So the Kree and the Skrulls are trying to get their hands on a light speed engine supposedly developed by the Annette Bening character, as if that were some wonderful new technology? How does that make sense? They are already space-faring races. If they didn't have faster-than-light travel they wouldn't even know about each other, let alone have been at war for ages.
What am I missing here?
Not to mention that they can open portals that warp them to locations across the galaxy in the blink of an eye.
Driving their snowmobiles on a quest for snowshoes.
Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 explained that ships need jump points to travel long distances. This movie mentions that Ronan and his crew are using jump points when they arrive and leave. The Starforce likewise needed to travel to find a jump point to get to Earth which was why it took them a while to get there. Likewise, the Asgardians needed the Bi-Frost to go to other realms even though they had spaceships. There are no light speed engines in the MCU.
shareI was going to post something along those lines. You could argue the tessaract itself is a light speed engine but it differs greatly from what the Kree and Skrulls use. I suspect the Bifrost technology is based off of the space stone though since both have a long Asgardian history but its just my opinion.
shareThey used the Space Stone to harness the Bi-Frost but Infinity War showed the Bi-Frost exists separately from it.
shareMar-Vell was a rogue Kree scientist posing as Carol's friend Dr. Wendy Lawson on Earth. She was using the Tesseract to develop a Lightspeed Engine to save the Skrull race from extermination by the Kree.
Yon-Rogg demanded the Asis' power source, which he believed was the Asis' engine itself. Presumably, the Kree also wanted the Lightspeed Engine technology Mar-Vell had invented and planned to give to the Skrulls.
It was clear why the Skrulls wanted it; they were being exterminated by the Kree and needed faster-than-light travel so they could find a new planet as far away from the Kree as possible, and Mar-Vell, who believed it was an unjust war, was betraying her own people to help them. However, the Kree already had interstellar travel and an armada, so what was the value of the Lightspeed Engine to them?
This comes down to the somewhat ill-defined rules of space travel in the MCU. In Captain Marvel, and in the Guardians of the Galaxy films which are set decades later, interstellar travel happens by the use of Jump Points - the hexagon-shaped barriers in space ships fly through. They're essentially artificial wormholes, not unlike the wormholes that lead to and from Sakaar in Thor: Ragnarok. What Mar-Vell invented was the MCU equivalent of warp drive in Star Trek and jumping to hyperspace in Star Wars, which would allow ships to travel faster-than-light without the use of Jump Points, by harnessing the power of the Tesseract, which was really the Space Infinity Stone.
Well, first off...I'm assuming "light speed engine" hopefully does not mean they cap out at the speed of light (since getting to our nearest neighboring star would take four YEARS at that speed but that it....I don't know....negates the relativistic problems of travelling at that speed. That's my hope.
As for your actual question, I took it that the Kree used a series of stargates to go from place to place and that they needed to travel days or longer to get to one to travel to another (since the Kree reversed course at the end, I guess there's a stargate in our neighborhood. This lightspeed engine would negate the need for the gates and would allow them to go where there aren't gates at the other end.