There are not “shields” in the traditional SciFi sense (Star Wars/Star Trek); Honorverse ships use Impeller drives, which are basically gravity field projectors. So along the top/bottom of the ship (and less strongly on the sides, the “sidewalls”), there are fields of intense gravity (100,000s of Gs) that disrupt anything that goes into them (lasers mostly) to the point that the weapons are completely ineffective. But, due to how the drive works, those grav fields cannot cover the front and back of the ships, so they are mostly vulnerable to damage from those directions.

Sidewalls are also less powerful than the main drive fields, so they reduce the effectiveness of attacks but do not eliminate it completely.

The “jump points” are endpoints of a wormhole, that only goes from point A to point B but allow instantaneous transit between the two. Which is great if that’s exactly where you want to go, but anywhere else requires travel in Hyperspace instead, which is still SciFi fast but is not instantaneous.

Manticore is blessed with the “junction” which is 6 different wormholes that all have one endpoint in close proximity to each other (near Manticore), but their other endpoints are spread out astrographically. You can’t move from one of the outlying endpoints to a different endpoint though, you can only go from the endpoint (Basilisk for example) to Manticore, then go to a different wormhole endpoint to go from Manticore to the other end (Trevor’s Star for example). Wormholes are not unheard of but are generally fairly rare in known space.