Difference between revisions of "Stargate"

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Introduction

Stellar gates, sometimes called stargates, use massive amounts of solar power to warp spacetime in order to literally reduce the distance beteen two such gates. Currently, seven exist inside the Solar System, each reaching nearby major star systems, and two more fully active pairs reside in the Sirian system, connecting Sirius to Procyon and Alpha Centauri. Eighteen additional pairs are currently under construction, and will eventually link humanity to ten additional star systems. Of those around Sol, these giant megastructures reside some distance outside Neptune's orbit, providing (relatively) rapid transportation to nearby stars.

The massive energy required for these hundred-thousand kilometer behemoths makes it nearly impossible to use them around a red dwarf star, as even with the aid of mobius patterns, these seven gates require well over half of the sun's energy.

List of Gate Pairs

The seven gates inside the Solar System lead to the following star systems:

Three further gate pairs are currently under development:

Structure

Each of these will remain the seven largest megastructures created by human hands for some time, at least in terms of raw dimensions. When initially constructed, they are massive, silvery rings over a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, seeming featureless from afar. The intense quantities of starlight directed at them visibly flouresces the interplanetary medium, looking like twelve great - if dim - pillars of light reaching them from the host Dyson swarm. This is considered a safety feature - anything wandering into the pillars is going to experience several yottawatts of light focused on a point about a single square meter in area.

When activation begins, a bubble of darkness reaches out from behind the gate, rushing towards its companion at the speed of light. The length and terminal properties of this artificial void are very specifically controlled, usually to allow one host star to compensate for the lack of energy production in its partner.

The amount of energy required increases dramatically with distance - gates linking more than two parsecs are generally considered infeasible. This limits the rate of human expansion, though carriers alleviate this burden.

Once fully active, from the outside, it is as if a great darkness passes between the gates, with a notable Einstein line surrounding it - a silhouette of those stars the line would normally hide visible in a concentrated form on either side, clearly marking the dangerous event horizon to travellers.

Viewing from the inside of an activated ring is quite the opposite - several light years of starlight is focussed into several kilometers, causing the edge of the interior to glow brilliantly. Since matter still crosses the event horizon from the outside, the edge is filled with rarified gas - largely hydrogen and helium, acting as a faint atmosphere. This exits the ring on either side in a phenomenon called gate wind.

Safely crossing the edge of this wormhole is not typically possible. By design, crossing the horizon from the outside compresses dimensions by a factor of ten trillion to one - even from interstellar gas, this causes a detectable neutron flux as protons are fused with their electrons. Any sort of macroscopic structure is crushed under the force of the fabric of space itself. Crossing in the other direction is somewhat more difficult - atoms resist such violent tearing more than they do compression,


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