Wormhole Terminus
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Wormhole Terminus |
A wormhole terminus - any wormhole terminus - is the single most traffic-dense area in its star system (unless of course the system is home to multiple wormhole termini).
At any one time there is an astonishing crush of traffic, both hardware and virtual, laser links and receivers, ships and containers of all sizes, with the stream of ships appearing to warp and distort as they go through the mouth.
There is so much traffic going through - all coordinated by AIs with reflexes millions of times faster than any human traffic controller - that it is sometimes hard for a near-baseline human to imagine it. Indeed, some hu suffer from anxiety reactions and develop phobias. Fear of wormhole transit is a not uncommon, albeit minor and relatively easily treated, psychopathology in the modern galaxy.
The wormhole terminus is really a three-layered structure.
In the center is the actual wormhole mouth itself, consisting of an exotic matter structure over which space-time is literally stretched, causing spatial and gravitational distortions.
As an initial shell or ring around this, at perhaps several kilometers remove, is a superstructure of normal matter supporting control stations, power generators, and maintenance units.
note: The wormhole mouth and the superstructure together constitute what is sometimes called the stargate or starportal
A few hundred kilometers out is the huge shell of "spaceport reality". Customs systems, defense outposts, communications links and so on; all conveying a sense of incredible activity and concentration of sentients and traffic.
Generally there are different lanes for approach and departure: ships enter from the opposite side they leave from, and there are a few faces that are not allowed entry, since there is a need for safe approaches to the wormhole itself for maintenance.
Another thing to watch for is balance: if a charged object moves through a wormhole the wormhole will acquire the same charge. This can get troublesome. Even worse, transporting a lot of mass one way means the wormhole will acquire a virtual mass in the same way - hence the need to balance traffic, if only with large chunks of rock. Too many large ships, too much mass being transported in only one direction will cause the negative energy exotic matter framework to collapse. A busy wormhole gate is a fascinating sight: Ships constantly going into all the faces on one side of a polyhedron and appearing to turn into different ships coming out of the other side of the polygon at a similar rate.
By carefully arranging the orbits of the wormholes within a given star system, it is possible to arrange it so that craft traveling inward from the gateway can easily line up to do some slingshot deceleration maneuvers around the nearby planets or star to help them slow down. Another good reason not to have wormholes too near inhabited areas: to allow time and space to slow down and help prevent accidents. Having a large mass nearby like a planet also means that you have more limited approach vectors.
Not to mention that in many polities an empire can gain much political goodwill from the voters of the generally poor outer system by putting a big wormhole project out there
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