Ndtyhij

I'm curious as to which work of science fiction can lay claim to furthest distance travelled in one trip by non-Wormhole, non-space shortening, non-teleportation means. So stuff like Q or the Traveller zapping the Enterprise somewhere; or the TARDIS' ability travel to any point in the Universe do not count.

I'm looking for the furthest distance travelled by a craft on one mission allowing for Hyperspace and other FTL.

To get a better idea of what I'm talking about I'll give this example:

In Stargate Universe, in the pilot, it's stated that Destiny, the main ship in the series, has travelled a vague distance of "Several billion light years from home (Earth)". The ship has been for 50 million years utilising an unknown form of FTL.

I want to know about voyages that trump that vague distance.

In Diaspora by Greg Egan, the protagonists discover that our universe is effectively contained in a sub-atomic particle in another higher universe (it’s actually more complicated than that), which is itself contained in a subatomic particle in a universe that’s higher still, and repeat for ever. They manage to navigate up the chain billions of times. Any movement they make at the top level covers a distance that’s inconceivably vast at our level —- just at the second level up, walking across a room means travelling trillions of times the width of our whole universe, and as I say, they repeat the process billions of times. Disapora is pretty well always the answer to questions about what’s the biggest anything in a work of science fiction.

Probably Tao Zero by Poul Anderson.

According to Wikipedia, eventually they end up going billions of light-years in "moments" of their proper time.

They basically keep on accelerating, and fly through the Big Crunch (which is the following universe's Big Bang), and fly for several billion light years after that. So how far they go depends on how long it is until the Big Crunch. Given that science at the time that Poul Anderson wrote this thought the Big Crunch was over 50 billion years away (and possibly well over), the distance they traveled was at least 60 billion light years, and possibly much more.

I expect that a very great distance was reached returning to Earth in The Skylark of Valeron by E.E. Smith.

After chasing their enemies a vast distance in interstellar space in Skylark Three, our heroes are attacked by a more deadly foe and face destruction. They use equipment aboard the Skylark Three to send their smaller ship Skylark Two into another dimensions to escape. Returning to our own universe an unknown distance away in Skylark Two They eventually have to build the Death Star sized spaceship Skylark of Valeron to hold the giant telescope equivalent necessary to find the Milky Way galaxy.

The Skylark of Valeron has to be over a hundred kilomters in diameter to hold the turning circles for their giant super advanced telescope equivalent, despite the turning circles having many angle markings per inch. With 39,370.1 inches per kilometer, and minimum diameter of 100 kilometers, and the circumference being 3.14159 times the diameter, there are at least 12,368,471 inches on the circumference of the turning circles. So a degree of angle on the turning circles would be 34356.863 inches, a minute of angle would be 572.61438 inches, and a second of angle would be 9.543573 inches, so if there are 104.78255 marks per inch there are 1,000 per arc second and the measuring ability is to 0.001 arc second.

Anyway, you'll have to read The Skylark of Valeron to get the actual figures and decide if they travel a billion light years back to our galaxy, or ten billion, or a hundred billion, or whatever.