Warp Drive
In-Game
The Warp Drive is a feature of nearly every ship in the game (the main exception being all Fighter-class ships) that allows them to travel in one direction at a very fast speed. The Warp Drive is activated by pressing the button 'V' on your keyboard or by clicking on the warp button. The Warp Drive will begin charging once the warp button is pressed or the 'V' key is pressed on your keyboard. A UI will then appear telling you how much it has charged. You must first know how far you wish to travel and then press 'V' again once the charge level reaches that distance. Your ship will then accelerate at a very fast rate in the direction you were pointing for the distance that you chose. During this state of warping, ships cannot fire turrets or spinals, change direction, or stop short of the set warp distance. After being used, the Warp Drive will be deactivated for a cooldown period that varies with how far you traveled. There is an indicator just above the movement panel to tell you the status of your warp drive. The maximum distance you can warp is 410,000 studs, so you can easily cross the 225,000 x 225,000 stud map.
How it theoretically works
A warp drive engine uses matter in the form of deuterium and antimatter to mutually annihilate them together in a fusion reaction which is mediated by dilithium crystals. This chemical reaction produces enormous amounts of energy to warp space-time itself using warp field generators to push the ship beyond unimaginable speeds. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive
Trivia
- One of the older iterations of the Warp Drive used to function as a sort of “bubble warp”. A player would charge up their warp drive for only a few moments, and charge through space at a speed of 7000 studs per second; while in warp, the user would not take any damage from turrets or spinals.
- In Alpha, different ships had varying warp acceleration speeds and maximum warp speeds. This often lead to larger ships being much more vulnerable in early-warp states.
- During certain phases of Alpha, ships had the ability to fire turrets during warp, leading to strategies such as "warp sieges." Players often used smaller, heavily armed ships such as the Grievion to maximize the effectiveness of this strategy.
- In the past, warp cooldowns could reach absurdly high amounts on low-end devices due to movement glitches. This was mostly fixed in a later update when Rcouret set a maximum cooldown limit.
- Miner-class ships used to be largely without warp drives. The original exception to this was the Harvester, making it a valuable tool in Alpha versions of Galaxy. All Miner-class ships later gained warp drives.