I have argued for decades that the authors of HG got the maneuver drive and jump drive tables flipped somehow.
IMO it was a deliberate flip that they didn't think through [ETA: or explain]. Adding [ETA: the requirement for] Pn=Jn -- which happened in HG '80 before it did in LBB2 '81 -- means tech level affects the tonnage needed for Jump too.
In LBB5, the power plant is a big chunk of the drive bay, especially at lower TLs.
Which means that (despite what the rules say), a HG power plant can run in overload mode for up to two turns (40 minutes), and in each of those turns put out half the energy needed to charge the jump capacitors for a max jump (assuming the design Pn=Jn), which is 18EP per Jn per 100Td. It burns 5% of the ship's tonnage in fuel per Pn in each of those turns while doing so.Big Eureka! energy here: This is where the idea for the power plant burning all the jump fuel instead of the jump drive itself doing so, originated. Unlike LBB2 '77 jump drives, the small jump drives of LBB5 are meant to be just the field generators and not include the hot/inefficient power plant inside the jump drives of the LBB2 '77 rules (and carried forward into the '81 rules for backward compatibility).
After that, it needs a lot of time to cool down before doing it again (probably not a whole week, but if you're doing it to jump, you have that week).
In short: Overload mode allows a power plant to, for up to two turns, produce 18 times its normal output, by burning 5% of the ship's tonnage in fuel each turn. Doing so precludes the ship Jumping for [some duration that needs to be worked out] unless it can generate the necessary 36EP/Jn/100Td without having used overload mode for more than two turns including the Jump power-up. (Example: a J2 ship with Pn=2 needs only one turn in overload mode to do a J-1.)
This may require an engineering check, similar to that needed for Jump, in rulesets that require one.
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