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I had not remembered, but early in the film, the crew gets into chambers prior to deceleration. The chief hurries up the men, asking them rhetorically, "Ya wanna bounce through this one?"

I think this is very sophisticated for 1956 and I am betting not only is this the first film that has a special procedure for the transition below the speed of light (and perhaps the same sort of thing when the ship is preparing to accelerate) but also the only film for at least a decade which has this sort of thing. Star Trek does of course distinguish between warp and sub-light but can't think of any other film/tv show that does between 1956 and STOS.

The Wikipedia article says this is the first film in which humans create an FTL ship, but I guess in whatever film (can't think of what that film would be) has a FTL alien ship there could be details as in FP.

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    +1 It really strikes me as drawing parallels to the shockwave at crossing the sound barrier.
    – Lexible
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 17:23
  • yes, something happens at the speed of sound although i do not know if what happens when you drop below Mach 1 is felt as shaking or in fact the absence of something like shaking..
    – releseabe
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 18:05
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    The speed of sound is the speed at which the air molecules can't get out of the way of the plane. The only problem with traveling from faster than the speed of sound to lower than the speed of sound is the transition. The lifting and the control surface are different for the different speeds.
    – NomadMaker
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 18:46
  • I don't recall TOS saying there was any kind of transition effect. It was just that a different type of propulsion was used -- impulse versus warp. The movies introduced the sling-shot visual effect when going into warp.
    – Barmar
    Commented Jun 14, 2022 at 16:12

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The 1955 film This Island Earth has a very similar system (i.e. transparent tubes, likely taking advantage of the relatively recent availability of large sheets of clear acrylic) in Exeter's ship to protect against the accelerations of both entering and leaving FTL. This ship was created by aliens, of course; humans didn't yet have any kind of space flight.

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  • Thanks. I had not recalled that from This Island Earth. BTW, from this and other things, the MST3K had not business ridiculing TIE and I do not think their attempt really worked. If TIE had been made with modern special effects (and maybe it will be remade) I think it would be one heck of a film.
    – releseabe
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 11:26
  • Another thing about TIE is they tried to portray modern human technology accurately -- all the wonders came from the aliens. This is in contrast to, for examples, both Outer Limits and Twilight Zone which would throw in random futuristic tech that somehow existed in the early 1960s and this tech was often not even central to the main story.
    – releseabe
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 13:20
  • @Releseabe was that futuristic technology shown in stories set in the early 1960s, or were those stories set in a distant future which just happened to mostly look like the early 1960s due to the expense of creating futuristic settings? Only dates spoken or seen during the episodes can prove thier fictional dates.
    – M. A. Golding
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 14:21
  • @M.A.Golding: Although it is normal in tv shows to avoid the date, TZ was the exception, mentioning the year as being 1964 or whatever. Outer Limits may have also used the date occasionally. It was the rare episode that by the clothing people wore or the cars they drove that it was implied it was happening in the distant future or the future at all. I really think it was meant that the episode was occurring in the present in the majority of episodes. Interestingly, LBJ was mentioned in a TZ filmed in 1962, a year before he became president.
    – releseabe
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 16:37

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