Jump drive

A jump drive is a speculative method of traveling faster than light (FTL) in science fiction. Related concepts are hyperdrive, warp drive and interstellar teleporter. The key characteristic of a jump drive (as the term is usually used) is that it allows a starship to be instantaneously teleported between two points. A jump drive is supposed to make a spaceship (or any matter) go from one point in space to another point, which may be several light years away, in a single instant. Like time travel, a jump drive is often taken for granted in science fiction, but very few science fiction works talk about the mechanics behind a jump drive. There are vague indications of the involvement of tachyons and the space-time continuum in some works.

Jump drives were used in many science fiction universes for space vehicle movement, initially suggested in The Foundation Series of novels by Isaac Asimov from 1942. In Heinlein's Starman Jones (1953), the characters use a "Horst Transition" to travel instantaneously between spaces that are "flat"; that is, do not have the warping associated with gravity. (Heinlein's Friday novel, published in 1982, uses the same form of jump drive with the same kind of starship.)

Jump drive next appears in the Deathworld 2 novel by Harry Harrison in the 1964 trilogy by the same name, and Frank Herbert's Dune. The CoDominium series by Jerry Pournelle which begun publication in 1973 features the Alderson jump drive. However, their popularity exploded only over a decade later with the Alliance-Union universe series by C. J. Cherryh from 1976. The Traveller role playing game (by Game Designers' Workshop, first edition in 1977) uses something called "jump drives", but they're actually a kind of hyperdrive, with ships using it traveling through "jump space" (the game's term for hyperspace) for about a week, regardless of distance travelled, before re-emerging into normal space.

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