Gate travel: safe but not flawless
The knowledge & technology that allowed the stargates to be developed was a turning point in the history of mankind. No longer were we confined to a single starsystem. Instead, we could travel back & forth between multiple starsystems with only a fraction of the time needed compared to the old days. Continuous development allowed for better & more advanced gates to be developed.
Despite the firm understanding of the technology behind the gates, the civilizations of New Eden lack a firm grap on the foundations of their workings. While they can make stargates work, nobody is sure on how they connect on a fundamental scientific level. Is it by manipulating the time-space continuum, bending it so it forms a shortcut? Or perhaps it works by accessing the multiple dimensions that are rolled up on a quantumlevel? It could also be that the stargates access a different dimension, with laws of it's own, hyperspace.
All of that is still being researched & no suitable theory has come forth yet. At times, strange stories emerge in seedy bars & shady outposts about ships suffering strange effects when jumping through gates. For a long time this was blamed on faulty data or simply accidents.
However, with the rise of capsuleer presence in the nullsec regions, more stories began to emerge from those barren regions about strange incidents involving gatejumps... At first it was dismissed simply as an issue of the gates themselves, as the nullsec gates are badly maintained & sometimes fall into disrepair.
But then the Peralles incident happened... making people wonder if they opened Pandora's box when they started using the stargates...
The Peralles; vanished but not gone
The Peralles was the ship that transported the Gallente senator Hubert Caissor, along with his family & fortune to his new ambassador post in the Amarr Empire. Due to his importance, the journey was well observed & documented. But something went wrong in the Genesis region... The ship Peralles entered the Dom-Aphis system stargate but it never reached the other end, the Iderion stargate...
To add to this mystery, Iderion traffic control did receive confirmation that a ship was about to jump through their gate, yet no ship appeared...
A large search party was set up, along with a deep investigation, by both the Amarr and the Gallente authorities, but alas, nothing was found. As Dom-Aphis was a lowsec system, it was initially thought pirates destroyed the ship just before the jump, but no wreckage was found, or any signal of pirates at the time.
The mystery became even greater when the incoming signal of the Peralles was received the next day, at the same time. And yet, no ship arrived once again... despite the gate showing all signs of gate activation of a ship about to exit the stargate...
And the next day... and the day after... Every day, on the same time, the Peralles would signal it was about to exit the Dom-Aphis - Iderion stargate, but it would never arrive...
To this day, Iderion traffic control continues to receive this message every day at the same time, a ghost attempting to break free...
The warning tale of a ghost ship
Ever since the Peralles incident, more strange occurrences & mysterious events surfaced regarding gatejumps. These stories tell about disappearing ships, time shifts, ghostly echoes and strange disturbances during the jump-process...
The various nations investigated these tales further, but no satisfying conclusion was reached, save for the fact that we know too little about the fundamentals that make stargates work...
During that brief time one spends in the strangeness between gates, there seems to be more at work then what science can tell...
Yet despite all this, the gate network remains the safest method to travel interstellar distances to this day.
A great read and addition to the lore of Eve, wonderful stuff, thank you o7
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