Why does a jump in Traveller take a week?
The real answer was to make travel times across the Imperium match those of Imperial Rome. A Jump-4 ship following the X-Boat routes matches the travel time of a mounted Roman courier on those wonderful Roman roads.
That's all well and good and inside-baseball, but we need doubletalk the characters can spout!
One caveat to get out of the way right now; I'm a Gamemaster not a theoretical physicist, dammit! Also, this is MY doubletalk for how the jump drive behaves in my Traveller universe. If you like it, fine. Feel free to use it. If you don't like it, fine. Don't let my explanation ruin yours.
What the jump drive does is create a passage between two points in space. "Hyperspace" is a two dimensional shadow of the three dimensional real world. (Actually it's a three dimensional shadow of the four dimensional real world but...)
The gigantic fuel expenditure is because of the massive energy required to create the passage. Better drives can create a "longer" passage and expend more energy to do so. However, the passage is always the same length. Once in this tear in space-time the ship will travel through it to the opposite end. Regardless of the distance traveled, the speed through the passage is the same, one week. A ship creating a jump passage is inexorably drawn through it to its destination.
Misjumps occasionally take longer than a week and often travel much farther than the jump rating of the drive. What Imperial scientists think is happening is the jump tunnel is accidentally intersecting naturally occurring tunnels. State of the art science does not have an explanation that allows the creation of a drive that consistently or predictably takes advantage of what is clearly possible in a misjump, imagine a J-36 drive with J-1 energy expenditures!
In fact, the state of the art in jump science is very much the equivalent of using Newtonian math to get Einsteinian results, you can get pretty close most of the time, but you don't really know why you're answers aren't matching measured reality in many cases.
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