Fold Gate (Jump Rings)
Overview: Almost every Saurian owned planet has a Fold Gate in its orbit to allow for instant travel to and from any other Fold Gate. Most planets have just the gate itself with defense platforms and any local naval assets to protect them, but there are some exceptions. Acadia, for example, has a triple Fold Gate with each of the independently operating three rings touching the other two. Sauria has over a dozen Fold Gates built into its outermost orbital ring that can but turned off and on at any time for security purposes. Generally any ship with proper registration can request the use of a Fold Gate at any time, but as all Fold Gates are owned by either the Saurian government or their local planet, they reserve the right to deny access or schedule groups of ships destined for the same place to depart in the same folding. Gates do not actually have to be oriented to face each other to be connected as the folding of sub space is nonlinear and thus direction is irrelevant, however they have all been programmed to require authorization from the desired destination's gate to establish a connection to prevent accidents through scheduling conflicts/misunderstandings or even deliberate sabotages and acts of terror.
Appearance: Upon activation, a brief pinkish-purple flash can be seen around the inside circumference of the gate, rapidly rippeling inwards until it reaches the very center of the opening. Then, the glowing ripple expands more slowly outwards again, revealing in its path a perfect view of the space beyond the connected Fold Gate. From the opposite side of the ring, the other side of the connected gate is visible, as if each gates' respective perspective views were simply swapped.
Dangers: The only real concern with Fold Gates is being caught halfway into the portal when the connection is halted or lost. This has happened a few times by accident or maliciously, resulting in the instant and total severing of anything caught partially theough. Notably, the Free State of Varn modified their own gate during their Varnian War of Succession war with the Saurian Empire to shred anything that passes through the Varn gate to molecular scraps instantaneously, while still allowing the gate to be used the other way.
Image: The Fold Gate at Varn
Complexity
Fold Gates use advanced technology to reach out to any other gate in the galaxy through tachyon emissions before folding the unversial fabric and punching a hole through that created sub space, opening up a direct path across almost any amount of space, allowing instant travel across light years of regular distance. As one would expect, this takes massive amounts of energy, which used to be generated by many fusion reactors fueling ultra high capacity battery cells and capacitors. This meant it tooks around an hour to charge each Fold Gate each time it was to be used, with time to cool down and recharge in between. With the relatively recent discovery of Void and subsequent surge in technology nationwide however, a new method has been widely adopted to power these Fold Gates. It works by accelerating special void-link crystals to hyper velocity in each gate's inbuilt particle accelerator spanning the entire circumference of their structures, effectively tearing open a rift into the void for a fraction of a microsecond and dumping massive amounts of energy into the gate's mechanisms to open the portal. Most major Saurian planets have switched to these newer Void powered gates, but some poorer or less important planets retain their traditional Fold Gates.
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