In Swords of the Stars, each race has its own unique FTL (Faster Than Light) Drive technology. FTL drives are used during the Strategic Turn when fleet movement takes place. Because the races' FTL drives are unique, each race has a sligltly different gameplay when moving fleets.
Human Node drives
When traveling among the stars, humans take advantage of the phenomena of nodes. Nodes are essencially tunnels, allowing for FTL travel between two systems via node space. A limiting factor to human node drives is that two adjacent stars arent guarunteed to have a node between them. If no node exists between two stars, Humans must either find another path to the star via other nodes, or use slow sub-light engines to navigate normal space.
Tarka Warp drives
The Takar utilise Warpdrives that warp space around them. When warping, the Tarka achieve relatively constant FTL speeds. Gameplay wise, the Tarka Warpdrive is the most basic drive, unafected by proximity to planets, fleet size, or nodes.
Liir Stutterwarp drives
The Liir Stutterwarp drive moves the ship by blinking out of existance, then blinking back into existance closer to its destination. The distance between each blink is shorter the closer the Liir vesel is to a system. In gameplay, this causes Liir to move slowest next to planets and fastest inbetween 2 systems.
Hiver Gate Technology
Hivers do not use a FTL drive in a traditional sense. When traveling between planets, the Hiver must resort to sub-light engines. Once they arive, however, the Hivers will deploy a specialized gate ship. These gates allow instantanous travel between any two, no matter the distance. However, only a limited number of ships can use the gate network in one turn. This number is increased every gate that is deployed, and can be further boosted with reaserch in the gate technology from the stardrives tree
Zuul Ripperdrive
Similar to Humans, Zuul use nodes to travel between systems and resort to sub-light when nodes aren't present, but the similaraties end there. The Zuul cannot use existing nodes the Humans use [needs confirmation.] Instead, the Zuul use dedicated Ripper ships to tear a node between systems. Because these nodes aren't naturally occuring, they are inherently unstable. If a Ripper ship does not travel down the node again, the node will close over time, trapping any ships in transit in node space.
Morrigi Voidcutter drive
The Morrigi use Void cutting technology. When traveling long distances, a Morrigi ship, called the Voidcutter, will cut into the Void, achieving FTL. The Voidcutter most dedicate large amounts of its power to mantain FTL, and leaves very little power for propulsion. When other Morrigi ships join the Voidcutter, they do not need to spend the amounts of energy the Voidcutter does for FTL, leaving them to accelerate the fleet forward with traditional propulsion. In gameplay, the Morrigi move the slowest as individual ships, but can achieve blinding speeds in massive fleets.