FTL Drive

The FTL drive (commonly referred to as FTL) is the only known means of practical interstellar travel. The FTL drive is a jump drive, so the ship disappears from normal space at one point and reappears instantaneously at another point some distance away.

In order to make a jump, a ship must charge its jump coils, a process which can take several hours. Once the coils are charged and the jump coordinates are plotted, the FTL jump is initiated and the coils discharge their energy into subspace. The discharge causes the ship to make the actual jump from point A to point B. All FTL drives since their inception have made jumps of no more than 0.5 light years. Longer trips must be made in a series of 0.5 light year jumps. To date, there is no satisfactory explanation for this and it has simply been accepted as an immutable law of FTL travel.

The main factor that limits FTL travel speed is the time it takes to charge the jump coils. At the founding of the Empire in GY 1, most FTL drives throughout the galaxy took twenty-four hours to charge up, for a whopping half light year per day. While this is obviously much better than having to slog the distance between stars at relativistic speeds, it made it difficult to maintain any sort of interstellar civilization. By the rise of the Empire, though, speeds had doubled to 1 light year/day (taking only twelve hours to charge up between jumps). For the first century, only the Empire had this level of technology, giving them a decided advantage during its early years. Modern FTL drives take only eight hours to charge between jumps, for a speed of 1.5 light years/day.

It should be noted that the Travellers appear to have FTL capabilities far in excess of the rest of the galaxy. During her time in the Royal Guard, Helen I recounted an incident where she encountered a Traveller ship in Tau Ceti that arrived in the system at the same time she was leaving. When Helen arrived in Epsilon Eridani eleven days later, she found that the same Traveller ship had beaten her there by less than a day. Similar accounts have appeared over the years, but the Travellers have steadfastly refused to share any information about their FTL systems. To date, this is the only known area of research in which the Travellers do not insist upon full access and transparency.