Interstellar civilization depends on three methods of faster-than-light travel: jump drives, interstellar gates, and void drives. Their different capabilities shape commerce, warfare, exploration, and the connections between distant societies. A journey may combine several methods with ordinary spaceflight.
Jump drives briefly create a wormhole between a vessel and a chosen destination. They are the most widely accessible form of FTL technology and commonly the first developed by emerging interstellar civilizations.
Range depends on the vessel’s mass, power output, and energy storage. Larger ships require more energy to transport, but can generally accommodate the reactors and storage systems needed for much longer jumps. Fighter-sized craft usually lack jump drives; those equipped with them typically cover distances measured in light-months, up to about one light-year. Huge capital ships can jump as far as 150 light-years at a time.
This advantage makes carriers valuable. Smaller vessels can dock with a carrier, land on or inside it, or attach themselves externally to travel within its jump field. Their mass becomes part of the carrier’s transported load.
Jump drives store energy in large capacitors, usually charged by fusion reactors. Recharging normally takes between twenty-four hours and a week, depending on the installation and available power.
Both wormhole endpoints must be clear of major gravity wells. Ships commonly burn above or below a system’s principal orbital plane, toward its zenith or nadir, to reach suitable departure positions. The destination must meet the same gravity restrictions.
The wormhole first forms at the drive. During this initial opening, the vessel’s sensors can observe the destination through it, allowing subtle adjustments to avoid obstacles. Detection of a possible collision or unsafe gravitational influence causes the drive to cancel the jump.
Once cleared, the field expands around the entire vessel and pulls it through. Everyone aboard experiences a violent forward lurch lasting approximately one second. Occupants must be strapped in and loose objects secured.
From outside, the departing ship appears engulfed in a heat shimmer before being rapidly sucked forward and disappearing. At its destination, space briefly distorts and the vessel appears. Its existing motion carries through, with an additional forward velocity of one ship-length per second: a 100-metre vessel gains 100 metres per second.
Interstellar gates are paired megastructures connecting established endpoints across distances of up to 2,500 light-years. They provide fixed routes through which vessels can travel without making the journey through repeated jumps.
A gate aperture can remain open for up to roughly thirty minutes, allowing substantial traffic, including entire fleets, to pass through. These connections are strategically important: a functioning gate can place distant territories within practical reach of one another and greatly reduce the time required to move people, goods, and military forces.
The Net’hret use existing gate routes but do not build interstellar gates. Access to paired endpoints does not confer the means to establish new ones.
Enormous artifacts are sometimes encountered within wormholes. Their builders, purposes and relation to any particular class of wormhole remain unknown. Speculative accounts attribute them to the Gyx, the leading probable candidate for the theoretical Ascendant civilization tier. The artifacts have not confirmed that attribution or the proposed nature of their makers.
A Void Drive combines advanced engineering with High Magic. A circle of trained mages harnesses Void potential and shapes it into the negative energy required to sustain a warp bubble around the ship.
The drive contracts space ahead of the bubble and expands it behind. This distortion carries the vessel across interstellar distances without requiring it to accelerate locally through the speed of light. The ship remains in material spacetime throughout the journey.
Operation requires sustained concentration from the mage circle. Deliberate interaction with the Veil carries the hazards of High Magic, including uncontrolled energy release, Void Corruption, and damage to the boundary separating material reality from the Void.
Void Drives offer flexible routing independent of fixed gate connections. Their operators are confined to Net’hret factions, pirates and cultists. Pirate crews value freedom from fixed infrastructure, while Net’hret factions combine Void Drives with jump ships and existing gate routes. Rare expertise and the hazards of sustained Veil interaction limit the technology's use.
Void Engineers are Void-Touched specialists with nearly ten Cycles of higher education in engineering and the physical sciences alongside trained High Magic. They maintain the complex machinery and its interface with the mage circle. An appropriately trained engineer may participate in the circle; the drive still requires sustained magical support.
Complete understanding of a machine's components and their interactions also permits instantaneous magical restoration. Missing parts, raw stock and surviving remnants are unnecessary when the engineer has sufficient knowledge and magical capability. Reconstructing a complex or wholly destroyed mechanism is far more demanding than repairing a familiar component. The same expertise can serve ordinary propulsion, reactors and industrial machinery.
FTL travel still involves ordinary spaceflight. Ships must reach suitable departure positions, approach destinations, rendezvous, and adjust their trajectories. Most use advanced ion engines powered by fusion-generated electricity.
There is no inertial dampening technology. Occupants experience the actual local accelerations of their vessel, so maneuvers must respect their tolerances. Antigravity can reduce the weight of eligible ship structure, but engines must still provide thrust and manage momentum.
Access to carriers, gates, trained mages, and sufficient generating capacity can therefore matter as much as distance when planning an interstellar journey.