BTW, The Aurora code/rules evolved from a game called Starfire (SF). Although Aurora at present has about the same relationship to Starfire as modern man does to Lucy (or even less), one thing that has survived are the concepts of inertialess drives, jump points (also called warp points), and surveying for jump points. If you're familiar with SF, then that might give you a little bit of "aha".
And there's also a very concrete relationship to science fiction books - David Weber (who wrote a huge part of the 3rd edition rules for SF) and Steve White wrote a series of novels set in the universe of a SF campaign - this was essentially the beginning of DW's sci-fi carreer.
As an example of the relationship, Steve recently put a feature into Aurora (that I like very much, btw) that jump points show up gradually as you survey a system. At the time, IIRC, he said it was motivated by a scene from one of the SF novels (The Shiva Option, IIRC).
John
EDIT/PS - BTW, if you want to read the SF books, they're sold by Baen (publishing, which has a lot of military SF (Science Fiction, not StarFire) authors). The correct order to read them is Crusade, In Death Ground, The Shiva Option, and Insurrection (although Insurrection was actually the first one written). They're collected in a pair of omnibus editions from Baen called The Stars at War I & II, along with some additional material that's not found in the stand-alone novels (at least for Insurrection). Steve White also wrote a follow-on book a year or two ago that takes place after Insurrection, but I don't remember its name.