The standard interstellar ship is the tetrascoper, capable of navigating Deep Four. Pentascopers, ships that fly Deep Five, are not generally used for travel within the Empire, as the brevity of perceived travel time makes overshooting one's goal a very real danger. Pentascopers are used by planet hunters and intergalactic traders. With a pentascoper, travel time to the Andromeda Galaxy is a little over two imperial years, with perceived time of about a minute. Travel to Andromeda by tetrascoper is not considered feasible because the two years perceived time spent downleveled causes insanity in humans.

Imperial ships contract spacetime by rearranging the patterns of the matter composing them and their cargo into a form that can be acted upon by Deep-level forces.

Travel via transway, chronon-twistor, or other spacetime-reweaving system is instantaneous (or even faster) between system nodes, but these nodes must be built in interstellar space, and travel from a planetary spaceport plus wait time in the queue for the target zone, will usually take several days.