It Should Have Been Obvious...

On the forums someone posted a note about the cost of FTL spaceflight vs. the cost of Warp. It got me to thinking and I provided a significantly cheaper and RAW build.
 Flight (Space, +50%) [60]
Enhanced Move 30 (Space, Instant Acceleration, +50%) [180] (900/5)
Enhanced Move 6 (Flight, Instant Acceleration, +50%) [36] for atmospheric travel, bought as a alternative ability of EM (Space) with a travel speed of 1,280 MPH.
Impulse Point Pool Cap 2, recover 2 points session [30].
Total 306 points to be able to travel anywhere and back in the Milky Way in about an hour if the GM rules its a good off screen or especially appropriate use once per game session. And to take it a step further, thats really only an extra 210 points towards a really nifty player controlled plot device.
Not bad IMHO.

This got me thinking about how comic book supers often have powers that are extraordinary in one issue but greatly scaled down in other issues.  Basically the character is as powerful as the story demands and the author desires. The advantage is that a character can have immense cool powers but for some reason they are not normally used and thus do not easily override normal problems.
This is actually a large part of what GURPS Power-Ups 5: Impulse Buys is about. A steep discount for abilities that are rarely used, and especially if that use helps the story.

So for a Supers, High Fantasy, or any narrative type campaign we can use Impulse Buys to allow the characters abilities that will see limited or off screen use. This really was brought up in the book, but I do not recall making this connection. It really fits a Four Color supers campaign!  For that matter it also fits a GURPS Toon campaign, just call Impulse Points "Comedy Points" or something.