Okay, so we have two things here:
1.Interstellar travel - it was never meant to be stated during intro because this AAR starts with Earth as known today (short of reduced population and conspiracy theories turning out to be true, of course). There couldn't be any mention of FTL travel at the start because at the start of the story such thing doesn't exist, so who could've said how this will look like back in 2021?
But as for how this works? Well, I thought I explained this, but I can do it once again if you find this insufficient:
a) First four systems explored were by interstellar sub-light, conventional probes. Of course gameplay-wise I started jumping with jump-capable ship, but for the story I wanted more smooth transition from solar to interstellar scale.
b) In the story so far there are two means to go superluminal:
-alcubierre drive - this is a theoretically proposed warp drive, you can find some info online, there's some science for it to be found so it's not pure fiction hence I went with that as the "most realistic FTL drive theory to date". Works by enclosing the ship within a bubble of regular space and then pushes it through by contracting the space in front and expanding behind, effectively shortening the road. I'm not a physicists, so in the AAR preferred to just leave it saying "it works".
Of course with warp drive you can go wherever you want which clashes with aurora lore of jump points, but as you've probably noticed, I don't like aurora lore hence I threw it all away, replaced with different stuff. So while gameplay wise I'm still limited to jump network, however story-wise I just go with "it just happened that this is where humanity chose to go next", no jump points involved.
Another thing are stable jps, these could easily be translated into creating wormholes to link stars and having wormhole network as an alternate mean of FTL travel. So stablising jps in this AAR is simply building a wormhole for instant travel between the stars without a warp drive.
2. Terraforming - if I remember correctly I explained it on Mars' example - installations sucking out CO2 to bearable levels, greenhouse gasses to melt ice sheets and pumping some more water vapour to keep liquid water spreading (so pretty much standard aurora stuff execpt wihout the magic of Aether gasses and all that high-fantasy weirdness), then there was introduction of first species and establishing a magnetic field (plus waiting for the absorbed radiation to cleanse after protection from magnetic field was in place). I decided that Mars alone will do and later didn't bother with going into details for each world as for each world it'd be the same - atmosphere setup and warming or cooling, liquid water and first species introduction, magnetic field establishment if needed.
Also, a small tl;dr: regarding intro how my universe works: at the start of the game it works like real world with the only exceptions of decimated population, world government, mircochips and Nibiru aka Planet X. There's nothing more to it at the start. It's the history of humanity. New things are discovered as human race pushes forward and only then it'll be explained. Interstellar travel is irrelevant before first human vessels reach other systems.
