Star Citizen · Alpha 4.10 · Size 1 quantum drives
Every drive burns in two acceleration stages up to cruise, then mirrors the same two stages in reverse to decelerate into arrival. Pick a ship to see fuel range cut each drive's line short, and check which drives are actually worth chasing.
Time. Each jump is symmetric: a gentler stage 1 burn from the drive's quantum engage speed up to roughly 37% of its rated top speed, then a harder stage 2 burn to full speed, a constant-velocity cruise, then the same two stages in reverse braking back down on arrival — plus spool-up and a short arrival calibration delay. The curve only bends near the start of a jump; beyond it, time scales linearly with distance. Engage speed is much higher for bigger drives (1.5 km/s at Size 1, 84 km/s at Size 2, 190 km/s at Size 3) since larger ships already need real velocity before a quantum bubble forms. The 37% stage-split was fitted against Size 1's official reference times and is assumed (not separately verified) to carry over to Size 2/3 — treat curves as a close approximation, not the game's exact internal formula.
Range. Each ship carries a fixed quantum fuel tank (in SCU); each drive
burns a fixed SCU-per-Gm rate. A line stops where the tank runs dry
(tank ÷ drive's SCU/Gm), marked with a small square. Fuel rates come from
erkul.games' live component database (fetched directly through a real browser session,
not its API) — a wiki-derived field I originally used turned out to be wrong for several
drives, so this was re-verified drive by drive.
Highlights. Best range marks the most fuel-efficient drive at this size; ties on raw SCU/Gm go to the fastest among them. Craftable marks every drive at this size whose blueprint isn't purchasable outright — it only drops as a mission reward, per scmdb.net's mission/reward database.
Craft quality. Crafting a drive lets you push three stats independently with separate materials: integrity, max speed, and fuel usage. Integrity isn't useful for trip planning so it's left out here. Quality runs 0–1000, but only 500q and up improves a stat above stock — the sliders start there. At 1000q, speed is up to +20% higher and fuel burn up to 20% lower, scaling linearly in between; both apply only to the craftable drives above, independently of each other. This is a community-sourced approximation, not an official curve.
Speed/acceleration/spool/cooldown/engage from the Star Citizen Wiki item database and ship tank sizes from its vehicle database (star-citizen.wiki); fuel consumption from erkul.games' live data comparison tool; blueprint sourcing from scmdb.net. Alpha 4.10 live data.