# Travelling

There are two categories of transportation that are of interest to the galactic traveller: interstellar transport, and planetary transport.

Planetary transport vary greatly from one world to the next, be it the grand railways of Ȝħarqalin-Wiirèe, getting you most places on the main continent under a day, the relentless aeronautic industry of Telùs-Sol, or the high speed drone taxis which zip in all directions across and between the Lissiya’s arboreal cities. The best way to know how to get around a planet is to ask the locals

Interstellar travel on the other hand is — at least within the members Galactic Cooperation Treaty Organisation — much more codified. Space lanes are cleared of most everything by the organisations to allow for supraluminic travel without risking the structural integrity of the ships[1]. Thus space travel follows the routes of those cleared lanes, as travelling outside the lanes is an activity only reasonable to those who are either thrill-seekers, stupid, owners insanely overkill EM shielding, trying to evade the law, or any combination of the above.

From this you essentially have five options when arriving at the spaceport.

The option most common among the majority of travellers is to hitch a ride on one of many a cargo vessel (most have a handful of cabins spare in the crew quarters), in exchange for a relatively modest sum or some work on the ship during the transit if you have relevant skills. It’s not fast, it’s not the most comfortable, but it will get you around for a minimal price.

If you are travelling a common route, a more comfortable — if a bit more expensive — option is to book a slot in one of the regular line ships that ferry passengers around.

Going up sharply in price, if your origin or destination is hard to reach or if you want the most speed and/or comfort, you can also charter a ship for your trip.

If however you are on the tightest of budgets and even a hitching on a cargo ship is too expensive, some freight companies offer stasis travel. Basically you get into a stasis box, they turn on the box, handle you in your stasis box like normal cargo and they turn off the box when you arrive, subjectively it’s instant, objectively, it’s as fast as the freight company is, which is typically "not fast", also quite nerve wrecking: if you get lost in shipping, well the energy core in the stasis boxes are typically good for a millennia or two, after which you may wake up to a radically different galaxy. If you don’t wake up in the vacuum of space.

Lastly, if you are on are travelling between planets of the United Peoples’ Federation or some of their closest allies, you’ll have the opportunity to use a jump array. For a frankly insultingly low price, you get put into a perfectly tuned wormhole and appear on the other side instantly for you (you are transported within a stasis field, because directly exposing organics to a wormhole has… undesirable effects[2]) and a couple of seconds for the rest of the Universe

1. Also the static charge, hitting a large cloud of gas faster than a couple kilolights is one good way to zap everyone aboard with the electric charge released by the ionisation.↩︎

2. Candidate for "Understatement of the standard galactic orbit"↩︎