Stardrive

From SGCommand

"Look, the city, as you know, is just a giant spaceship with a stardrive capable of faster than light travel..."

—Rodney McKay

The stardrive is the form of faster-than-light travel utilized by Ancient and Asuran city-ships.

City-ships, being spaceships in-and-of themselves, possess their own fully-functioning sublight engine and hyperdrive. The stardrive allows a city-ship travel to other planets, and even distant galaxies, in only a matter of days. The stardrive requires an incredibly large amount of power to be exerted at once, and so can usually only be activated if there are at least 2 Zero Point Modules powering a city. This can be subverted, however, such as when Dr. McKay and Colonel Sheppard powered the stardrive of Atlantis using only one ZPM, with the drilling platform supplying a little more power to get it in the air, though they dropped out of hyperspace far too early due to damage incured prior to raising the shield. The hyperdrive itself requires very little power, and the greatest amount of power expenditure is used to power up the inertial dampeners and lift the multi-million ton city off of a planet's surface prior to achieving escape velocity. Due to the fact that city-ships do not possess hulls in the traditional sense, they instead have to rely on the shield to contain the atmosphere needed for its occupants; the shield also protects a city-ship and its occupants from the dangers of space flight and atmospheric entry. (ATL: "Rising", "The Siege", "The Tower", "The Return", "First Strike")