Sometimes ships FTL and portals co-exist, where the latter is a one-time investment to save everyone a lot of time and fuel to act as an express lane.Īs these provide both a relatively plausible form of Casual Interstellar Travel and justifies the idea that Space Is an Ocean enough to permit choke point naval battles, Portal Networks are common throughout all but the hardest varieties of Science Fiction, which disallow faster-than-light travel altogether.
Alternatively, it is sometimes hybridized with hyperdrive in such settings, starships carry their own FTL equipment but can only use it at very specific naturally occurring " Jump Points" in space defined by gravitation intersections or some other mathy thing that's too complicated to explain. In science-fiction versions, it is common for portal transits to induce disorientation, hallucinations, or nausea which make starship crews temporarily extra-vulnerable immediately after transit.Ĭonsidering that it would take thousands if not millions of years to set up an interstellar Portal Network without any other means of Faster-Than-Light Travel, it is not uncommon for such things to have been made by the Precursors, in which case the gates are usually (though not always) Lost Technology.
This results in what can be called a "graph universe": the connected islands/communities/planets are vertices and the portal links are edges, and the rationality of travel between them depends not on the distance, but on the existence of a known link between them. However, there is a set of gates or jump points connecting them together, allowing for near-instantaneous travel. Simply put, there are lots of "islands of habitability", and conventional travel between them, if possible at all, is time-consuming, expensive, and generally not attempted unless there is absolutely no other choice.
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