Research cost on jumpdrives

[Count Sessine (OP)]

Hi all

I just discovered that a military jumpdrive that open a wormhole for 25.000 ton ships cost more than 40.000 research points! Has this always been the case? I seem to remember it used to cost a lot less. I realise that I can bring the cost down researching jumpdrive efficiency, but still.. very strategic choice in that case

[Hawkeye]

Try to first research a few levels of jump drive efficiency. This will benefit you in two ways.
1) Your jumpdrives will be significantly smaller, leaving more mass for other stuff and being cheaper to build too.
2) Developing (researching) the actual jumpdrive will be significantly cheaper in terms of researchpoints.

[Brian Neumann]

The problem is that the cost of the jump drive is based on the cost of the background tech used times the total size of the engine.  This means that while a jump engine that has an will move 5 hull spaces for each space used by the engine is more expensive than one that only gets 3 per hull space of engine, the total cost for a given capacity engine is going to be lower the higher your engine efficincy is.  I strongly recommend not building any jump engines untill you get an efficiency of at least 4 (4000 rp project) if not 5 (8000 rp project)  These are relitivly low cost to reasearch and will have a dramatic effect on the cost to both reasearch the specific engines (prototypeing) and building them into ships.

Brian