I always had the charming idea of having the concept in Traveller of ships entering Jump for extended periods while the crews slept in low berths, rather than have Jump activate for exactly one week maximum.
The Great Rift would not seem so daunting, nor would it be an impossible barrier to travel, if even a Jump-1 ship could cross distances of more than one parsec in a single Jump.
So what if the destination world was a Jump-4 away with no worlds in between? That Jump-1 ship could still make it in a single Jump, but it would take 4 weeks with all passengers and crew in stasis, compared to a fortnight in a Jump-2 ship, or the one week a fast Jump-4 ship would take. And Jump-6 would become a reliable means of intersector travel - hop on the Jump-6 at one terminus and the J6 bus would take you to any sector you like on its year-long route.
I imagined that all Jump ships in the 3I setting were capable of that, but that most humans had this loathing of low sleep and preferred short Jumps to local destinations, playing it safe. Scouts and other explorers, on the other hand, were psychologically conditioned - or came with the natural psychological gift already - to withstand cold sleep for such extended periods, and could happily endure a couple of months in stasis, say, while their scout ships crossed those vast distances. This was what I envisaged for the Zhodani Core Expeditions - Zhodani explorers spending up to a year at a time in low berths in their Jump-5 explorer ships, crossing distances of 200+ parsecs at a time in single Jumps.
And I've adored the idea of the Quantum II Jump capable of crossing intergalactic distances since I first read The Centauri Device by M John Harrison. Not to mention the 600G Quantum II M-drives and inertial dampers - the idea of which I kind of borrowed from the Outsiders' and Puppetteers' vessels in Larry Niven's Known Space stories including Ringworld.
Not to mention my abiding love of Vorlon ships, and Moya and Lexx, among other Big Damn Object type living spacecraft with semi-organic hulls.
It sounds as if Mongoose needs to play catchup and come up with a supplement containing more of the kinds of technologies covered in T5. I'm ready for those kinds of sf adventures again - the exploration and discovery of unknown worlds, not warfare and more warfare.
