What does maximum fuel per jump mean?

What does maximum fuel per jump mean? I don't know if higher or lower is better and how it affects the gameplay.

Maximum fuel per jump has stopped me from jumping to systems several times so I want to understand how it works.

Solution 1:

Higher is generally better, it increases distance of single jump by using more fuel (but fuel efficiency is decreasing if you use fuel up to the limit - the longer jump the more fuel is wasted). The standard upper limit is 5 ton per jump. Engineers can increase it a little (e.g. 5.21 ton per jump).

If you manually select some distant system in the galactic map (without building a route to it) and try to jump, you will receive the error about exceeding fuel-per-jump limit if the system is too far way. This can happen even if you have a route built - if you selected another system after route was built. You can assign a shortcut to ~"Select next nav system" and use it to re-select next-in-route system.

In general, economic jumps are short jumps, fuel efficiency is decreasing if you jump at biggest possible distance. Scenario when higher limit is worse is when you may need to re-fuel: if you build a multi-hop route which uses almost all your fuel (without re-fuel) with 5 ton-per-jump limit. Having bigger per jump limit means that you can make one jump less, but you will need to re-fuel due to less fuel efficiency of long jumps.