Most vessels are capable of faster than light travel (and indeed, many smaller vessels can achieve this too). Ironically, FTL travel is still referred to as Light Speed, a hold over from the early days of space travel when man was still trying to figure out how to breach the light speed barrior. it is correct term should be hyperspeed.

Now hyperspeed is taken for granted with the Marron drive.

While a craft has the potential to simply travel at hyperspeed until its fuel runs out, in reality, the maximum range of a ship is limited by its long range sensors. When travelling at hyperspeed, the craft is still traversing known space and is thus still able to collide with objects in space. The chances of hitting a space craft or other small object in open space is generally so remote to be negligable, but planets, stars and other larger objects pose a different matter.

Planets and stars give additional problems for navigators as well. All these objects have a large gravitional field around them, and this can make a ship deflect off its course as it is sucked into the gravitional well of the object. Most navigators usually give systems a wide berth when plotting their hyperspeed course, but some navigators can use these gravitional fields to their advantage.

As such, before entering hyperspeed, a navigator has to have full access to long range scans so that they can make careful calculations to be able to avoid these objects. This generally makes large military craft able to travel a couple of systems at a time, while a civilian craft will be able to travel to the next system before re-scanning and going into hyperspeed again.

When in hyperspeed itself, only small course corrections (or stopping) is possible, and because craft are now outracing their sensors, it is impossible to actually plot another hyperspeed trip until the craft has exited light speed. However, it should be noted that when plotting a hyperspeed journey, the course itself is not neccassarily a straight line between points A and B.
When in hyperspeed, a ship is able to communicate with others only through the use of its FTL communications. Normal radio and communications channels are too slow to traverse light speed.

hyperspeed burns fuel very quickly, and no ship carries enough for more than a couple of system hops.

Note: Hyperspeed, FTL, Light speed, jump, hyperspace are all terms to describe the same thing.
While these terms are mainly Colonial terms, these notes apply to Cylons with their gravity drives as well.

For my take on hyperspeed, consult these notes.

Hyperspeed Range:

On the average, a civilian craft can make a hyperspeed journey with a range of 10 centars. Then they must stop to recalculate before making another jump. A military craft generally has a range of double this, of some twenty centars. Craft with greatly extended sensors (like a Colonial Warstar) could have a greater range, of up to thirty centars. This range is based on the maps and is used before any calculations for travel times (below).

Computing hyperspeed Travel Times:

The starmap lists travel times between star systems. Using this as a base, it is possible to compute travel times to a system. Take the basic time and then multiply this by the ships hyperspeed modifier.

Some examples (craft with differing values will be listed in their ship description):

Travel times assume a non-direct route to avoid local stellar obstacles (like the Nova of Madagon). A more direct route is possible, and this can mean a saving of up to 20%, but this requires extra time for the navigator to compute and also will mean going through any stellar obstacles, which could mean exiting from hyperspeed to deal with. For example, no one will travel at hyperspeed through a mine field!

A legendary navigator can shave an additional 10% off this travel time.

Note those that ships in a fleet will be travelling at the fastest speed of the slowest ship in the fleet. In the Exodus, the Galactica could have made much better time had it not been escorting a fleet of civilian craft, many of which had makeshift FTL drives.

See the Role-playing section for more detail about computing travel times between star systems.

Computing Total Travel Time:

The hyperspeed travel time is only part of the actual time taken to get to a particular planet. Because of gravity distortions around a planet and star, a ship will arrive into a system at it is edge. It will then travel to the inner planets using its more conventional ion drive.

Ignoring a lot of celestrial mechanics and realistic physics, it takes about a day (on average 24 centars) to get from the outer system to the inner habitable zone. This can be modified as follows: