L-Gates

While regular gateways raise important questions of their own, the mystery of the L-gates is one that has obsessed our scientists for decades now. Massive remnants of the past, the L-gates appear superficially similar to the derelict gateways - they are massive, near moon-sized superstructures obviously designed for instantaneous or near-instantaneous trans-galactic travel. The L gates are however distinct in some crucial ways, leading scientists to theorize that, while L-gates might have been inspired by the Gateways, they served a different purpose and had different architects.

• Unlike the Gateways, the L-gates do not seem to have been hindered in their purpose by powerful gravity fields - quite the opposite. If the Gateways were all built on the outskirts of a system, outside of a star's main gravity well, L-gates are always found built close to the event horizon of a Black Hole with no companion star, in a region of concentrated gravity that is nonetheless (barely) escapable by conventional drives.
• Unlike the Gateways which are theorized to all fold onto one another, the L-gates seem to connect to a single terminus, a gateway towards which all the L-gates are oriented. This terminus is a cluster of distant stars, several thousand light years outside our galaxy.
• Unlike Gateways, which are believed to build some sort of tachyon bridge, uniting all apertures into a single traversable boundary, the L-gates seem to function by some sort of subspace bypass, a process that our scientists have not even begun to understand
• Unlike Gateways, L-Gates appear to be working, with all discovered so far active but trapped in some sort of redundancy or maintenance loop that our scientists have so far been unable to decipher and stop or alter. One peculiar and perhaps worrying aspect is that several scientists have theorized that the gates were sabotaged, forced into this maintenance loop by some outside force.
• Unlike Gateways L-Gates seem more or less impervious to damage, the maintenance cycle ensuring that a lot of the damage done is rapidly repaired, to say nothing of the fact that due to the proximity to a black hole's event horizon, firing most weapons is pointless, as beam and energy weapons are "bent" by the gravity and projectile weapons are deviated and sucked in
.
• Unlike Gateways, L-gates are purely functional with next to no engraving, marking or otherwise present on their surface

• Most importantly for our scientists, the L-Gates seem to have all been built using large, system scale deployments of very advanced nanites, assembled near the event horizon of a black hole. As nanotechnology is high on our research docket further investigation is warranted.

The discovery of the fact that the L-gates were built entirely by heavy use of nanorobotics has launched a nanite gold rush throughout allied space with contractors and explorers looking for insights into the functioning of the L-gates as well as other examples of advanced nanorobotics. So far the Lokken Mechanists have been the most focused on discovering a way to activate the L-gates and reverse engineer the advanced nanobots used in their construction and maintenance.

Massive relics of an age long gone these gates seem different from the collapsed gateway network and more recent. Still functional, they seem to be locked in some sort of feedback loop.
Assembled by nanites, the L-Gates defy our current understanding of subspace mechanics. This must be remedied before they can be opened for travel.

List of Known L-Gates:

• Heaven's Gate, Lokken Mechanists
• Y'thilmak's Eye, Chinorr Combine
• Paradigm Pillar, Freespace