5 Things You Should Know About Gate Hubs

Well, if I can’t talk you out of your foolish journey to Orbis Aurea, I am at least glad you are electing to use the gate hub to get you there. Who wants to die in space, am I right? We’re becoming familiar with each other, so don’t mind if I mention a thing or two you should have already known when you got this far.

1. What Are The Gate Hubs

The gate hub network is a series of honeycomb-like space stations orbiting the planets of the Aethera System. Gate hexes come in many different sizes on this honeycomb, allowing small personal craft and ships all the way up to war cruisers to pass through them. This eliminates the need for long, wildly dangerous journeys through nightmare-infested vacuum in order to get from planet to planet. Fun fact, they are also the reason we discovered the erahthi people of Kir-Sharaat and immediately went to interplanetary war with them! For one hundred years!

2. Exploited Ancient Ruins

It might come as a surprise you but no contemporary species built these. The gate hubs are ancient Progenitor artifacts which have been retrofitted with aethertech to function. It takes a lot of aetherite to power these hexes, and the bigger the hex the greater the expenditure required. Don’t have the aetherite to pay? Don’t get to go. Please tell me you brought money. Also...

3. Condition

Many of hexes of the hub have not been reactivated, restricting our access to those which are regulated and functional. The stations themselves are massive, with large areas of the structures unexplored to this day. Some foolish, foolish people will occasionally enter restricted or abandoned area in search of riches, but rarely find anything other than millennia-old monsters or death in vacuum. Some scavengers are more successful, mapping safe areas and powering them as needed, far from the watchful eye of local law enforcement. These scavengers work with smuggling organizations, repairing hub hexes in secret for discrete black market transportation.

4. Ownership

The Hierarchy does not have exclusive claim to the gate hub network. Due to conditions of the treaty that ended the Century War, the erahthi tritarchy maintains total control of their world’s gate hub, as do the paragon marshals of Orbis Aurea theirs. The other powers have dedicated hexes for their private use, determined through lengthy negotiations during the treaty signing. Though the gate hub itself is controlled by the governing body of its host planet, these dedicated hexes and the functional station surrounding them are considered embassies and sovereign soil of the power that resides there. Obviously, once your ship is out in space, you fall into the jurisdiction of whatever party controls that area of space for laws and taxes. Also, some interplanetary business conglomerates or other monied powers can rent sections for their own exclusive use to not have to wait in line with us poor, unwashed plebs.

5. The Fold

When a gate hub hex is activated, a demiplane called the Fold is accessed to get you from point here to point there. A demiplane created by the use of a gate hub, the Fold makes the distance between those two points incredibly short.The journey will be uneventful, and only take a few minutes instead of months or years! What’s that? Noises you say? Wailing of the damned you say. I didn’t hear anything and neither did you.

Good job! You’ve successfully made it through a gate hub and can now continue on to oh for the love of the score, it’s pirates, isn’t it. Yeah, it’s pirates.