Quote Originally Posted by Rythal View Post
well, technically, anything made up of matter cannot reach or go faster than the speed of light. The only thing capable of reaching the speed of light is.... well.... light.
Actually, matter cannot be accelerated to or beyond the speed of light. Who knows what might happen if you could introduce a non-linearity and simply skip that speed entirely?

Back on topic: To pull from another game, the Traveller RPG system has jump drives that always take 7 days (I think, I may be misremembering the details) to transit, and the quality of the drive determines how far the ship can travel in that time. A ship gathers fuel from local gas clouds and gas giant planets between each jump, so jumping to a point with no local fuel gets you stranded.

Also, Traveller has no faster-than-light communication, so information can travel only as fast as the ships themselves, which significantly affects the shape of civilization.

Conversely, Orson Scott Card's Ender novels (initially) have ships that cannot exceed the speed of light, but the Ansible allows instantaneous communication. So by the time a warship arrives at its destination, it is usually no longer needed there.

Most settings, though, use a more conventional combination of the two: FTL ships and instantaneous communication, within certain limitations. Usually a FTL communication relay system of some kind is involved.