The Primary Means of Faster Than Light Travel in The American Privateer, the equation behind it was discovered at the University of Tokyo in 2033. For a century, it baffled scientists due to the massive power requirements needed to conduct it, until the first successful test in 2157.
It was later discovered, that use of a Subspace Capacitor would result in the drive failing to halt the Universal Translocation Effect used by the vessel, and thus transfer the entire vessel into a separate universe.
The first test run of the Tesseract Drive was conducted in 2050 on Mare Tranquillitatis. The attempt was a disaster, as expected, leaving the crew compartment stranded in Lacus Mortis. Any information they may have been able to obtain from the jump was destroyed in the early stages of the 2050 Fracture War, when a Chinese Communist Remnant force that had been smuggled onto the Moon where able to launch an Anti-Craft missile and destroy the cabin.
Commander Sam Mertz and his Co-Pilot Lieutenant Jason Strongarm where both killed in the strike.
The second recorded test took place in 2103, with a proscribed course over a distance of 100 thousand miles in length, and resulted in the ship traveling backwards in time, and obtaining samples of thousands of DNA from the Cretaceous Period.
These Genetic Samples where later used to begin the colonization of Venus following it's successful Terraforming.
Standard Operating Procedure in The American Privateer requires all vessels conducting a Tesseract Jump to deactivate their Subspace Capacitors. This is due to the rather porous nature of Subspace when it comes to Quantum Phoam.
When a Subspace Capacitor is active, it forces upon miniature wormholes inside the magnetic bottle. Drawing it's power from them, it is able to feed a Titan Class Vessel for numerous world makings.
The problem is though, that the Subspace Capacitor winds up keeping the Quantum Tunnel through which the "Fax" is sent open long enough that instead of the wormhole curving back on itself and the ship being re-created inside the same universe it left, the ship travels completely to another Universe, arriving at it's location in that universe.
Tesseract Drives do not work well in locations where the Gravitational Forces are prone to shifting, due to the need of relatively precise Gravimetric Information to plot the destination point of the jump.
Attempts to jump into unstable Gravimetric Fields or Black Hole strength fields, will result in the failure of the Jump Window to form, and the ship will not jump.
Another major limitation is Jumping from inside of a station. Jump Windows have a habit of pulling everything within their relatively large Event Horizons into the tunnel and thus to the destination.
For this reason, Tesseract Drives have restrictive systems that prevent jumps in spaces with less than three hundred klicks in diameter. This can only be overridden in Fleet Commands, by linking the Drive Comps of all ships in the fleet to open up a Joint Jump Window that will thrust all ships through at the same time.
Attempts to jump into battle directly are strongly advised against. When the ships first arrive, they are vulnerable for up to six seconds as the ships transfer power back over to the Subspace Capacitor, and re-power their shields and Grav Plating, rendering them vulnerable.