I see spaceships, impulse speed, jumpgates, space stations, but i am unsure how they all work, meaning, what's the technology behind it all. Better to not go into too much detail, but at least a believable 'excuse' for things working as they are would make conceptualizing models/effects/gameplay mechanics quite a bit easier.
First it would be best to see what we have so far, and think of ways of expanding on it.
What we have so far, is how space ship propulsion works:
At low speed, a spaceship uses conventional thrusters. They push the ship into any of the six cardinal directions and in combination with the afterburner (w key),
a ship can go up to attack speed, usually around 300 m/sec. Right now, there's no limit on afterburner usage, so you can go full throttle and use the afterburner all the time. The actual maximal speed depends on the ship's engine definitions.
When travelling between objects inside a single star system, ships use the kinetic impulse drive (the tab key). This piece of hardware enables high sub-luminal speed and is probably based on complicated electro-gravity optronics which I leave to the engineers to discuss. The maxmal impulse speed is the same for all ships and is currently 1500 m/sec by default, but can be changed through the g_impulsespeed variable.
Travelling between star systems is a different matter. The laws of physics still won't allow for supra-luminal speeds, fortunatly a handy work-around exists: hyperspace. Hyperspace is this weird thing curled around our space-time, and in some places, you can create extra-dimensional connections (wormholes)
to connect two distant places in normal space to each other. All you need is a hyperspace motivator that is able to bombard local subspace layers with sufficient gravitational energy. The trick if it is, that the destionation is fixed. The hyperspace points can be opened but if you go through them you will always end up in the same place, no matter if you use a jumpgate, or your own ship's jump engines.
Smaller ships do not have sufficient generator capacity to power a hyperspace motivator. Such ships have to rely on jumpgates, which
are basicly large hyperspace motivators, stationed in space.
