[Official Authorized Wing Commander Confederation Handbook, pp. 56-57]
A jump-ship has three essential components. The first is an Akwende drive itselfe. The drive is usually mounted in the center of the ship, securely braced. The second is a set of fusion engines, for maneuvering to and from jump points. The third is a containment vessel of antiprotons, fuel for the antigraviton generator. Most large ships also carry the equipment to create more antiprotons to recharge the tank, but this isn't strictly necessary.
To begin a journey, the jump ship must first find the jump point. In settled systems, the jump points are carefully charted and tracked—a ship will know what section of space to search, but it must search nevertheless. To find a jump point, the drive is switched on at a very low level, producing a slow trickle of antigravitons. Sensing equipment around the edges of the drive determines where the antigravitons are leading. All jump ships are fitted with this equipment, but most civillian craft can only home in on jump points when they're already within a few hundred thousand kilometers (i.e., they have to know—very exactly by the scale of interstellar space—where the jump point is before they can head for it.) Military or exploration vessels can plot jump points across many millions of kilometers.
Once the location of the point is determined the ship starts its fusion engines and heads towards it. As the ship gets closer to the jump point, the attraction of the antigravitons becomes stronger and stronger. When the ship is close enough to the point that the antigravitons can actually arrive at the point itself before decaying (a distance of about 500 meters), the jump drive starts to produce real thrust, though at this point that thrust is very small.
The ship stops at the edge of the jump area to get a precise bearing on the jump point, including its drift rate. It then kicks in the engines, gets as close as possible to the jump point, and activates the jump drive at full power. The high thrust provided by the jump drive drags the ship to the exact jump point. Once the source of antigravitons coincides with the jump point, an antigraviton field is created with a roughly 500-meter radius. (The radius is a constant, based on the half-life of anti-gravitons.) If the intensity of this field is sufficient based on the mass contained within the field and the speed with which the mass is moving, then everything in the field vanishes at the point of departure and arrives at the point of arrival, keeping all its original momentum.
All parts of the jump-ship must be subjected to roughly the same amount of antigravtion flux. Because of the short lifespan of these particles, this effectively translates into a maximum ship radius of about 500 meters. Since particles have a half-life, this radius is not fiec, and to a certain extent the power of the drive determines the radius of the sphere. Ships bigger in radius than 500 meterstake vastly more power than ones smaller than this threshhold. If a ship is too big for its antigraviton flux, then only the parts that are within the field complete the jump—meaning parts of the ship may be left behind, with possibly disasterous results.
Since the speed of the ship affects the amount of antigravitons required to initiate the jump, a ship can reduce the jump's energy needs by carefully maneuvering to the exact location of the jump point, and matching vectors with the jump point's drift, before turning on the drive. This results in the maximum-energy jump for a given mass, but can take quite some time to achieve. However, for ships that are close to the maximum size, this is the safest way to make a jump.
Each jump draws energy out of the jump line used. This energy is proportional to the energy required to initiate the jump. Thus, a minimum-energy jump takes less energy out of the jump line. Reducing the energy opf a jump line may make it connect to a new destination, or it may disconnect it entirely. When a ship attempts a jump that depletes the line's energy, it will either arrive at the wrong destination, or it will simply disappear. No one knows where ships that vanish this way go; they are presumed destroyed.
When a ship generates more antigraviton energy than it needs for the jump, the excess is dissipated in a vurst of light and neutrinos at each end of the jump. This burst is easily detectable from long range. If the ship takes time to calculate the exact amount of energy required, and is equipped with a "variable-flux" engine," it can make a "stealth" jump, eliminating the flash at both ends. Under normal conditions, ships seldom bother with this; in fact, few civillian ships are even equipped with the gear necessary to calculate the antigraviton flux.
