1. Bureaucracy
I hope you cleared your voyage in advance, because the gate hubs are highly regulated. Your ship will probably be inspected because we can’t have invasive flora and fauna just spewing out into the system. There are taxes and forms and rituals. You can grease palms to save time, but some cantors are actually good people who frown on bribery and it’s hard to tell them apart because they all wear the same outfit.
2. Distance
You’re right, you should just skip the gate hub and rocket through space until you get to your destination the old fashion way. This will probably take a few months of travel if you time it right. Also, if you are off from your original estimation by half of a degree you could miss your target by millions of miles, but let’s table that.
You’re going to need to eat and drink for this whole voyage. Bring lots of food. Make sure you enjoy the company of your crewmates because you will be seeing a lot of them and have no way to avoid them unless you put them in the airlock. That reminds me…
3. Space Is Awful Even When You Don’t Count All Of The Monsters
It’s cold out here. Also, you will die if you go outside. Some sort of radiation is pulsing in every direction at all times, so while you freeze to death you will also be irradiated. There is no air in space, so it will take whatever is in your lungs faster than you can breathe it out which I’m told is more painful than it sounds. It’s pretty dark out here too, and the Plane of Shadow is nearby at all times. Also, you probably saw this coming, but...
4. All Of The Monsters
Space is lousy with monsters. There are lots of harmless ones, or at least some that aren’t malicious but occasionally crash into you and break your ship. There’s not much you can do about these ones other than not fly into them, but there are some types of monsters which warrant special attention.
- Fish: There are swarms of monsters in space which for all intents and purposes behave like fish. They can be pretty, but some are as terrifying as you would expect a thing that can survive in space without a suit to be. Whether it’s an acidic hull barnacle jamming up your ducts with its spores or what is effectively a whale swallowing your entire ship, keep an eye out for these guys.
- Ghosts: I’m not a scientist, so I shouldn’t wager a guess as to why they haven’t moved on. Obviously, a lot of ghosts ended up in space due to people dying here during the Century War. Sometimes they have the decency to haunt the ships they died on, but generally they’re just flying around, presumably wailing about how unfinished their business is. If you are lucky, they will be too consumed with existential sadness to notice that they are floating through your ship, but who am I kidding?
- Taur: You obviously remember when these aliens arrived and literally stole a moon. I should now remind you that no one knows for sure where they went after they did that. They came here, they stole a whole moon, and we do not know where they went with it. We do know that they are really good at stealing people for mysterious purposes but it’s a pretty safe bet those people have been eaten or enslaved.
- Demons: I don’t want you to blame the Plane of Shadow for everything that’s wrong with space, but I have to tell you it’s pretty awful. As an example, apparently it is just full of masochistic pain-worshiping torture-demons. I don’t know how I can make that sound worse.
5. Pirates
Do you know who else doesn’t use the gate hubs? Pirates. While some will allow you to live in exchange for your calmly standing by while they rob you blind, others have gained a harsher reputation. The latter have found aethership crews to be far more pliable when all of the breathing air has been unceremoniously vented from the ship through large cannon holes.
6. Near Total Lack of Information
Probably the most dangerous thing about space is our complete ignorance of what else is out here. The Progenitors were here first, and presumably they were here for a long time. They left some of their technology behind, and we don’t know how to use it properly. This ignorance results in dozens of deaths a year even under laboratory conditions. We’ve only been travelling around the system for a little over one hundred years and the Aethera system is enormous. To put this in perspective, Akasaat has had an active civilization for thousands of years and we still haven't explored the entire surface, let alone the underground.
After all of these warnings, do you still want to go into space? It can be quite rewarding if done with a little forethought. There are vast riches to exploit and ruins to explore. There are sights unseen and miracles and wonders waiting for discovery. For every unknowable horror, there is a ray of hope. So, maybe don’t give up on your dream just yet. Get back to the gate hub, wait in line, and head on to, where were you headed? Orbis Aurea? Why, in the name of all that is-
No. You know what? There’s obviously no reasoning with you.
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