บท 2549: Catching Up

"If we follow this route, it is challenging to estimate how long it will take to reach the beyonder gate at the end." Major Verle. "The more stops we make along the way, the more time it will take to traverse our route. Our fleet composition also affects our speed. The larger our fleet, the more unwieldy it becomes."

"A group of ships is only as fast as the slowest among the bunch." Ves commented.

"Exactly."

Ves smiled. "It's good that we're getting rid of all of our third-class vessels. Keeping them will only drag our feet."

Third-class ships with cheaper FTL drives couldn't even pass through the gravitic barriers separating star sectors from each other.

Even if they could, their FTL drives possessed shorter ranges, thereby forcing any fleet that included these vessels to undergo more downtime.