Manual:Interstellar travel
Manual:Insystem travel | Manual | Manual:Targeting |
For the history and theory of interstellar travel, jump drives and wormholes, please refer to scientific literature. Here, we discuss the basics and mechanics of how to travel between the stars.
To initiate interstellar travel, a ship requires a jump drive. Jump drives use gravitic technology to access a singularity formed between two previously weakened points in the space-time continuum, joining the two points in interstellar space. These singularities (commonly named wormholes) connect one point in one solar system, permanently to another point in another system. Certain wormholes are rumored to randomly connect two points at random times.
Once a wormhole has been discovered and mapped, it is marked on star charts as a targetable point. An inactive wormhole appears as a wire-frame disk in your HUD. An active, stable wormhole appears as a red whirlpool, while an unstable, random destination wormhole is multi-colored (ED: this feature currently disabled).
You may target and approach any such wormhole. Where your ship is jump drive equipped, and you are close enough to an active wormhole, a blue JUMP indicator will appear in your upper centre HUD. This indicates that you may activate your jump drive [j], open a wormhole and fly through to your destination system. For best results, approach the wormhole directly, not from its side.
Final Note: your starting ship is not equipped with a jump drive at start of play. As such, you are only capable of in system travel. You will need to acquire a jump drive to travel between the stars.