Useless fact for today: apparently all these SciFi authors with their ‘FTL drives‘ have been using the wrong word all this time; they should be using ‘superluminal’ (Wikipedia).

The former wording is far more common than the latter, but then the drives are nonexistent, so that’s understandable; if you’ve ever seen any of the pre-sound-barrier-breakage dramatic faster-than-sound movies they do sound a bit weird to modern ears – not to mention the weird theses they presented.

I vaguely remember one that suggested aircraft controls at/above the speed of sound, worked upside-down. I hope nobody ever put that into practice.