This can be anything from Hyperspace in Star Wars, Warp Drive in Star Trek, travel through the Warp in Warhammer 40k or anything else.
I’ve always liked “slow” FTL travel, where going a few light-years still takes a few days or so. I also really like travel through an alternate dimension like in 40k, Event Horizon, Witchspace in Elite Dangerous.
I wanna know your favorite versions, or do you prefer stories that obey the laws of known physics, like the Expanse or Rimworld?
It’s such that, for an individual booking passage, you’ll spend a week or more on a dropship, half accelerating, half decelerating towards the jumpship, dock, the “jump” is experienced as an unpleasant and disorienting few seconds, and then your dropship undocks and spends another week in flight to another planet.
It’s not the lagrange points; the whole thing about a lagrange point is the significant effects of gravity. It has to be anywhere outside a significant gravity well, typically they use far above/below the ecliptic plane, though if calculated carefully you can get a lot closer into the system.
Or, if you’re Jaime Wolf, you can just jump into low orbit over Luthien “Inside the orbit of our closest moon.” Happens in the second or third book in the Blood Of Kerensky trilogy.
Oh, and further points for Hyper Pulse Generators. So many sci-fi shows depict “supspace radios” or whatever that just let them communicate at whatever bandwidth they want in real time; Captain Picard can just Skype Starfleet Command whenever he wants. In the Battletech universe, the only real stable currency, the C-Bill, is backed by HPG transmitter time. Bandwidth and speed of communication is built into the setting in a way it just isn’t in other franchises.