Jump Gate

"The greatest accomplishment of psitech, in turn, was the development of the Jump Gates. These massive rings of psitech resonators floated at the far rim of a solar system, wide enough to receive the slowboat freighters that lumbered out from planetary orbits. With the help of a choir of master psychic teleporters, these ships would be hurled for scores of light years across the galaxy, emerging from a Jump Gate held in waiting at their destination point. The weeks or months of spike drive travel that would otherwise be required were compressed into a few days.

"The Jump Gates quickly replaced spike drive travel throughout the core regions of human space. The only check on their expansion was finding the necessary number of master teleporters to power them, and the great expense of shipping components out to more distant worlds unable to fabricate them on-site. By 2450, almost all core and Rim worlds were served by Jump Gates. The ease and cheapness of mass interstellar transport caused some worlds to specialize as agricultural planets and other worlds to rely on interstellar food imports.

"By 2600, spike drives were antiquated technology, found almost exclusively along the frontier of human space where Jump Gates were too expensive and economies too primitive to justify their use."

— Excerpt from A History of Human Expansion, by Varja Sentre

The gates which allowed the Terran Mandate to spread across thousands of star systems were massive orbital constructions. Each station employed dozens of psychics working in concert to create an instantaneous portal to another, linked gate. Master telepaths, enhanced by metapsychics, linked even more teleportation psychics into a single gestalt entity by a Conductor, and a telepathic link was established with the Conductor at the destination gate.