Was there a discussion about this? To me it seems that differenciating between military and commercial jump drives doesn't add much to the gameplay. So why do we have them in the first place?
No. Steve mentioned a while back that he wasn't thinking about the VB way while coding and simply wrote "civ-civ" and "mil-mil". Later, someone offered the explanation that military jump drives opened a much 'rougher' wormhole and only military engines could handle the stresses of using it -- sort of the equivalent of 'you need a tracked vehicle to get through here' -- to justify the change.
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Basically, we have military & civilian systems because people didn't like micromanaging maintenance for all the support ships an empire needed, and we have civilian vessels ten times the size of military vessels because people looked at container ships & supertankers vs modern frigates & destroyers and decided that was an appropriate ratio. Then we needed civilian jump drives because back then a ship couldn't jump anything larger than itself. And we forbade civilian jump drives from moving military-engined ships so there would be a reason to build military jump ships.
