MFTL+: Is It Too Broad?

[Flashlight237]

I have seen various feats of speed that are rated at MFTL+, most recently one that is 1 trillion times the speed of light: See Here

I even did a couple myself with feats that are worth 80 million times the speed of light and 10 billion times the speed of light: https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:Flashlight237/Sinistar_Calcs

Death Battle even shows feats of traveling across the universe in seconds as being quarillions or quintillions of times the speed of light (most notably in Heracles vs Sun Wukong, but there are others)

It makes me wonder... Despite the speed page's assurances, is MFTL+ too broad?

Let's look at the minimum for it 1000x the speed of light is equivalent to traveling from here to Alpha Centauri in 37.2555 hours. Unless a time frame is specifically stated, I'm fairly certain that visible time frames last a lot shorter than 37 hours. At the same time, using this as a reference, you can get from Earth to Pluto in around 25 seconds: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/plutofact.html

To cross the Heliopause, which is done at 119 AU, you would need to go almost a single minute.

By comparison, various Star Trek warp factor estimates have reached thousands of c and one even millions of c: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Warp_factor

Do note that the distances linked reach into intergalactic territory while the minimum for MFTL+ in our wiki is, at best, just leaving the solar system. Our systems tend to go for ratings matching interstellar, galactic, intergalactic, and universal ratings.

But then, what constitutes reasonable travel distances? Should we go off a real-life work commute? Should we go off seconds of travel like fiction tends to do? Hmm... Let's use both for the sake of discussion.

Let's pretend that our hypothetical new speed ratings are "Interstellar," "Galactic," "Intergalactic," and "Universal." Here are our distances for such:

Light Year (reference): 9460730472580.8 km; 9460730472580800 meters

Interstellar: 4.25 light years (rule-of-thumb distance from Earth to Alpha-Centauri); 4.020810451*10^16 meters
Galactic: 43700 light years (radius of the milky way); 4.134339217*10^20 meters
Intergalactic: 2.5 million light years (distance from the Milky Way to the Andromeda Galaxy); 2.365182618*10^22 meters
Universal: 46.5 billion light years (radius of the observable universe; should be good enough to match Sun Wukong's universal leap); 4.39923967*10^26 meters

According to the census bureau, the average one-way commute to work is 27.6 minutes or 1656 seconds: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-travel-time-to-work-rises.html

For work commute ratings, I can estimate our hypothetical speed ratings based on travel distances as the following:

Interstellar: 4.020810451*10^16/1656=2.428025635*10^13 m/s; 80990.21739c
Galactic: 4.134339217*10^20/1656=2.496581652*10^17 m/s; 832770000c
Intergalactic: 2.365182618*10^22/1656=1.428250373*10^19 m/s; 4.764130435*10^10c
Universal: 4.39923967*10^26/1656=2.656545694*10^23 m/s; 8.861282609*10^14c

For more fiction-based ratings (let's assume 10 seconds since fictional showings tend to be <10 seconds), I can gather the following:

Interstellar: 4.020810451*10^15 m/s; 13411980c
Galactic: 4.134339217*10^19 m/s; 1.37906712*10^11c
Intergalactic: 2.365182618*10^21 m/s; 7.8894*10^12c
Universal: 4.39923967*10^25 m/s; 1.4674284*10^17c

Those are my estimates. No, I didn't pull the numbers for the hypothetical speed ratings out of my arse; these are names and range guidelines from our own Range article, so I can get some additional validity points out of this ordeal. I would've included the Virgo Supercluster in this list under the name "Sub-Universal" (since superclusters are basically the largest thing that aren't the universe itself), but uh, who cares about that really?

The main reason I bring this up? Well, it was either I bring this up, or someone's going to bring it up in 2035 when the vagueness of the MFTL+ rating would actually be a major issue, and I'd rather swat it before that happens. And no, I don't think adding a "MFTL++" rating like an Outskirts Battledome user is exactly a solution. So yeah, there's that.

 

[Testarossa002]

I don't disagree with the intent but I do hold issue with the nomenclature
Our speed ratings convey a general idea of how fast they are, relative to some real world constant
SUBsonic - below sound speed
HYPERsonic - above sound speed
SUB-relativistic - below light speed
FTL - Faster than light speed
and so on
Interstellar/galactic speed doesn't really convey the idea of the speed ratings like those aforementioned
Unfortunately, I don't have any suitable alternatives

 

[Saqphire]

Yeah I also disagree with the naming of the hypothetical new tiers.

My proposal would be to follow the theme but change the word to something considered in the English lexicon to be bigger than "massive", like for example "enormous" for speeds that reach the millions and the billions

Massively FTL
Massively FTL+
Enormously FTL - Speeds as fast or faster than one million times the speed of light
Enormously FTL+ - Speeds as fast or faster than one billion times the speed of light

 

[CloverDragon03]

I think this exact kind of proposal was made before and it was rejected

 

[Psychomaster35]

I will admit that it can be difficult to keep track of how exactly fast an MFTL+ character is in speed, which was why I was having the thought that the MFTL+ rating should be separated into new tiers to differentiate these types of characters especially when you have some absurd speed feats like these three here, for example. Though like Clover said, that proposal ended up being rejected for being too time-consuming to implement IIRC.