Gateway

I have had a bit of time lately but even so my reading has been a bit slack. Gateway was the winner of the Hugo in 1978. This theme has been used before whereby an advanced race of space travellers decided to leave but left a lot of their stuff behind.  We humans found some of their space ships and started using them  to further our own explorations. Of course we never had any of the manuals so it was a trial and error method of learning to fly.  And a lot of the time they never came back.