Maintaining a civilisation spread across many star systems and vast gaps of interstellar distance requires the ability to travel faster than the speed of light. There are two well-known methods of breaking the lightspeed barrier, and only one that is widely understood. There are also some more esoteric or theoretical technologies that may be able to break the lightspeed barrier or allow for long-distance travel, but these are nowhere near as well-developed as the primary two methods.

Warp Drives have been in use in one form or another for thousands of years - indeed they were the primary method of expansion and power projection for each of the four Factions that dominate the Orion Sphere. Warp Drives function by manipulating the fabric of space-time in a bubble around the starship using the drive. The emitted bubble's shape creates a compression wave effect in the front of the ship, and an expansion eddy behind it, propelling the ship forward along the surface of spacetime itself, while preserving normal spatial conditions inside the bubble.

Warp drives of one variant or another have been invented several times, by most early Faction powers as well as several other smaller powers. One of the earliest known drives was said to be the Ikunkuma Shunt Drive, although

Initial designs of warp drive developed by the Polity of Sol (the precursor to the Terran Ascendancy) used exotic particles harvested from the Sol star, circulating within complex spiral-shaped magnetic bottles to project their reality manipulation field. Designs since then have branched off into several different methods, and speed and efficiency has improved drastically. The core material for the drives are still typically these exotic stellar particles, which are emitted by most main-sequence stars. Specialised collectors on most starships collect and store these particles when close to a star to power their warp drives, and running out is rarely an issue for most starships operating in standard parameters.

Modern warp drives are capable of tremendous speeds, and are now mostly limited by the size of the vessel. There is a relationship between the size and mass of a vessel that requires a larger and larger drive to obtain very high speeds. While a small personnel transport can attain speeds of 25,000 times the speed of light © with only 10% of its volume being occupied by the drive, a vessel the size of a large warship would need to be over 50% drive to attain the same speed. As a result, larger freighters and military vessels are typically fitted with slower, but more space and power-efficient drives, while smaller, faster ships are used for time-sensitive assignments. As such, a fast vessel can cross a single sector (1000 light-years) in a few days, while larger ships might take over a month.

Within a star system, the effects of stellar gravity and particle emissions constrains Warp Drive speeds, as they interfere with the formation of a stable warp bubble.

Piloting a ship at warp speed requires concentration and attention, as machine detection systems cannot “see” outside the warp bubble. Micrometeors and other small objects are usually dealt with via a ship's energy shielding, but large stellar bodies must be navigated around. Light does pass through the compression fringe, and although it is highly distorted, it is possible to apply optical means to allow a pilot to perceive phenomena such as rogue planets and star systems that could intrude upon the warp corridor. A good pilot can pick up the distorted light signals emitted by an object thousands of years in its past and extrapolate them to a current position, allowing them to change heading to avoid the hazard.