Jack of Harts

The first Gateway Run passed through twelve star systems. Alcyone is approximately three hundred and seventy lightyears from Earth, but we traveled nearly six hundred lightyears on the crisscrossing route we were forced to use. A War Era American warship with a top-of-the-line hyperdrive could maintain an average effective speed of over fifteen hundred times the speed of light, and make the entire trip in as few as one hundred thirty or forty days. Assuming ideal hyperspace conditions. Hyperspace is never ideal, so it was not uncommon for transits to take one hundred fifty, or even two hundred days. Slower civilian transports could take a year or more to travel that route, one way. But that represented the best we could do at the time, and many smaller transport corporations made their entire living by sending ships into Peloran space and bringing back anything they were willing to trade with us. One never knew what minor knickknack the Peloran had forgotten was important and hung on a wall because it was pretty. We revolutionized entire fields of manufacturing and science on the back of those knickknacks. And most of them came to Earth on The Gateway Run.