Interplanetary travel can be accomplished in many ways.  Solar sails are slower, yet cost effective allowing speeds of up to 150,000 mph.  Additionally, these sails cannot be deployed in atmosphere, forcing ships who wish to enter them to utilize a secondary source of propulsion and guidance.  Faster, yet far less cost effective long term, is travel by kinetic energy.  This requires vast amounts of fuel, which must be maintained on a regular basis.  These craft can breach speeds of 350,000 mph.  The third, is radial propulsion, or plasma, which are expensive to create but cheap to maintain.  These ships are also the fastest, allowing for speeds of up to 750,000 mph.  

Though this may seem expedient, the galaxy is an inconceivably massive place.  Thus, the need for even faster travel is required.  The primary method of accomplishing this is via hyperdrives.  These do not interact with the ships main engines, but instead, are separate devices entirely.  This said, many funnel this energy through shared vents with the ship's engines which often gives the illusion that the two are one in the same, based on a given ship's design.  Hyperdrives, like engines, range in speed.  The slowest of which just breach light speed (670,616,629 mph), while the fastest are able to travel at over 150x that rate. 

Still, this speed only goes so far in a galaxy.  With star systems no less than couple of lightyears apart, another design was discovered.  Their origins unknown, there are several portals which have been discovered in the known universe.  These portals open up channels in space time to allow for much faster passage from one place to the next.  Though, one must take care in utilizing these methods of travel too frequently.  For what one gains in expediency, can sometimes be lost in time...

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Hyper-speed Mechanics: Deciding to breach lightspeed is not something that should be done on a whim. The course you plot should be considered, even if being utilized to escape combat. The individual plotting the course will need to roll successful intelligence rolls to determine whether or not that charted route is safe. This can be done over the course of no less than 3 turns, depending on the rolls, as priming the engines for such a feat takes time. Embarking on a hyperdrive jump without a successfully plotted course can be done, should the player choose. However, choosing to do this is quite literally, a gamble with the lives of everyone aboard the vessel.