From 3I history, max jump distance is strictly limited by Tech Level. At the time of the First Interstellar War, the Ziru Sirka (First Imperium) and the Solomani Confederation were strictly limited to Jump-2. Cramming big jump drives into small ships just didn't matter.

The Terran development of the J-3 drive was one of the daggers in the heart of the First Imperium.

On Sun, Oct 6, 2019 at 12:18 PM Cian Witherspoon <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

Looking at the LBB gives an interesting perspective, since the “standard” drives in there don’t have a TL limit on potential (just a cap of J6), but do have one on drive size. This means that you can take the highest potential JN and multiply it by that hull size/100 to create a “real potential range” number for that particular drive model (or just divide tonnage by 100 and multiply by jump number if you’re doing this for individual ships), and then divide that by the actual hull size you’re installing the drive in to get that configurations jump number.

You can also do this for M-drives, to get tons of thrust for a drive model.

High Guard introduced “Jump potential by TL”, but it sort of implies, in the context of HG vs LBB2, that this applies only to custom military jump drives.

Looking at Tom’s example, j4 for 400 tons would be potential 16, and when installed in a 300 ton hull would give J5.33.