Perhaps the most esoteric of drives in this section, the wormhole drive opens up a shortcut through time and space between two points, allowing the ship to simply cross the threshold. What makes these drives unique is that they allow a certain volume of ship to make transit, rather than a certain tonnage. This difference leads to a very different approach for FTL vessels, one that places an emphasis on a ship's density rather than its mass.

In some settings, it may take time to transit the wormhole; in others, a wormhole drive might require a “cool-down” period. Alternately, the high power or fuel costs of these drives might serve as a barrier to rapid use.

For every cubic meter of starship that is to use the wormhole, the wormhole drive will weigh 0.75 kilograms. However, the smallest possible wormhole drive is typically 750 kilograms, for a 1,000 cubic meter vessel. The wormhole drive occupies one cubic meter for every 100 cubic meters of starship, but this can be halved if the drive is installed externally. The typical problems of external installation apply—the drive cannot be maintained or repaired without landing the ship or going EVA. However, a very large advantage to an external drive exists: the wormhole manifests well outside the ship, and can allow a different ship—possibly even multiple different ships—to make transit!

The wormhole drive is one of the lowest in cost, at ₠30 per cubic meter of starship.

The wormhole drive requires 640 MWs per cubic meter of starship to activate, making it rather power-thirsty. This will typically require capacitors in order to deliver that much power.

If your setting instead uses an exotic fuel for its FTL system, you will need to burn 10kg of fuel for every cubic meter of ship making transit.

“If the calculations are off, we could end up light years away from our intended destination… or worse, stuck in fold space.” – Captain Bruno Global, Macross

As mentioned above, wormhole drives might allow instantaneous transit, or they might take time to cross. As a rule of thumb, the standard 4 parsecs per jump can apply.

If you want to take greater advantage of the system's granularity, however, you could calculate a “jump rating” equal to four times the cubic meter rating of the wormhole drive. Then, when actually performing a transit, divide the jump rating by the total cubage of all ships making transit to determine the maximum jump range.