star drive n.

They’ll know the principles of the star drive in a few more generations, and invent a faster-than-light engine almost at once!

Man’s horizons exploded to the rims of the universe with the perfection of the star drive—he was no longer living on a world but in an inhabited universe.

Even to me—and I've spent my working life making science and technology comprehensible to the man in the street—it was a hell of a job putting the thinking behind that stardrive into everyday language.

Minimal crew quarters are…used by duty engineers and by the star-drive crew.

The voice of the Organic Computer, pieced modulations, snips of the sounds of the voice of a man, began counting down the seconds until star drive was cut, until the three starships ceased their motionless motion, ceased micro-jumping through universes, returned to normal and real space-time.

Low acceleration on ion thrust had built up a modest outward speed, measurable in tens of kilometers per second. It sufficed to start the star-drive engine.

They managed to cope with the damage while staying in warp space. Miraculously, the explosion left their stardrive untouched.

It is the stardrive that issues this light: a ship eats space, and light is its offthrow.

Jakt was getting ready to go back into space…to see whether the original Lusitanian colony ship could possibly be restored for another flight after so many decades without maintenance of the stardrive.

Nobody has any idea what the hell they are, but all kinds of guesses have been made, some of them fairly science fictional. Black holes colliding. Star drives switching on. Wormholes eating galaxies.

Even steaders like me knew the basics of space travel. In order to cross vast distances, you had to use a special stardrive to punch your way through a local Gate. Each Gate only connected to a handful of nearby ones, so voyages could involve a lot of hopping.