System Drive

Used interchangably (albeit incorrectly) with the term System Ships, instrastellar system drives are a modifed main propulsion system utilized on ships to travel vast distances within star systems without actually implementing a spike drill. Spike drives are heavy, expensive and costly in the terms of a ship's power and resources. After the creation of the spike drive, it became an almost regulatory practice to restrict the number of ships equipped with spike drives to only those that absolutely need to travel between star systems. Vessels such as rock hoppers, planetary shuttles, mining vessles, slowboat carriers and more don't need to travel between systems and so are only equipped with system drives.
Unlike spike drives, which drill into meta-dimensional space as a way of circumventing the natural laws that restrict faster than light travel, system drives propel a vessel at speeds approaching lightspeed that allow them to cross the vast distances of solar systems in as little time as six to forty-eight hours depending on relative distance. System drives use pretech equipment know as a Gelman Field Actuator that creates a field of meta-dimensional energy field around the vessel that keeps the occupants safe from the incredible speeds the system drive propels the vessel at. Addtionally, the the energy field emitted from the GFA ripples throughout the systems and distorts local spacetime effectively negating the effects of general relativity and time dialation.
Unlike spike drives, system drives don't require additional fuel on top of the power provided by the ship's reactor. As long as a ship's reactor is kept fueld and in good repair, the system drive could be used indefinitely requiring only occasional maintenance efforts itself. As the paladium based fuel of a spike drive is costly to replace, modern spike drives have been designed with an alternative funtionality mode that allows them to serve as a system drive when travelling around the system, even using components of the spike drive itself to create a Gelman Field.