6 years after beginning the project and on my 40th birthday the planetoid ship was coming to completion the monster of a ship could on its own fight an entire million strong fleet of bug ships and it was so large it had its own gravity field impressive would be the only word you could give it and with tge technological upgrades we had managed we had brought it up from the theta bands of hyper to the gamma bands I should point out from slowest to fastest it goes theta, gamma, delta, beta and lastly alpha each roughly 100% faster than the previous band meaning my planetoid was nolonger tge slowest ship in the galaxy but in real space it was still a slug though I doubt any sane foe would think it was useless.
I decided that I'd command the planetoid and take her on her first cruise and I set the destination as earth because I wanted to see their reactions to this monstrosity of a ship and I was probably more than a little sadistic honestly but I figured the pirates would give it a try and I was almost excited for that possibility. Leaving the shipyard we slowly made our way out system before transitioning to hyper and settled in for a long journey to earth specifically Mars station and aside from some minor systems malfunctioning which were quickly fixed we flew without issue in fact coming out of hyper I realized that we had reached the delta bands of hyper meaning that with sufficient fuel my planetoid could make some serious speed granted it was like driving a train starts astops drained prodigious amounts of fuel while in-between we sipped it and were very efficient for such a massive ship still not something that could be built without the resources of several systems pooled together.
We arrived and found a massive combined fleet waiting for us about 2 million shops all total I figured they saw the massive gravity shadow and assumed a armada of alien ships were arriving to decimate earth but once I sent my greetings I could literally see ships fleeing the area it was comical in a way but not exactly shocking no one wants to stand in the way of such a massive ship after all. I arrived at Mars station and stood off almost an orbit away before sending crews for resupply and R&R it was almost comical how the Sol system treated us like we were a hair trigger from annihilating everyone I mean we could have easily but that wasn't why we came after all and on a random search I found some interesting topics about theoretical ftl drives so I sent invites to every scientist who was currently working on one in the hope that they might join my empire and give me a faster drive system for my new toy.
It was no surprise that almost every scientist I sent an invite to came without question some more interested in the ship but most because I offered to fund their research indefinitely in the hope that they could create a new ftl drive system for us. I was looking over the various research papers the scientists submitted to me and found several interesting ones infact one caught my attention immediately as I knew the ancient ones had something similar and I decided to talk to the scientist who had submitted the article about what he referred to as a jump drive. After getting a meeting with the scientist we sat down and I showed him the footage I had of tge ancient ones using their drive system he was practically foaming at the mouth to get started testing his theories and so I put him to work building a prototype jump sled while resupply was still ongoing infact Mars station had to find several tanker ships to resupply my ships fuel capacity as we couldn't dock normally and required massive amounts of fuel.
Refueling took a week and resupply took 4 days as I'd left without a full load and now restocked and fueled we set off for the Artemis system our home port and main fleet base tge scientist who was working on the jump sled prototype was feverishly working on calculations and an assortment of specifications that he revised time and again until we finally arrived and we launched his test sled and while it worked sort of ot clearly also failed the single jump took the sled 10km instantly however it used double the energy that he calculated it as. After the lone scientist spent 6 months changing his design my millimeters and revising his concepts he reached a dead end so I sent him to discuss his idea with the Wawenog who seemed to always be able to come up with a new spin and direction once we offered a working theory and it was then the scientist a man named Howard Hauge had a breakthrough and he built and tested the first prototype jump drive system that worked exactly as intended granted the range left something to be desired at only 200km but progress was progress.
With a proof of concept working as it should I began adapting it to my massive ship though I had to install an additional 8 reactors and an entirely different processing computer to handle navigation using the system not to mention adding 4k drive nodes around the ship which cut down on all of the extra space I'd added to the design of the ship to begin with so that i could install something like this in the first place. We had tested the jump sled first unmanned then with a pilot and now we were going to test it on the biggest ship in the fleet unfortunately it wasn't feasible on anything smaller than the planetoid ship but it should work and so I brought us to deep space and we made our first jump easily so I ordered the navigation computer to take us to earth space via mini jumping and that was a wild ride it was not smooth in the least but we arrived at earth 1 hour after starting the journey about 2 weeks earlier than any comparable drive system available infact even the alpha bands couldn't match the speed of what I now called the skip drive the best they can achieve is 2 days for the same distance so 1 hour was fantastic.
With the fastest drive in the galaxy we were quite happy and then I looked at fuel consumption and realized that we had used a quarter of the fuel as compared to our original trip so after I had the scientist tweak the ship drive we headed back and his tweeks made the journey less jarring now we didn't feel like we were in a can being violently shaken by a child instead we were on a bumpy road an improvement but still not idea however the surprising thing was by reducing the shaking we had gained a bit more drive efficiency and had taken less than what it took us to get to earth in the first place by 6% and we still had more tweeking to do to get rid of the shaking but now we were faster and more fuel efficient than anything else humanity had created to this point it was fantastic.
Our new drive tested I did learn one thing our entering and exiting skip drive did exert a temporary gravity field on the surrounding area and it had already pulled several asteroids into new orbits unintentionally so I filed that for future reference and set the navigation computer to stay away from objects in space as much as possible. New skip drive tested I decided that it was time to go visit our bug friends with my new ship after we had resupplied and once we were ready I set out towards the direct that tge last bug attacks had come from. The first few new systems we explored proved to be basically empty and then the 9th system into our search we found the jackpot a entire system filled with shipyards hundreds of them granted they also had a few hundred thousand ships in system but I was feeling brave and ballsy so in we went.