Star Traders

When the destination was reached, the entire crew would be landed on the planet, leaving the ships in space, to be used again when the feeling hit the population to split and again head into space in search of another world to populate. This happened when the population of a world reached a point of disagreement just short of world warfare. The dissidents would be invited to leave. It had been so for hundreds of millions of years. It worked for them. Usually that point was reached when about a billion people populated the planet.

The Dran never did discover the faster than light drive. They did, however, discover the faster than light communications system early on in their expansion. Thus they had relatively fast communications with the far reaches of their empire. It was that technology that led the team headed by Eric the Elder to discover the FTL drive. He used the Dran communications technology and followed that lead somewhat further along and discovered Hyperlink. They could now send their ships along the same lines as the FTL radio used. In fact, they could follow the same direction used by that radio to determine where and in what direction to go. They just followed the “telephone” lines! The Dran had actually done most of the work for them. One had to physically go to the destination point in order to set up the line. Measurements as to the velocity of these worlds in space necessitated a close study to get the identification correct. Once set up, communications were then continuous. And so the link was there for the Hyperlink ships to follow. As long as one had the right identification number, a ship could follow that line just as well as the radio communications. Unfortunately even the communication was limited to about 100 lights years per hour.