Bistromathic drive

The Bistromathic Drive is a starship Propulsion system in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is introduced in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book of the series.

The Bistromathic Drive is used in Slartibartfast's craft Starship Bistromath and works by exploiting the irrational mathematics that apply to numbers on a waiter's cheque pad and groups of people in restaurants. Life, the Universe and Everything describes bistromathics as follows:

Further explanation of the theory behind bistromathics:

Operations

The bridge instruments of the Starship Bistromath are ensconced in fake wine bottles.

The central computational area is a fake Italian restaurant table with Seating for twelve encased in a glass cage. The table is decked with a faded red and white check tablecloth with mathematically positioned cigarette burns. A group of robot customers sit round the table, attended by robot waiters.

The mathematics play themselves out in the complex interplay between continuously circulating keys, menus, watches, cheque books, credit cards, bill pads and scribblings on paper napkins.

"On a waiter's bill pad," explains Slartibartfast, "numbers dance. Reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible."

Should the ship's captain sit at the table, the mathematical functions speed up; the customers become more vociferous and wave at each other. Eventually, the equation balances, and the customers become polite and civil once more. The more heated the argument, the more complex the equation, and the farther the ship may travel.

Effectively, the ship takes advantage of the strange rules that only restaurants operate under by turning itself into a controlled, artificial restaurant. This allows a ship equipped with a bistromathic drive to accomplish feats quite outside the normal capabilities of spacecraft, such as traveling two thirds across the galactic disk in a matter of seconds. The drive is, while less powerful, far safer and more reliable than the Infinite Improbability Drive.

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