they were in transit. Now the same trip that took them centuries can be done and be back in time for Christmas. And that planet you were all set to colonise? Done already, and actually we're not sure there's any room for you... Expect the brave pioneers to be upset about this. An in-universe Sub-Trope of Science Marches On. Can also be related to Humans Advance Swiftly. See Fish out of Temporal Water for a comparable situation. Examples |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog | fetched |
2024-02-17T02:31:29Z | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | parsed |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog | processingComment |
Dropped link to BloodKnight: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
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Dropped link to ColonyShip: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
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Dropped link to FanRemake: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
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Dropped link to SelfFulfillingProphecy: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
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Dropped link to SleeperShip: Not an Item - UNKNOWN | |
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Dropped link to TheFederation: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | processingUnknown |
SleeperShip | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | isPartOf |
DBTropes | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_18883335 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_18883335 | comment |
The "First Contact" side quest in Starfield involves a generation ship which left Earth 200 years prior to the current year (2330), and about a decade before the invention of faster-than-light travel. They eventually arrived at a planet where other humans had already built a resort. Contact is initially hampered by their outdated hardware having incompatible communications protocols, resulting in warped static signals. It is up to the player to settle the dispute between the two parties. One option is to buy a FTL engine to install on their generation ship so they can keep looking. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_18883335 | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_18883335 | featureConfidence |
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Starfield / Videogame | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_18883335 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_1c0cb70 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_1c0cb70 | comment |
In the Questden adventure The Sunfish, this is revealed to be the evil plan of the Investors: keeping FTL technology a secret, they sent crews ahead of the big sleeper ships to build Company Town colonies at their destination, so the settlers would end up completely at their mercy. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_1c0cb70 | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_1c0cb70 | featureConfidence |
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Questden (Website) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_1c0cb70 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_247422c7 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_247422c7 | comment |
Honor Harrington: Happened to several groups of colonists in the backstory of the series, as the big push for colonization started before FTL travel was safe for mass transit. On at least one occasion, this lead to a planet being home to two distinctly different cultures with separate governments. In Manticore's case, when the colony ship for the founding of what became Manticore left FTL travel was possible but extremely dangerous prompting them to travel sub-light. However before leaving they invested their remaining money with instructions that when safe FTL travel was invented the money should be used to contact them and if necessary prevent other people from establishing a colony on their planet before they arrived. Consequently when they did arrive they found a small squadron of warships guarding their home and all of the equipment and teachers necessary to bring them up to speed on 800 years worth of scientific advancement. The "Haven Quadrant" as a whole is full of this Trope, as it was settled by a mix of early and slower sleep ships, later sleepships with more efficient engines, and hyper colony ships. Haven itself was founded about a decade after the discovery of the Warshawski sail made hyper colonization possible, with Haven being founded more than 100 years before the Jason arrived at Manticore. At which time, Grayson has already been colonized for over 400 years. |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_247422c7 | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_247422c7 | featureConfidence |
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Honor Harrington | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_247422c7 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_44c7750f | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_44c7750f | comment |
In The Ark (2023), the first Ark was launched as a Sleeper Starship taking 6 subjective years to get to Proxima b. Five-sixths of the way there, it is overtaken by the later Arks with FTL drives that cut the trip to months. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_44c7750f | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_44c7750f | featureConfidence |
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The Ark (2023) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_44c7750f | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_558b4c84 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_558b4c84 | comment |
This was the origin of Vance Astro in Guardians of the Galaxy. He was cryogenically frozen and sent on the first manned space mission to another star. When he arrived, he discovered that Earth had invented faster-than-light travel and had colonised the world he was heading for. He was hailed as a hero but found he had arrived in a world where he no longer had a place. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_558b4c84 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_558b4c84 | featureConfidence |
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Guardians of the Galaxy (Comic Book) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_558b4c84 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_5bb406f8 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_5bb406f8 | comment |
Narrowly averted by the LDS Nauvoo in The Expanse, if only because the Belters building it hijacked it and tried to ram it into Eros in an attempt to stop the Protomolecule, which ended up creating the Ring. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_5bb406f8 | featureApplicability |
-1.0 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_5bb406f8 | featureConfidence |
1.0 | |
The Expanse | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_5bb406f8 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_5bbf2c3b | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_5bbf2c3b | comment |
Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton starts out with a variation. A NASA vessel makes humanity's first-ever manned voyage to another planet (Mars), only to discover that a pair of garage inventors have discovered the means to generate stable wormholes and beat them there. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_5bbf2c3b | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_5bbf2c3b | featureConfidence |
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Pandora's Star | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_5bbf2c3b | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6a2b73ca | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6a2b73ca | comment |
More recently, generation ships are now being found within a 100ly radius of Sol in the official sequel Elite Dangerous. Every ship that's been found so far has run into much, much bigger problems than being overtaken by FTL vessels. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6a2b73ca | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6a2b73ca | featureConfidence |
1.0 | |
Elite: Dangerous / Videogame | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6a2b73ca | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6d7fb9f | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6d7fb9f | comment |
In Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein, the protagonist is on a NAFAL ship that spends most of the book exploring the nearby stars; at the end of the book when everything is falling apart, they get rescued by an FTL ship that's been developed on Earth in the interim. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6d7fb9f | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6d7fb9f | featureConfidence |
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Time for the Stars | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6d7fb9f | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6f6971b5 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6f6971b5 | comment |
In one Sector General story, a Monitor Corps faster-than-light scout ship intercepts a human generation ship that had been lost for centuries. The crew is nearly all dead. The Sector General space hospital has to dispatch an ambulance ship when the humans on the Monitor Corps ship start getting sick; due to a centuries-diverged influenza virus that the crew of the generation ship carried. In two other stories; the ambulance ship intercepts damaged slower-than-light starships launched by alien cultures and after treating the injured, arranges for the Monitor Corps to ferry them to their intended destinations. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6f6971b5 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6f6971b5 | featureConfidence |
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Sector General | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_6f6971b5 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_7988cb68 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_7988cb68 | comment |
Mentioned with a twist in one of the Mass Effect news feeds, where the asari stumble across an uncharted human colony. As it turns out, the colonists were from an old STL human colony ship, which left Earth 75 years before humanity discovered mass effect technology. Needless to say, much Hilarity Ensued until an FTL human ship could arrive to explain the situation. This was also metaphorically the fate of Jump Zero, aka Gagarin Station, which served the humans as a testing ground for FTL tech before they found the Prothean Archive describing mass effect FTL, far more efficient than anything the humans had hoped to accomplish on their own. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_7988cb68 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_7988cb68 | featureConfidence |
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Mass Effect (Franchise) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_7988cb68 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_7f2914c9 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_7f2914c9 | comment |
No stars in sight: When the crew of the Rancis Olytus began hunting the Locus of Communion through uncharted space, they were always one step behind their quarry due to having no knowledge of where their target was headed, so the best that they could do was blindly follow the trail of breadcrumbs the Locus left behind. However, once Ikharos learns which star system the Locus was heading towards (thanks to coordinates provided by Elsie), he has the Rancis Olytus perform an FTL jump to get there, arriving at their destination ahead of the Locus's ships that they had originally been chasing. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_7f2914c9 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_7f2914c9 | featureConfidence |
1.0 | |
No stars in sight (Fanfic) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_7f2914c9 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_8b175d | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_8b175d | comment |
A sublight version in Alien Legacy. In a last-ditch effort to preserve the human race in the face of the Centaurian onslaught, the Earth governments band together to build massive "seedships" to carry colonists to faraway stars with each ship instructed to maintain strict radiosilence in order not to give away their position to the enemy. The game starts with the crew of the UNS Calypso waking up from cold sleep, as the ship enters the Beta Caeli system (90 light years from Earth). The Captain (you) sees messages waiting in his/her PDA. They're from Earth, informing him/her about another seedship, the UNS Tantalus, sent to the same star 16 years after the Calypso. Thanks to a marginally better engine, the Tantalus arrived to Beta Caeli 21 years before the Calypso (it's implied the trip took centuries, if not millennia). The other parts of the trope are avoided, as all you find are remnants of the colony with no humans in sight. Finding out just what the hell happened to them drives the plot of the game. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_8b175d | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_8b175d | featureConfidence |
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Alien Legacy / Videogame | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_8b175d | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_9a7088bc | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_9a7088bc | comment |
Star Trek: The Original Series: In the episode "Space Seed", the crew of the Enterprise discovers the Botany Bay, a sleeper ship from the 1990s which has been floating in space for centuries. As it turns out, the ship is a prison colony for genetically modified superhumans, including one Khan Noonien Singh. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_9a7088bc | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_9a7088bc | featureConfidence |
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Star Trek: The Original Series | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_9a7088bc | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a1970a85 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a1970a85 | comment |
Fading Suns: Sol's Jumpgate was discovered by a Sleeper Ship on its' way out of the system. In a variant, the ships that preceded it were never heard from again. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a1970a85 | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a1970a85 | featureConfidence |
