Other forms of faster-than-light travel included Hyper-Tubes, which were man-made wormholes which both the Boskonians and Galactic Patrol frequently used, and N-Space corridors which were gateways to a parallel universe.
Both sides of the war frequently used literal planets accelerated to relativistic speeds and "fired" through wormholes as a primary strategic weapon, in effect intergalactic ICBMs.
Later the Boskonian Empire began using N-Space corridors as "cannons" that could fire planets or moons at fifteen times the speed of light at a given target and could obliterate suns at intergalactic distances.
In Gray Lensman, Port Admiral Haynes noted that, were it not for the galactic war, a financial crisis might have risen over the Patrol possessing so much in the way of legal tender.
(For comparison, in 1940, the year after Gray Lensman was originally published, the U. S. Gross Domestic Product was $97 billion, so the "ten thousand million credit" figure was perceived by readers as equivalent to 10% of GDP; in 2008 terms that would be almost $1.5 trillion.)
This number is in keeping with the fact that, later in the series, Boskone (the great enemy of Civilization) mustered fleets of warships and mobile worlds of comparable size to be sent through the "hundreds of thousands" of hyperspatial tubes they'd opened to attack Arisia and Earth directly.
Examples include the detector nullifier, the negasphere (a weapon that behaved like antimatter with negative mass), and the sunbeam (which concentrated a star's entire energy output into a single, horrifyingly powerful beam).
Prime Base has a large number of functions including housing the office of the Port Admiral, facilities with the ability to construct warships for the Galactic Patrol, and a variety of scientific labs for scientists that work there.
It is hinted within the series that, rather than a Military-Industrial Complex such as evolved in our society, almost all military research and production is managed by civilian employees of the Galactic Patrol, rather than by independent contractors.
Internal evidence in the series may lead the modern reader to believe that The Hill/Prime Base is the evolved form of North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, Colorado.