How long will crossing a star system, or traversing to another one altogether, take?

Estimates have varied, but in general for a typical star system, you're probably looking at somewhere in the range of roughly 8 to 10 minutes to cross the diameter. Now that said, there is the spool up time, and so basically covering 10% of a solar system may take considerably more than 10% of 8 to 10 minutes, because you need to engage it, you need to exit it, and then you actually have the transit time. While you're doing quantum travel, you have free control to wander around your ship, but you can't interact with the external environment. There's no combat during quantum travel or anything like that. Another point of interest on the, well, actually, I guess I shouldn't get into that since we get into that a little bit later. But going back to the jump gate travel, it requires quite a bit more dexterity than quantum travel, in regards to you're not just lining up with some concentric rings trying to keep your ship pointing in the right direction for a period of time and then engaging. Jump gate travel, you're actually trying to follow a twisting, turning path through these wormholes. Another thing that was only recently added is basically the concept of rating the wormholes according to classes. And what this will allow us to do is basically have wormholes that will allow ships of a certain size or ships of a particular level of maneuverability to cross from system A to system B very quickly. Whereas a larger freighter that can't fit through it or doesn't have the level of maneuverability necessary to actually make the maneuvers necessary, it's going to have to take a much more circuitous route through multiple wormholes to get to the same place.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily say jump gate, a wormhole, but think of them as sort of mountain passes. So some mountain passes are narrow and treacherous, and you can't go take a big truck up through the mountain pass, but maybe you can do it on foot, and some passes would be big and wide, and you could have big heavy equipment go through. So that's the same idea with the various wormholes and jump points around the galaxy, is that they're rated between different levels. I think we're sort of talking about three levels. So there's the kind of cap ship level, which is the biggest. There's the sort of medium level, which would be the sort of multi-crew ship, kind of a Freelancer or a Constellation. [And there's] the level that would be for very small craft. And the idea is that, say we call the small craft level class one, and class two would be the medium, and class three would be the heavy ones. So the class one jump points a lot of times will provide a route that can get to a destination quicker. So, for instance, as Tony said, if you want to go to Sol from, I don't know, some other system, there may be a class one jump point that gets you directly there. But that's actually really sort of treacherous and only a small ship can go. If you've got heavy cargo and you've got to get the cargo there, you may actually have to take a class three jump to another system, another class three jump to a system closest to Sol, and then finally the final jump to Sol. So what that ends up doing is, there's reasons why, for instance, if you're a trader, maybe you're running a small ship because you've got perishable goods or something that has to get there quickly, whereas if you're transporting bulk goods, then maybe you take the slower route. So it's not too dissimilar to what would happen with sort of freight: you can air freight it, or you can put it on a ship, which is obviously slow, but you can move a lot of stuff at the same time. So that's kind of the idea with the jump gates, is they're sort of different sizes. There are also different levels of stability. So some of the jump gates will be less stable. So in the case of the design, all the jump points, they're slowly going to go out of phase. Some will go out of phase quicker than other ones. And what that means is there will always be jobs for people that are basically navigators. So one of the jobs we're thinking about is you go through a jump point, through the wormhole, and your job is to map it again. And so what happens is if I've bought the nav data from, say, the UEE navigation guild or whatever it would be, then I have the route that I would take through this jump point that would show up on my HUD, and it would show me which [...]. [Otherwise] I don't have any hints of where to turn, which way to duck around the corner and all the rest of the stuff as you fly. And you'll kind of see what I'm talking about when we show something at the end of today. And so the idea is that you, as a navigator, would potentially have a job: you're good at flying these things, you've got great reactions, you fly it, you map it, you get paid for it, and you're constantly keeping the nav data up to date for everyone else that's subscribed to get the nav data from this sort of UEE navigation guild. And then when you've got the nav data already, then it's sort of giving you the hints. So in all cases, probably, flying a jump point requires you to fly it. It's not 100% automatic, but it's either flying it in easy mode, where it's showing you where you need to go, [or] hard mode, where you don't have any hints and you've got to have good reactions.

And we'd also talked a little bit about the concept of being able to fail a jump. In other words, what happens specifically when you go a little bit outside of the boundaries within which you're supposed to be sticking. And where we kind of wound up gravitating towards is we didn't like the idea of basically making it such that if you wind up failing the jump, your ship is destroyed. And so where we wound up going was more, depending upon how much of the jump you've already traversed, that's going to largely dictate where you wind up. In other words, if I made it through 90% of the jump to a particular system and then I miss one of the curves at the end and I get kicked out prematurely, I'm still going to likely be thrown into that system, but I'm going to take a bit of damage as a result. If I only made it 10% of the way through that jump, then I'm probably going to get thrown right back into the system I came from, and my ship's going to have taken some damage along the way.