When is a capital ship able to use its jump drives?
There is canon evidence (the briefing of The King’s Gambit) that a ship must recharge its jump drive before using it. How long it takes a ship to “re-energize” its drives (as the mission briefing refers to it) appears to vary. The Iceni, for example, was able to use both its inter- and intrasystem jump drives in rapid succession (about 30 seconds) whilst running the GTVA blockade and entering the nebula. In contrast, in The King’s Gambit, the NTF vessels running the blockade take from 60 seconds (an Aeolus class and an Argo class) to one and a half minutes (the GTCv Pax) to jump out. The largest ship, the NTD Uhuru, takes 65 seconds. It appears that large ships cannot use their jump drives to jump in close proximity to a subspace node. This is presumably why pilots are often tasked with escorting ships to a jump node, or preventing an enemy ship from reaching a node; otherwise the ships would simply jump to the node right away. This may also explain, from an in-universe perspective, wh
