Superluminal travel

Superluminal travel or faster than light travel is the ability to travel across space and time at a perceived velocity greater than the speed of light. Every known interstellar civilization has discovered and utilized superluminal travel at some stage in its development, and the ability to do so is reckoned as a technological paradigm shift. Sociologists have frequently universalized a transition between the "Fusion Age", a phase of history wherein a civilization has harnessed fusion power, and a "Colonial Age", a phase of history wherein a civilization has used such energy to power the equipment needed to practically break the lightspeed barrier and engage in viable exoplanetary colonization.
Superluminal travel generally takes place in one of two methods: wormhole tunneling, or spacetime warping. The former is practically subdivided based on the scale of the technology used: multi-lane "jump gates" that tunnel from and to fixed positions using stable wormholes, and individual-spacecraft "jump drives" that open up unstable wormholes that are collapsed after utilization. Individual spacecraft jump drives were widely used by space warships, though they have been superseded by Alcubierre-style warp drives; they still have some limited use among independent merchant ships, though it is prohibitively expensive to equip every craft in most merchant fleets with one. The vast majority of superluminal travel is done by highly-controlled jump gates.
== Wormhole tunnel ==
Wormhole tunneling has been the primary method of superluminal travel in every known interstellar civilization. A wormhole, scientifically known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, is a corridor through an extradimensional space opened up by a rotational singularity similar to a massive black hole. The "bridge" or "tunnel" intersects fixed points in spacetime, allowing an object to enter the singularity at one point and exit at the other, arriving at a time significantly sooner than it could at the speed of light through ordinary spacetime. The effects of extradimensional physics inside this tunnel "pulls" the object through it to the the destination point, a form of reactionless travel; however, this is only effective in the "bridge". A spacecraft's velocity in hyperspace is not realized in normal space; this has a side effect of inhibiting weaponization of FTL wormhole travel.
These bridges are limited in both the rate of travel, and their placement around destinations. Both have been consistently improved upon with more accurate tunneling devices and drives, but limitations still exist. A spacecraft generally can travel at a rate of 1 lightyear for every 2 minutes of elapsed time in realspace; and the radiation effects within the tunnel are such that spacecraft traveling through it need to be of a certain size or sufficiently shielded, limiting the type of craft that can traverse it. Further, due both to the gravitational effects imposed momentarily during the tunnel's creation, and to the effects of large-mass objects in space on the shape of the tunnel, a wormhole tunnel can only be practically created some distance away from a planetary or stellar body. This distance has shortened as technology has improved; generally, it is held to be around 0.01 AU from an Earth-sized body, scaling proportionally with mass up to 2 AU. A tunnel can "thread" to a point between the gravity wells of a star and its planet, enabling accurate jumps to be conducted close to a habitable world, but this generally requires stable "gates" and extensive calibration. Spacecraft equipped with their own individual jump drives are typically much less accurate, and have to jump to a safe point at least half an astronomical unit's distance from a destination world.
For humanity, the initial "jump lanes" were established using fixed "gate" apparatuses, several hundred kilometers in diameter, which created a wormhole projected to another fixed point, which a second gate stabilized. The first successful transit experiments were conducted in the 2180s, connecting Earth and Jupiter, and then other outer planets to the metropole. In the 2190s, construction of jump gate networks between Earth and Proxima Centauri cut transit time from five years down to five days, enabling rapid interstellar trade and colonization. Specialized spacecraft called Jump Lane Developers, bearing pre-fabricated gates, would make "jumps" to various star systems within a 500-lightyear radius of Earth and "lay down track" for the wormhole infrastructure. This dramatically accelerated a colonial exodus, with the extrasolar population reaching 2.3 billion in 2200. Occasionally, a JLD would "miss" its intended target, usually with catastrophic results; however, at least one instance was successful, leading to the colonization of the Banat region in the 2400s.
Especially in the aftermath of the Orion War of Independence, it became strategically vital to sharply control the network connection points between jump lanes, so that Earth would not be made immediately vulnerable to any combat spacecraft connecting to it via existing jump gates. By law, no outer colonies worlds connect directly to the Sol System; instead, the Sol jump gates connect to a number of "transit hub" worlds within a certain radius, which then link to worlds in the inner and outer colonies, and beyond. In international great power conflicts, control or destruction of jump gates was a guiding strategy. Cutting off supply lines and trade routes, and isolating hub worlds was practiced as a way to injure an opponent's ability to sustainably wage war. The widespread deployment of jump drives on individual space warships, and the later use of Alcubierre drives on military vessels, lessened the importance of this in terms of constraining military maneuvers, but it nevertheless remained a crucial strategic element in projected "total war" scenarios where an opponent's commerce and supply was targeted. This was utilized on a large scale during the Great War, when ISTO fleets seized or destroyed Soviet, Cassiopeian, Freyan, Kasian, and United Suns jump gates at varying points throughout the war; the priority was to seize and use the gates, as destroying them required reconstruction after the war. By following the transit lanes of the jump gates, the ISTO was able to single out hub worlds for landing operations, significantly cutting down manpower and losses in "planet-hopping" campaigns.
The jump gates remain the backbone of the interstellar transportation infrastructure. They enable a network of interstellar transit, trade, and migration lanes that resembles a web or branching tree, which can be controlled, regulated, and standardized. In the centuries preceding the Great War, international NGOs produced and regulated standards between national jump gate systems, enabling controlled international travel and trade. The boundary zones between the colonization regions of interstellar states, colloquially called frontiers or borders, were greatly enriched by this trade. In nearly every instance, wealth flowed from these border zones to core colonies, then to hub worlds, and ultimately to the metropolitan world or "capital planet" that directed a given interstellar empire. The Soviet Republic differed in that its centrally-planned economy distributed wealth and goods from interstellar trade to each world in an egalitarian fashion based on need and economic development; further, most worlds within the FSSR were autonomous Socialist Republics in their own right, rather than colonies of a metropole.
These international communications and transportation standards have been adopted and continued by the unified Central Galactic Government, and their implementation is administered by the Ministry of the Interior. The CGU's composition as a federation of member worlds, autonomous colonies, and alien protectorates, has enabled a relatively free trade between the Union's constituent planets under the purview of a unified interstellar transit authority. Most jump lanes traverse points less than 100 lightyears distant; some are as short as an intra-system connection, such as those in the Sol system, while the average is about 3 to 4 lightyears. Some, however, can reach as far as 5,000 lightyears if it is commercially viable, rending a transit time of just under a week; just such a trade lane connects the Inner Colonies world Nieuwvaalia to a transit hub in the Outer Colonies, bringing in raw materials for the planet's refineries.