Jump Drive

The Jump Drive, also known as the Baron-Palmer transdimensional transportation drive, is the technology that allows for faster than light travel, and thus has become one of the most important technologies to the contiuation of galactic civilization. In short, the Jump Drive projects a bubble of liquid hydrogen around a ship thus creating an area of realspace, and then teleports the ship and the bubble into Jumpspace, an alternate dimension that is, to this day, poorly understood, however, for the purposes of the drive serves as a transitory realm, in effect sending the ship from one point in space to another point in space within roughly a week. To those outside jumpspace, this appears as if a ship teleports with a week long delay between entering jump, and then exiting jump.
The jump drive was first developed by Susanne Baron, and Ellen Palmer in the early 23rd century. After initial probes, the first crewed flight took place in 2202, which was exceptionally successful. Shortly afterwards voyages that had once been planned to use sublight speeds were changed over to jump based travel at a the best possible pace for building and installing jump capable ships. Since then, Jump has been the primary form of travel, with the earliest Baron-Palmer drives being iterated upon, increasing range, improving fuel efficiency, and other modest improvements but not really transformed drastically, except for the possible adoption of the Liu Drive which makes use of Dark Matter rather than the traditional liquid hydrogen fuels. However, on the horizon the next phase of Jump drive technology has begun to arrive, early models of ship equipped with the magnitudinal jump drive (dubbed the 'Hop' Drive) have entered service, with a range literally ten times the equivalent jump drive, this would mark a dramatic increase in travel speeds, however, the Hop Drive has only been successfully implemented by the shipyards of the Utopia system and only on their latest generation of exploration ships, and thus far there is still some debate about whether to expand production of the drive.