Science Fiction

Mine would be "The RiverWorld" novels by Philip José Farmer...

Starship 3000

As I remember it, it was a terribly written book about a colony on the moon with a water ocean, and an asteroid hollowed out to be a seed ship to travel the stars and colonize planets.

The first half of the book was the colony on the moon part, and it went into the physics of an ocean with very low gravity, and how massive the waves get as a result. That part was cool.

And the asteroid seed ship was also very cool, it was described as being an entire ecosystem with hundreds of square miles of earth-like terrain, with small towns sprinkled all over the place.

But the writing was so hard to follow. It was all abstract, pronouns and names were hardly used enough to keep track of what was being talked about. Reviews for the book follow a similar pattern.

I've had a mind to make game about the asteroid seed ship because I feel like the concept hasn't been done justice.

In my own made up worlds I often imagine FTL works by moving between the 2nd and 3rd dimensions. 3D is “flattened” in such a way that point A (where you start) and point B (where you want to be) are at the same point of the now 2D universe. During the transition back to 3D, points A and B go back to their original positions, but you are now at point B.

In Michael Crichton's Timeline, they send people back in time hundreds of years until they push a button to return, except they don't. The time travel has something to do with alternate timelines, so in theory there could be countless versions of them travelling back and forth in alternate universes or alternate realities or however you want to think of it.

The invention of time travel in our universe only got as far as figuring out how to send people back, but they never figured out how to return them to the present. Coincidentally a virtually identical alternate universe figured it out but they get sent to our universe on the way back to the present.

So every time we send someone back, we essentially kill them and in return we receive an alternate version of them that's so close to identical it's virtually the same as the original person. And for every person we get back, another universe loses that person forever. The organisation doing the time travel secretly know this is happening, but it works and it's cheaper then finishing the invention of time travel.

I forget which series it was from, but people could communicate long space diatances by whispering in a semiconscious telepathic beings ear and another being on the other end would speak the words.

Also the explanation of the inertia drive in the BattleField Eath book was interesting. Instead of a propulsion system the engine moved space coordinates of the matter in the engine and the engine/ship had to shunt forward to match the new position.

Yours sounds somewhat like Foundation series has their intergalactic travel. At least in part.

I cant pick just one but since you mentioned Conjoiner drives (rev space is my all time favorite series) I would say that the cryoarithmetic engine is super crazy. They popped up in Star Sector as well, I'm guessing as one of the many SF references in that game. If you like good SF games that have a ton of depth, check Star Sector out. You can purchase it from the website directly, it doesnt mess around with third party bs or drm software or anything.