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Wormhole Gate Manufacture

           The Federation is becoming increasingly reliant on its expanding wormhole network, which allows massive transport of materials, people and information every day. Wormhole technology has in fact become a fact of reality, and although many are personally aware of their use for traveling between places, wormholes underpin a great number of less visible systems that allow the Federation to work

            Each wormhole gate can simply be thought of as a device to anchor wormholes, the containment is achieved by creating a symmetrical distortion in space which forms a kind of ‘well’, because of the gradient, wormholes caught within it are unable to escape and become anchored to the gate. The gate at its simplest is a ring of DCM, a transducing material that converts energy into spatial distortion. Though energy needs to be applied to the gate to open a wormhole trapped within it, the passive well generated with no applied power is able to confine the collapsed wormholes indefinitely.

            Because the wormholes between gates are permanent and not created every time the gate is used, there is no energy penalty in having to create a new wormhole each time, instead the dormant collapsed wormholes are opened by the application of energy. When a wormhole is not active its termini collapse to infinitesimal width, and so require no energy to maintain them, like the passive well that contains the wormholes, the collapsed wormhole retains the link between gates if not actively creating a conduit for matter between them in this collapsed state. The collapsed wormhole can draw upon the energy fed to the gate through the increased distortion of the containment well, and as the distortion is consumed by the expanding wormhole then the well that occupied the centre of the gate now becomes a wormhole conduit connecting the two gates connected by the womrhole.

            The creation of an anchor gate pair is relatively straight forward, first the anchor gates need to be made, these can be made from relatively crude circular frames of DCM, which serve to contain the wormhole termini across a two dimensional plane, more often the anchor gates are made from sophisticated modules of precision manufactured DCM which not only serve to create the passive well, but also to stabilize conduit of a fully active wormhole. In addition to the bulk material of the DCM there may also be some instrumentation to control the spatial distortion as well as systems that monitor the health of the gate elements. The creation of the anchor gate and its systems is purely an exercise of construction, and requires only a relatively modest construction yard, however creating the wormhole link between the two gates is the real challenge, and generally requires far more sophisticated equipment.

            Though space can be though to behave as an almost regular and rational sheet at human scales, it’s behaviour at Planck scales is much more chaotic, where regular space becomes something of a froth with complex topology, a natural part of this seething torment are conduits which can be thought of as the precursors to wormholes. These naturally forming conduits are unfixed and transient, as well as being minute, but these proto-wormholes are exploited to create the wormhole pair between gates. The two manufactured gates are brought into close proximity and energy is dumped into them creating a steep and powerful well. These wells naturally trap these fine conduits but any conduit joining both these wells will receive enough energy to form a fully functional wormhole between them. It is this way that a link is forged between the two gates, the newly created wormhole retains its stability through the passive gradient formed from the gate annulus.

            Though the above technique describes how a link can be made between two gates, the gates of the Federation are often capable of handling a great many wormholes, and by cooperative application of energy at either end can finely control which termini are opened. To create such a complex system in one particular attempt is impossible, and would necessarily require all gates in the system to be brought into close proximity for the links to be forged. Instead wormhole links are ‘delivered’ to an anchor gate, and so to create a new link between two distant gates a simple pair of gates are made as described above, and each anchor delivered to one of the distant gates where the wormhole is transferred from one well to another. By this process new links can be added to existing gates by creating new pairs and delivering them to the existing system, without any modification to its existing links.
 

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