What is it? Something I had on my mind. I would hazard a guess the Millennium Falcon. What say you?

The Heart of Gold.

I prefer the Bistromath.

Lol, yeah i was thinking of that. Let's rephase that. The fastest REALISTIC fictional spaceship (almost an oxymoran if it isn't) In other words something that is remotely probable. It's hard to take hitchhiker seriously. Star Wars and Star Trek tech is suprisingly probable.

I like the approach Dune has for non comedy scifi.

IIRC the "Event Horizon" could travel between any two points instantly. Though it never worked quite properly, what with the accidentally traveling to Hell and all.

Fastest ones that work properly (but are much less realistic) would be the ZPM-powered Asgard hyperdrive ships in Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis; they've been known to cross intergalactic distances in a matter of weeks or less, which is at least an order of magnitude faster than any propulsion technology in Star Wars (which is itself much faster than Star Trek tech).

I'm surprised there isn't a wikipedia page comparing relative speeds of fictional spaceships.

I think you know what you need to do.

The interstellar travel in I, Robot is more or less instantaneous.
Only problem is, that, like with the "Event Horizon", you die while traveling. But that's only temporary.

Well, the improbability drive takes care of that problem quite nicely.

Star Trek and Star Wars are guilt of gross violations of the law of relativity.

The Gay Deceiver. (See Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.) for in depth workings of it, read the number of the beast.

you could travel in space and time with it along any of 6^6^6 axis of rotation, translation etc, as fast as solid state circuitry can work. it also took almost no power to do so!

Who would name a ship that?

i dont know dude, it was written in the late 70s, so i really couldnt tell you. heinlein is a brilliant writer though!

Wasn't the USS Enterprise flying pretty freakin' fast using that experimental system which sent them so far in the first place?
/vague remembrance
Aside from the Heart of Gold.

The Jupiter 2

Jane and her version of spacetravel?

Genki wins the thread.

LUDICROUS SPEED.

'"Ludicrous speed? Sir, we've never gone that fast before. I don't know if this ship can take it!"

if i remember correctly they never really specify any time frame to the space travel in Dune.

<Insert list of ships from super-advanced SciFi verse, like the Culture>

Wh40k: Necron Ships.

I just invented a spaceship called the Fastotron. It's a fictional spaceship that is faster than all other spaceships, and if someone invents a spaceship to be faster than the Fastotron, the Fastotron upgrades its engines to become even faster.

****ing cheater

HAX!

Definately the Event Horizon in my book.

That movie still creeps me out to ****.

Here's an interesting thought; we can't actually directly compare different forms of transportation because as with all things going high speed you can look at it from 2 frames of reference.

For example, say you have the fastest ship that can be built using known physics, one that is shot off by a huge (length measured in AUs) linear accelerator at 99.[some number of nines]% of the speed of light. Because of time dilation, on-board clocks will measure the trip to Alpha Centauri to take only a matter of seconds, whereas an observer on Earth will see it taking about 4.2 years (actually 8.4 years but hopefully they're smart enough to subtract the 4.2 years it takes for any signal to arrive). So you've got 2 different speeds right there, and how do you compare that to something like an Alcubierre warp drive, with which both clocks would measure roughly the same amount of time, but that time could be, say, a month?

Though to be truthful I'm not actually aware of any fiction that uses the "huge linear mass driver" approach to interstellar travel.

(P.S. Yes obviously one of these ships would not be much good without another matching accelerator at the other end to slow it down again.)

Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard K. Morgan have a form of "travel" (data transfer) which is called needlecast. Basically sends your "soul" (kept in a data stack on your Cerebral Cortex) through galaxies in a matter of seconds.

That in mind I'd say the Ansible is faster, and if it could be adapted to the data sending then you're talking traveling anywhere instantly.

The ship from Red Dwarf

The Outrider!! WOOOO SHADOWS OF THE EMPIRE!

OOH! OOH! I KNOW!

The Tardis! FASTEST SHIP EVAR!

The Butlerian Jihad series explains it better.

http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Space_travel

The Millennium Falcon can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

That's right, it's so fast it measures time in units of distance.

Kevin J. Anderson doesn't count. everything he touches dies a horrible, horrible death.

I like those books. >_>

It can arrive somewhere before it even technically left!

...So... Red Dwarf? Or Starbug?

And yes, the TARDIS would actually be it I guess.

Um, didn't we discuss this before? The Kessel Run is measured by how far you travel, not how fast you do it.

It would have to go to the USS Voyager shuttlecraft that was modified to travel at warp 10 -- according to the plot, it could occupy all points in the universe simultaneously. Instant travel from point a to point b.



Umm....The Red Dwarf? It took 3 million years to accelerate to light speed. There was an episode where Holly built a device he called the Holly Hop Drive, which was supposed to transport the vessel back to earth in seconds....didn't work out too well for them.

I would say it worked out great. I mean, babies!

True, the real skill in the Kessel Run is traveling the SHORTEST route, which can be dangerous to use uncharted hyperspace routes.

For a fairly obese geekanerd you sure aren't up on your starwars.

I sentence to you 30 minutes listening to fanboy from Freakazoid.

The Tralfamadorian's space craft. It's just a matter of time.