Verified against the live game, August 2026. Numbers are the current defaults and can shift with balance patches; each galaxy's host also sets its own pace.
The gate-pair rule
A jump gate on its own does nothing. What matters is a pair: an active gate in your origin system and one in your destination, both belonging to the same power. With a usable pair, a jump ignores range entirely and completes in a single minute of game time — a fleet that would spend two game-days in hyperspace steps across the map instead.
Who can ride a network
- Your own gates — always.
- A mutual ally's gates — only if you've both declared each other allies. One-way friendship doesn't open the network.
- The Transport Authority's gates — the galaxy's public infrastructure. The Authority runs three gates triangulating the map, usable by any commander in good standing. Make an enemy of the Authority and your access is revoked.
Who builds them
Gate technology belongs to two races: Humans (the Jump Gate and the Nexus Jump Station) and the Knossons (the Jump Node, plus the mobile Node Ship). Everyone else borrows a network — through alliance, or through the Authority's tolls-free public lanes.
Nexus Jump Station
Human · gate + gun platform
The economics and the risk
Gates are logistics, not profit: trade ships that hop through a gate earn nothing for that leg, because trade pays by distance actually flown. And a network cuts both ways — every mutual ally you accept can move fleets through your gates at gate speed. An alliance is also a set of doors.
Strategy
Gate your core to your frontier and reinforcement time stops being a function of distance. Kill (or capture) the far end of an enemy pair and their shortcut dies with it. On the galaxy map, gate networks are drawn as lanes — read them the way you'd read a rail map in a war: that's where the armies will come from.