Comment on Ship Ranges

Vanessa,

A comment on ship fueling/engine maintenance.

from Fleet Cadet: The old Admiral wished the huge ship could go any faster and glanced over to captain Harris, knowing full well that the ship was already pushing its engines close to the red line. He did not want to push them any further. The mighty Devastator would be of no help if she arrived at a crisis with damaged engines. Thankfully the Attikan Commonwealth was not only part of the Union now, but they had sent a full battle group to Fornax and all ships with the fast Attikan engines, but it would take them month to get there.

The general 5000ly ship range before refueling or engine overhaul seems very short given the ranges at the scale of the galaxy, coupled with other things that are said (like the above passage). Especially when the Devi was supposed to be able to somehow make it to the Fornax Dwarf (a distance of 460 plus/minus 30 thousand lightyears) on its conventional Isah engines (just not soon enough to do any good - they switched to the Celtest engines in order to get there _now_, not because the Isah engines couldn't get them there).

I could see 5000 (or maybe even 500) klightyears being a reasonable maximum for the older hyperjump engines but not the new continuous quasi-space drives.

(putting in the plot holes and typos category simply so you can find this later if you need to)