I've just been playing now for 1 day and am still finding my way around. It is taking ages to get to some planets on max impulse, is there warp drive available and if so how do I use it?

You don;t understand space travel do you? If you were getting between planets at impulse it would take decades if not centuries you are travelling with warp drive. Just be thankful it is taking you about 10 seconds to travel a lightyear instead of about 5 years

Cheers, I guess I'll get used to it eventually.

When in sector space, you ARE traveling at Warp. The higher tier ship you have, the faster your warp speed is.

When you are traveling within a system (like approaching a star base or a planet), you are traveling at impulse. When not in combat, you can mark full impulse for maximum speed. Any combat knocks you out of full impulse.

You can make your ship go faster by buying (or looting) better impulse engines in this case.

** below is just for fun **

Please note i'm notoriously bad at math so If i'm terribly wrong, let me know.

If I recall right, Voyager was 70 light years away from home and marked the most direct route feasible to get home.

As stated in End Game, I believe it took Voyager 30 years to get home (in the original timeline, not the time travel).

Even though they did take side trips they always made it a point to keep going towards home.

If my math is correct, and with some rounding, we can deduce that Voyager traveled approximately 2.5 light years per year.

That is, 70 light years / 30 years = 2.3. I round to 2.5.

So I can't say it would take 5 years to travel 1 light year in cannon

Well, some of the underlying physical concepts of the game are a bit off. I'm an astrophysicist and I've been a Star Trek fan forever.

Without Warp Speed it would take hundreds of years to go a couple of light years.

Warp speed gets around this limitation and you are supposedly always at Warp speed (unless you are completely stopped) in sector space. Even at high warp speed (many many multiples of the speed of light), it should take even longer to go from system to system. ALOT longer, but this is a game, and while they *could* make this instantaneous this *is* an MMO and would be super super super expensive to make enough interactive content without making you wait for some of it. Even WoW has huuuge waits. It's just part of the experience, just like farming, and grinding through leveling missions (like enemy signal contact)

70 thousand light years...

as you level and rank up, your warp drive increases gradually. I think when you first start, you're doing Warp 7.5 or so at max speed. If you keep your mouse cursor over the throttle slider, it'll show you what speed you're doing.

thanks guys, thats really helpful