Interesting Space Travel Systems

[Conners]

Across all the different sci-fi, there are many forms and types of space-travel.

Which ones do you find the most interesting?

[zorenathres]

Ego Casting by far, from Eclipse Phase... transmit your ego/ mind over the net & download into a new body on the other side of the solar system.

[Zale]

In a giant tree.

[Ormur]

I'm getting fonder of slower than light transport.

Something like the lighthuggers in the Revelation Space series where huge spaceships powered by some exotic means accelerate to 99% of light speed. Time dilation ensures the crew doesn't experience more than a few years or even months of travel even though the trip takes decades.

Then there's the portal system where wormhole gates are towed at speeds slower than light between systems, eventually connecting the galaxy. In Iain M. Bank's The Algebraist there were also slower than light needleships (so named so they could fit through the portals) that were used to travel to unconnected systems or within systems.
Or as in Peter F Hamilton's commonwealth saga where the portals could be created in a radius of lightyears on planets. Travel between them was done by trains, in a huge network radiating from Earth, without ever needing to leave to atmosphere. That's probably the most original space travel idea I've heard.

If faster than light travel is needed then I prefer jump drives that can travel long distances in many jumps. They still have to match the relative speed difference between the starting point and destination though which calls for some manoeuvring.

[Madfellow]

You guys should check out the Orion's Arm Universe Project (a quick google search). The goal of the project is to build a space opera sci-fi setting without breaking any known laws of physics. Space travel is done with fusion or antimatter rockets (or hybrids), and a network of wormholes has been established to connect all inhabited systems. These wormholes are larger than our own solar system and take months to travel through, though it's still faster than going the whole distance at sub-light. And despite their size, the "throat" of these wormholes is only something like 500 meters in diameter, so only small ships can pass through them.

[Silverbit]

Runcibles from some airport fiction novel called Gridlinked (I think) are pretty awesome. Instant travel, but if it goes wrong all the energy in your body is released at once. That's a lot of H-Bombs. The Runcible is essensially a portal, so not space travel. Still pretty cool though.

[Veklim]

I always liked the idea of colony ships moving at very sub-light speeds using ion drives. Makes for more sense than anything else. On a related topic, dear old E E Doc Smith came up with the idea of an inertia-less barrier on spacecraft to negate messiness from high-speed impacts too. Oh, and asteroid-ships, very cool (Heart of the Comet).

[Zale]

To expand on the Tree thing.

I once read a novel in which people traveled at sub-light speeds inside huge genetically altered tree-ships.

Seemed interesting.