Newbie question: What is hyperdrive?

[White Owl (OP)]

Hello everybody.  I just found this fantastic game a few days ago, and am loving it so far.

The tutorials are good.  The wiki is also good.  But they don't cover everything.

I've searched the wiki.  I've searched the FAQ, the tutorial forum, and The Academy, but am unable to find an explanation of hyperdrive.  What is hyperdrive? How is it used?

Maybe I just missed seeing the information somewhere. . .  If so, would somebody be kind enough to direct me?

[Zook]

First of all, whenever you use the search function here, use Advanced Search and select only New Players and Aurora, or you'll be swamped with hundreds of hits from the Fiction fora.

Hyperdrive is pretty pointless at the moment. It allows very fast travel inside a system (not between systems!), but only far away from any strong gravity fields (i.e. stars). It's only use would be for specialized ships traveling in one of those rare giant systems, where planets or binary star systems might be a few dozen billion km away from the jump points. You can safely ignore it until the day when you *absolutely have to* colonize one of those very rare systems.

[White Owl (OP)]

And in a system like that, a better option would be Lagrange-point travel, I imagine.  Okay, that makes sense.  Thanks for the speedy reply.

 

[Zook]

I'm not sure, but there are issues with LP travel. Anyway, I just found a binary system where the only planets are about 90 billion km from the jump point. I suppose I'm never going to survey them.

[Konisforce]

LP travel issues (that I've run into anyway) include commercial traffic that won't path through them.  When you get a colony out there through the LP, you've got freighters bumbling all the way out there at sub light speed and they take forever.

It's on the changelog for 5.7, though.

[White Owl (OP)]

And days later, here's a follow up question.

I just started a new campaign.  My home this time is an interesting binary system, orbited by a second binary system a little over 800 billion km away.  Ordinarily I'd say "screw that" and just ignore the orbiting system. . .  but one of the moons waaay over there is a terrestrial with a breathable atmosphere.  It's a little warm, but definitely liveable.  I'm having visions of a potentially impregnable manufacturing base in my own home system!

So I built a hyperdrive-capable survey buggy and sent him on his way.  In a few years he'll arrive and have a look around.

The question: is hyperdrive supposed to use no fuel, or is this a bug?

[phil]

Hyperdrive on = *10 to the ships speed
But it uses the same quantity of fuel