Stargate Technology
It is undoubted that a race capable of interstellar travel roamed New Eden thousands of years ago. A number of ancient stargates and acceleration gates have been discovered in various systems across the cluster, all of which have a peculiar factor in common: carbon dating shows that these gates were all constructed within a time frame of approximately 150 years. It is believed that these individuals were those who initially ventured forth through the EVE Gate to colonize the cluster.
The system of New Eden remains an enigma, as does that which lies on the opposite side of the EVE Gate. Scientists across the cluster speculate on the origins of mankind and wonder where our knowledge of stargate construction and faster-than-light travel originated. A stargate is an immensely complex mesh of astrophysics, science, and mathematics that to most people seems an impenetrable wall of equations and jargon.
In layman’s terms, a stargate generates an artificial wormhole, through which a vessel passes to its destination. These gates are constructed to exploit areas of natural gravitational resonance, or harmony, either on the edges of a solar system or in areas where a sufficiently large or dense celestial body creates relative equilibrium between itself and the star it orbits.
While this resonance is not required to be absolute (such as, for example, when two celestial bodies cancel each other’s gravitational effect completely—the ideal conditions for a stargate), gravitational distortion must remain below an acceptable threshold for the stargate’s subsystems to be able to function nominally. Once that condition is satisfied, a stable link can be created between the source and the destination nodes. These nodes are the gates themselves. They operate in pairs, their interstellar positioning arrays and mainframes linked directly via the fluid router system for instantaneous point-to-point communication.
When a vessel requests jump clearance, the source node transmits a basic carrier signal that includes data on the class of the vessel, its mass, its current status, and its CISC (CONCORD Identification Serial Code) to the destination node, which then confirms receipt of the data. This entire process is automated, consisting of direct communication between the mainframes of the paired stargates.
The gates then confirm alignment to each other before activating their retaining magnetic fields. Once this process is confirmed by both the source and the destination nodes, they simultaneously fire a focused beam of gravitons toward each other, folding space-time consistent with Weyl tensor dynamics, which creates a temporal singularity—or more simply, a tear in space-time—at both the source and the destination nodes. The two nodes monitor these singularities at intervals of one picosecond, ensuring they are stable before the source gate begins to stream negatively charged gravitons toward the destination, which in turn acts as a receiver, positively charged.
This causes the nodes to effectively “reach” for each other, their retaining magnetic fields preventing external gravitational distortion and focusing it on the two rifts as the wormhole begins to form, causing a tentacle-like structure reaching from source to destination, the beginning of which is often seen to the naked eye as a building ball of white light at the center of a stargate’s superstructure. Within a nanosecond, the link is established and a positively charged sphere of mass boson particles begins to form around the vessel, enveloping it and coating its surface as it is pulled into the rift. As the vessel passes into the wormhole, the mass boson particles can usually be momentarily viewed as a sphere of distorted light around the vessel, before it vanishes into the rift.
As the vessel travels from source to destination, this positive charge is dissipated, as the elasticity of the particles assists in maintaining the vessel’s structural integrity and prevents it from being torn apart by intense gravitational force. On arrival at the destination, both nodes cease their release of gravitons, sealing the two rifts and closing the wormhole, causing the vessel to become trapped in the destination node’s retaining magnetic field, which then scans the vessel, ensuring that its mass and status remain the same and its CISC matches that of the source node. Once the jump is confirmed as complete, the gate’s retaining magnetic field shuts down, releasing the vessel.
For approximately one minute after the vessel’s arrival, the remnants of the mass boson sphere and the coating of particles produce a localized gravity well, bending light around the hull and effectively rendering the vessel invisible to the naked eye and most conventional sensor systems unless it moves.
With this relatively simple principle, used universally across all stargates, pilots can traverse the entirety of the cluster in a matter of hours. While various methods of generating a retaining magnetic field and a beam of gravitons exist, depending on which race designed the stargate and the manufacturer of the stargate’s subsystems, the basic physical principle behind the artificial generation of wormholes for the purpose of travel remains the same. The only thing that changes is the scale of the structures, a factor that depends on the length of jump to be undertaken—across systems, constellations, or entire regions.
Stargate technology is the backbone of humankind’s ventures into space. Never before has a safer or more valuable system of travel been invented. The only disadvantage of the stargate is the requirement to fly under conventional power to the site of the destination node before it can be constructed. This is a journey that can often take upwards of a century, and many an expedition has gone radio silent twenty or forty or seventy years in—fallen prey to madness, technical malfunction, hunger, or whatever unknown dangers may lurk on the fringes of explored space.
This has been the case with almost all the expeditions launched in the last half century or so. Much of this has to do with the fact that for the time being, humankind appears to have reached the functional boundaries of New Eden. No suitable destination node signatures have been found in dozens of years, so the few expeditions still active have been sent toward points that, though carefully triangulated by top astrometry experts, still amount to little more than educated guesses. Therefore, until some form of new breakthrough is achieved, the far reaches of the dark will remain a mystery to the inhabitants of New Eden.