Talk:From the Ashes 3
Space Travel (obsolete)
The Grid is arguably the single greatest work of human esoteric physics, 'burning' easily-accessible interstellar travel routes into the hyperstructure of space itself. While the slow movement of the stars has degraded this ancient work over the last forty thousand years, most connections still exist, albeit not always as passable as they once were.
Actually traveling along a 'tramline' (a term derived from pre-space Human mass transit) is easy, so much so that jump drives are built by post-Open Palm sophonts that are under the mistaken impression that the Grid's tramlines are a natural phenomenon. In the heyday of the Federation jump drives could be built small enough that they could easily be installed on family-sized runabouts and shuttles, though today much of this miniaturization is lost. Even so, almost anything big enough to be considered a 'ship' as opposed to 'shuttle' can and does carry a jump drive today.
Tramlines are classed on two metrics; Quality and Span. Quality is a measure of how easily a ship can jump along a tramline and, by extension, how sophisticated/well-built a jump drive must be in order to use it. Quality is rated in one of three values; Stable (1), Degraded (2), Highly Degraded (3). Span is a measure of the maximum mass that can be comfortably pushed along a tramline in a single jump. Span may be Unlimited (U), Cruiser (C.) or Escort (E). Tramlines are often notated by a Classification system where 1 represents Stable and 3 Highly Degraded - so a Stable Unlimited span would be U1, the most accessible possible, while Class E3 would be the least accessible.
The 'penalty' to using lower-quality tramlines is a reduction in effective span. A degraded tramline reduces its effective span by 1 level, while highly degraded reduces it by 2 levels, to a minimum of escort equivalent. Higher-grade ships mount higher grade jump drives, better able to travel along less-than-stable tramlines. TL5 ships may ignore one level of penalty due to lower-quality tramlines, while TL6 ships may ignore 2 levels. TL4 ignores no penalty, and TL3 adds one, effectively treating all lines as degraded one step. For example, a Degraded Cruiser (Class C2) span could be traversed by a TL5 Cruiser, but a Heavily Degraded Cruiser (Class C3) span would be impassable to a TL5 Cruiser. Heavily Degraded Escort (Class E3) Spans are impassable to anything other than a TL6 Frigate (the distortion of multiple escort ships at once makes transit unsafe so escort divisions can’t transit). Higher-quality jump drives do not, however, compensate for small-span tramlines.
These simple factors combine to shape the astrogeography and space strategy of the 83rd millennium.
Jump gates do not have quality (they are effectively always Stable), but they do have span - maybe you only want (or have the money for) an escort-span jump gate!