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Originally Posted by khorboth
Start with the feeling and themes of the setting and then decide what kinds of spaceships exist there.
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I completely agree, and this is how I design my star drives.
Lawmen of Borlo needed a setting where world about a resource rush could reach population centers quickly and then take a decently long time for people to get there, but it still made sense to have the galaxy sparsely seeded with settlements. I used a jump-drive system that could make extremely long jumps, but with a low degree of accuracy (a 20,000 ly jump had a 25% margin of error). Smaller jumps had better accuracy. I think each jump took about a week. Jumping to around exceptionally large stars/black holes let you get better accuracy, and the solar system had built a hideously expensive artificial anomaly that gave a similar performance boost. We never actually went to space, but the basics of the system came up a bunch, because they determined what resources where and weren't available.
I've got a setting I played a couple of games in about exploring the stars with a stardrive for the first time. I used warp drives with speeds from around 5c to 100c, depending on circumstance. I had "roads" of space that were "easier to warp", and an alien civilization built around those. Every new world was a big deal, and each voyage was a big deal... which was the point, because it was an exploration game.
I've got an expansive space empire setting I hope to play with soon, where I'm trying to do a kitchen sink treatment. Its FTL connects different pockets of time and space via a jump drive with jump points that are sensitive to time, and they may be open hourly or maybe only every six months. This lets me present isolated networks of "territory" that have a given culture. And cut off areas if they prove to be problematic, or tell the PC's they only have to stall the invaders for two months instead of defeating them.
Dreadstormers uses Jump drives with a 5 day lapse and take two jumps to get between close systems. I needed time for the players to take over the ship, and the travel time is their clock. I also am using jump drive like traveller because the ship was designed for a "everything is on fire" scenario, and I wanted an excuse to fill the ship with flamable hydrogen bricks. And to make the machinery involved as troublesome as possible, so we have a spinning jump core, capacitors to dump energy into it, and plasma emmiters to flood hyperspace with hydrogen to inflate the bubble of reality.
Space Boarders I never answered those questions for. The players didn't drive ships, they boarded them violently.
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So, I created an FTL drive where objective (outside the ship) travel speed was measured in hundreds of times the speed of light. Then, I had subjective (inside the ship) travel speed stuck at speed-of-light.
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Ok, that's cool and unique. Well done.