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Getting Around

Every space writer has to make a critical choice in their writing life whether or not to allow FTL travel. We currently have no way to beat the speed of light, and books would get reeeeeallly booooring if they were NOT “road trip” books and it still took forever to get anywhere fun. So throughout fiction, writers have come up with some creative hacks to work around the whole space-time speed limit thing. In the Star Empire, we have Jumpgates.

Jumpgates exist in almost every orbit. These ancient artifacts from a long-gone alien culture operate by opening temporary stable wormholes into “Jumpspace” between two gates, allowing short-term travel through folded space that cuts the sublight travel speeds of months (or even years) down to minutes and hours.

Interplanetary Speed Limits

In the Star Empire, travel can still take days or even weeks between orbits. As with everything in a marginally capitalist society, adding credits to the engines can shave time off your trip. Still, there are some hard limits even credits can’t buy you out of. In space, there’s still traffic. In the worlds of the Jewel, Jumpgate Traffic Control keeps things in order by queueing up vessels for entry into Jumpspace. It takes coordination and planning to get to where you’re going. Ships are required to log their travel plans with JTC. Routes are ranked in order of total travel time, number of jumps, and time in Jumpsace. Depending on your ship’s characteristics, choosing a route to your destination may involve more jumps and less travel time, or it may involve fewer jumps and more time in Jumpspace. 

 

 

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