Our first starships were spindly, fragile things. They were a slender needle nearly five hundred meters long designed to pierce the wall between normalspace and hyperspace. Fuel tanks and crew quarters surrounded the central spindle with little room for anything else. Even the engines were weak things barely strong enough to push them through hyperspace. And so the early starships never left the gravitic rivers that linked our stars together. They simply did not have enough power to try another route.