Jump to Lightspeed basics

The Jump to Lightspeed expansion introduces a host of new concepts and content to Star Wars Galaxies. Space combat, much like its ground counterpart, involves a wide variety of equations and abilities that directly affect your succes when flying. Though touted for its emphasis on T gameplay, players certainly benefit from understanding the basics underneath their pilot abilities, ship performance, droid routines, and component effectiveness.

Droid Routines
One novel feature of JTL is your ability to interact with your ship's astromech (or flight computer) to tweak various parts of your ship's performance. These tweaks can perform a variety of tasks, from reinforcing your shields with weapon energy to overloading your engine to provide higher output.

Execution time
All droid routines have an inherent "level" which reflects where in a Pilot tree the routine is granted. Routines provided at the first box in each Pilot profession's Droid branch have a level of 1; routines at the final box have a level of 4, with other routines falling logically between 1 and 4. This level is used along with your droid interface's speed to determine the amount of time it takes for your droid to finish a particular routine. This time is as follows:



Time is expressed in seconds. Note that the routine specified is executed immediately; if you run Moderate Front Shield Reinforcement, you will immediately see your front shield strength increase. The time merely specifies how long you must wait before executing another routine.

There are a few execptions to this rule, however. The Emergency Shields routines run in three times your interface speed seconds (3 * speed). All "overload" routines take five times your interface speed seconds to execute (5 * speed).

Astromech levels
As you progress through your pilot tree, you will gain access to more sophisticated astromech computers. These computers are rated on a level from 1 to 6 that reflects the amount of storage they possess for saving droid routines. These amounts are as listed: Higher-level astromechs do not execute routines faster; only a faster droid interface will speed your routines.
 * Level 1: 20
 * Level 2: 40
 * Level 3: 70
 * Level 4: 110
 * Level 5: 125
 * Level 6: 150

Data size
Your astromech droid (or flight computer), depending on its level, has a limited amount of routine data it can hold. Each droid routine has a data size that specifies exactly how much of your astromech's memory it occupies when loaded. Generally, routines have data sizes of 5, 10, 20, and 40, for levels 1-4 respectively, though exceptions do exist. These numbers are listed on each Pilot profession page, as well as individual routine pages.