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Fading Suns (Tabletop Game) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a1970a85 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a2a386c9 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a2a386c9 | comment |
Orion's Arm does not, and will never have, an FTL drive and they still have a version of this. The first Generation Ships were often outpaced by smaller and faster sleeper ships, and when relativistic drives were developed those beat the sleeper ships. And finally linelayers could not travel at relativistic speeds but could lay down wormholes that would bring in a flood of colonists within a few years of deployment and decrease travel times thereafter from years to months. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a2a386c9 | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a2a386c9 | featureConfidence |
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Orion's Arm (Website) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a2a386c9 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a439eb16 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a439eb16 | comment |
Coriolis: The Third Horizon: In the backstory the colony ship Zenith left Earth for Aldebaran, and by the time they arrived they discovered that the star and the local cluster had long since been colonized using a precursor Portal Network and seceded from Earth's empire. The game starts in the aftermath of the cultural upheaval started by their arrival, with the Zenith dismantled to build the Space Station Coriolis that acts as a meeting ground for the cluster's factions. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a439eb16 | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a439eb16 | featureConfidence |
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Coriolis The Third Horizon (Tabletop Game) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_a439eb16 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_b690fec0 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_b690fec0 | comment |
Downplayed in Coyote. In 2070, the United Republic of America launched the URSS Alabama, a Sleeper Starship driven by a Ram Scoop towards 47 Ursae Majoris, which will arrive after 230 years of travel. Midflight, the URA collapses and the Western Hemisphere Union replaces it, then launches their own colony ships powered by an extremely efficient thruster, allowing them to arrive at Coyote only a few years after the Alabama, despite being launched over a hundred years after it. The conflict of interest between the WHU leaders and the original colonists drives the plot in later novels. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_b690fec0 | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_b690fec0 | featureConfidence |
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Coyote | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_b690fec0 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_b747108f | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_b747108f | comment |
In the second book of the Out of the Dark series, Vlad and several others take the dreadnought captured from the Shongairi and embark on a 40-year trip to the Shong System to pay the aliens back for killing over half of humanity. Almost immediately after arriving, they're overtaken by a much larger (and more advanced) vessel sent from Earth a mere six years ago and that has actually been waiting for a month for it to arrive. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_b747108f | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_b747108f | featureConfidence |
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Out of the Dark | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_b747108f | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_bcadd7cb | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_bcadd7cb | comment |
Warhammer 40,000 has a variation on this: FTL travel is done by opening a temporary rift into the Warp (also called Warpspace, among a few dozen other names) and flying through until they get to the destination. That said, the Warp is an alternate dimension comprised of forms of energy that is antithetical to most living beings, the laws of physics is a set of jokes, and it's full of demons, haunted and derelict spaceships, and several flavors of god monsters; and it requires a special, inbred, psychic mutant to read its tides and currents. That said, time is highly inconsistent in how time passes relative to 'real space' every time you make a jump. Ships are expected to not arrive on schedule because of this, although a decent Navigator (the aforementioned mutant) can usually come close (give or take a couple of months). That said, the trip can take months or even years (from the crew's perspective) but poor warp conditions can delay a ship for centuries (from the perspective of realspace) without the crew being any the wiser; more than one Imperial fleet has arrived on schedule to relieve a besieged planet, only to find that the conflict came to a close long ago. Fleets stay together by using the same Navigator's directions, although every fleet carries the expectation that a couple of ships will get lost on the way, potentially playing this trope completely straight. On several occasions a ship has emerged before it entered the Warp. A notable case involved an Ork Warboss, who immediately attacked his past self in order to have two of his favorite gun. His army more or less disintegrated in the ensuing confusion resulting from his victory against himself. There is a case where a combination of this and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy screwed over the crew of of an Imperial ship that answered a distress signal. Unbeknownst to the crew, they had responded to their own distress signal, due to their initial warp jump sending them back in time and into an ambush. |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_bcadd7cb | featureApplicability |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_bcadd7cb | featureConfidence |
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Warhammer 40,000 (Tabletop Game) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_bcadd7cb | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_c0aa8ea9 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_c0aa8ea9 | comment |
A mild version of this in Stargate Universe, where descendants of an alternate version of the crew of the Destiny have a 2000-year colony on planet Novus. However, as the planet is destabilizing, they have built sublight generational ships to take them to a world their advance scout teams found using stargates. The Destiny crew (not the alternate one) find one such scout group and decide to give them a lift to their destination, knowing that the generational ships will get there in about 200 years. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_c0aa8ea9 | featureApplicability |
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Stargate Universe | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_c0aa8ea9 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_c5c45c70 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_c5c45c70 | comment |
Marvel's Micronauts basically cannibalized this figment of Astro's backstory and gave it to Arcturus Rann. Like Astro, he went into stasis for most of a space voyage only to find that the rest of the universe (well, Microverse) had discovered warp travel while he slept. | |
