' Wrote:Jump Drives are far from prototypes. Travel before jump gates was done primarily by Jump Drives that moves a ship at an extreme speed for small distances. They were extremely delicate, and a malfunctioning jump drive could cause an entire ship to explode.
Jump Gates were developed by the Coalition right after the betrayal that was the Balma Treaty. They were used in tandem with cloaking devices, also developed by the Coalition, to move truckloads of small fighters and bombers within Alliance Defensive Lines and obliterate them from behind. In essence, Jump Gates have formed what Freelancer is today.
The first Jump Gates weren't nearly as powerful as the ones of Freelancer. In Starlancer, the one you encountered was only capable of opening a small worm-hole from Venus to Saturn.
After a while, the Alliance managed to develop personal jump gates onto their ships that were capable of moving a ship from planet to planet via worm-hole. It wasn't as great as Jump Gates, but they worked really well in comparison to Jump Drives, which were only capable of functioning for very small lapses of time...
Every ship is capable of being equipped with a Jump Drive. They're fun little devices that are implemented right inside the engines. Fun little things, they are. Fun little things......
You know, I've been doing some timing and quick number crunching (not very accurate due to freelancers horrible scaling) and I think that cruise engines are almost as fast if not faster than the old jump drives.
But what happened to the warp drives? hundreds of years latter you'd think they would of optimized on the technologies. (A conspiracy by the makers of trade lanes anyone?)
