I think the main reason FTL travel has been overlooked is that realism usually implies that one's plausible denial shouldn't be severely strained.

Personally, I think FTL will be possible because I don't hold the view of material objectivism that 90% of hard scientists hold. In effect, material objectivism says that there exists seperate independent physical objects which exist within space/time. I happen to be a monistic idealist which basically means that there is only one fundamental thing in reality....consciousness. Everything that we think is real, independent, material (or energy) stuff is nothing but a concept. If you can, imagine the Matrix in reverse. Instead of imagining that your empirical senses (a materialist paradigm) determine reality by being fed artificial data from a machine, instead imagine that there is a mind (and only a mind...no body) that creates all sensory data and the concept of a body that is affected by that sensory data. By holding to a idealistic ontology, you are freed from space/time constraints because there is only consciousness (and indeed, only one consciousness because what is seemingly seperate is an illusion). In a way, we are ghosts in the machine....programs of the mind, which is why I like to think of it as xirtaM, the Matrix backwards.

We don't even need to go so far as wormholes to consider an FTL possibility. If David Bohm's holographic universe theory is correct, then what we think of as space isn't really space. Quantum physics has basically put a nail in the coffin at the quantum level that things are local. However, as some mathematicians and physicists have tried to show, quantum indeterminism extends to the macro world. In Bohm's theory, the universe that we see is the explicate level of reality, but there is also an implicate level. Just as if you cut a hologram in two, you don't get a left half of the hologram and a right half, instead you get two pictures of the original hologram. The universe, he suggests works on the same principle. In a hologram, every point contains information about every point, and Bohm suggests that the Universe operates in the same manner...every point in the Universe is tangled in an implicate way with every point in the Universe.

What this means in effect is that every point in the universe is non-locally connected to every point in the universe. Of course, I say the word point...but really, there's no such thing, because there's no such thing as space. And space is merely the distance between two points. Ditto for time...time can only be measured by two points in time...if there is only one thing, there can't be time.

There's other quantum theories out there like Goswami's Transcendental realm which could account for FTL travel or even the Many-Worlds interpretation. While the Orthodox (or Copenhagen) interpretation is considered the "authentic" interpretation, it is by no means the only one, or even the correct one. But going from what could theoretically possible (these interpretations are all at war with one another) to actually being able to use it are another thing. For example, in my game world, I posited the ability to tap into the Zero Energy field. This is a verified to exist thing (the Casimir effect uses it) but physicists are currently unable to determine how much energy it holds or more importantly, how to tap into it. So it exists, we just don't know how to use it.

I read somewhere that good science fiction should only break one law of reality (that we are currently aware of). If it does more than that, then its fantasy. So FTL travel is definitely a possibility, but currently it does require more plausible denial than if it's not used. Hence hard sci-fi usually tends to ignore it because it tries to remain as believable as possible given what is not just possible, but what is likely.

dauntless - You make some good points, although I personally disagree with your general philosophy and some of what you wrote was a little over my head. I'll amend/clarify my previous statements a little: 1)Not only does good science fiction not break any currently known laws of the universe, it also does not make up too many new ones. 2) I did not intend to imply that the warp drive or worm-holes that I mentioned earlier are the only, best, most plausible, most interesting, etc. methods that could be included in a game that would allow FTL; I was only giving some examples in order to make my point that FTL is overlooked, despite the fact that it could be incorporated into a "realistic" space game (as long as it was set sufficiently far in the future. For an actual game, it would probably be nice if one could replace these ideas with something more creative.

Have you seen site projectrho.com?
There is nice discusion about detection in space. And several nice pictures from old comixes and books.