orbital wormhole facilities

The majority of wormhole gates are situated on planetary surfaces or on minor bodies, and although these gates are valuable for the residents that use them, most of these gates are inaccessible to spacecraft. Spacecraft can also use wormhole gates, and although starships have the ability to fly between star systems, a gate can significantly reduce the energy of this transport, as well as greatly reduce transit times. An orbital gate facility allows even relatively unsophisticated spacecraft to travel between important federation worlds, with the additional benefit that under all instances emergency assistance would be available for the flight.

Orbital wormhole facilities have become key focus points within the Federation, the scale of construction, often creating gates in excess of a kilometre in diameter have set about not only a new age of interstellar flight but also, advanced the technologies for macro-scale spatial manipulation. A typical facility orbits the key Federation world, or one of its satellites, the altitude of these gates is seldom, greater than a few thousand kilometres above the body, putting these gates well within the range and flight abilities of sub light craft of relatively low sophistication.

Traffic and goods handling centres, which provide assistance for the travelling craft, often accompany the gate facility but the main component is the gigantic gate itself. The gates may only be a dozen metres wide at the rim, but the diameters are in many hundreds of metres, the bulk of the gate volume is the spatial distortion generators, which are fed from a wide plasma annulus inside the gate ring. The energy requirements of the gate are tremendous, and power-generating facilities are regularly spaced on the outside of the ring itself. The power generation is usually fusion, which is suitable for the high continual loads on the ring components, as well as being reliable, and gentler with the spatial distortion generators than higher energy antimatter power generation.

The gate itself may be a single solid state device, attached directly onto the other orbital facilities, the older systems used to use a pair of counter rotating rings, used to smooth out the relatively crude field produced by the older generation of spatial distortion units. The diameter of the modern gates has been designed to accommodate the widest ships on the federation fleet, and it is likely with the increasing construction of super-heavy armour, that gate size will continue to increase.

However most craft that use the gate system are much, much smaller that the gate area, and to preserve a certain amount of energy efficiency, craft heading for the same destination are grouped together for a simultaneous transport, this system also reduces the amount of time which the gate has to be open, and in addition to saving energy, saves the wear on the structural components.