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Micronauts (Marvel Comics) (Comic Book) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_c5c45c70 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_cb570c4a | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_cb570c4a | comment |
In Mostly Harmless, we're told that one of the things making Galactic history so confusing is the armies that were sent out in sleepships to fight wars with distant civilisations, only to awaken, discover that diplomats travelling FTL arrived before them and hammered out a peace treaty, and damn well fighting their wars anyway. | |
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Mostly Harmless | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_cb570c4a | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_cc49cf71 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_cc49cf71 | comment |
In an episode of Once upon a Time... Space, the first interstellar spaceship from Earth — a Sleeper Ship believed lost for nearly a millennium — arrives unannounced to its destination, smack in the middle of Federation space. The crew has to cope with the fact that humankind has already colonized space in their absence, and their thousand-year journey now takes about a week. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_cc49cf71 | featureApplicability |
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Il était une fois... | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_cc49cf71 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_d109f322 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_d109f322 | comment |
In the Andromeda episode "The Lone and Level Sands", the crew encounters the Bellerophon, a 1,700 year old exploration vessel launched shortly before Earth joined the Commonwealth and acquired slipstream drive (as in, a Perseid research ship found Earth a mere 8 years after the Bellerophon has been launched, although 30 years would pass before humans were to officially join the Commonwealth). Its mission was scheduled to last 3,000 years (on Earth - because of the relativistic time dilation, the original crew is still alive and well). The crew is divided between those loyal to the captain (who has some idea of how obsolete they've become and is keeping the rest in the dark) and their mission, and those who get the feeling that their crewmates are dying in encounters with raiders for nothing and want to leave. Partially subverted in that they aren't completely useless, because they can go to parts of the galaxy that cannot be reached with slipstream drive. | |
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Andromeda | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_d109f322 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_d2219b0a | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_d2219b0a | comment |
Part of the backstory in Strata. | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_d2219b0a | featureApplicability |
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Strata | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_d2219b0a | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_d4f11a60 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_d4f11a60 | comment |
The manual for Elite says you can encounter ancient generation ships still flying to their destinations in your Casual Interstellar Travels. You can't, but if they were in the game, that would be this trope. However one of the user-made addons for Fan Remake Oolite adds these into the universe. More recently, generation ships are now being found within a 100ly radius of Sol in the official sequel Elite Dangerous. Every ship that's been found so far has run into much, much bigger problems than being overtaken by FTL vessels. |
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Elite (Video Game) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_d4f11a60 | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_dc30219c | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_dc30219c | comment |
Lancer: Over the past ten thousand years as Generation Ships have given way to light-huggers and blink gates, sorting out colonial claims has gotten very complicated, causing more than a few wars. The generation ship Armstrong launched during the waning days of Old Humanity, taking several centuries to get to their destination, their original purpose turning into a religion as they went. When they finally got there, they found that Union had sent a nearlight craft to that same world and established a colony a century ahead of them. The descendants of the Armstrong's colonists, the Aunic people, never forgave Union for its presumption. |
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Lancer (Tabletop Game) | hasFeature |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_dc30219c | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_eb3f3551 | type |
Lightspeed Leapfrog | |
Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_eb3f3551 | comment |
A variation serves as the central conflict for Mass Effect: Andromeda. The initiative ships took 600 years in FTL to cross the intergalactic void. By the time they arrived, the planets they chose as their destinations through long range scans had been drastically altered by local populations/forces and were no longer the Golden Worlds they were expecting to find. The technology found on the first planet you arrive at is estimated at 300 years old, meaning someone faster arrived there when your journey was only half over. | |
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Mindjammer: Given the 10,000 year gap between the first slowships and the invention of Planar drive Lost Colonies are a more frequent occurrence. But pre-Expansionary slowships are on the random encounter tables. | |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_f189f12e | comment |
Vega Strike has Forsaken — whole faction formed from the settlers who arrived to their destination only to find already developed places where no one needed them. Forsaken are understandably bitter about all this, don't care about Confed and end up as a big Space Pirates haven. | |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_f74b5f80 | type |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_f74b5f80 | comment |
Babylon 5, "The Long Dark": In the 22nd century, the exploration ship Copernicus set out with a frozen crew and a navigation computer set to track down radio signals suggestive of intelligent life. A hundred years later, it arrives at the source of one such set of signals — the planet that Babylon 5 orbits. Turns out, the Centauri found Earth and gave humans jump gate technology just a few years after the Copernicus set out. And also, an Eldritch Abomination hitched a ride on it and ate all but one of the crew. | |
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Lightspeed Leapfrog / int_ff9ab17f | comment |
The season 1 finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Neutral Zone", is in part about a recovered ship sent from Earth in the pre-warp era, with cryogenically frozen passengers. Apparently it drifted out of Earth orbit at some point and traveled a few thousand lightyears from Earth in a matter of four hundred years (one Expanded Universe novel fixes this by revealing it was deliberately moved by aliens, for some unknown reason). | |
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