WIP A Distant Galaxy

[Uomaru]

Thanks for all of the advices! I got GURPS Space and I'm currently reading it. All I can say is that this book is a must buy for a SF world builder it has a lot of information, stays interesting and explains everything in a nice way, giving newbie’s like me a chance to understand basic SF terms and concepts. Very nice!

While I’m reading the book I’ve come up with a concept of the travelling system in the galaxy. I’ve had this vision of a former alien species that only focused on developing their space travelling technology for many many hundreds of years, maybe thousands. They came up with so called hyper stations, or routers, to make space travel faster, secure and simpler.

The routers functions as a sort of catapult that launch ships in high speed into hyperspace, emerging out by another router. Each router has its own close knitted network; one router leads to another one, which then leads to the next one (and back to the previous router).
As the ancient alien species expanded their territory they placed out these routers at strategically and useful coordinates.

Before using a router it must be activated. After the alien species “mysteriously” disappeared, one after one of the routers deactivated because of the lack of maintenance.
To relocate and activate the routs, the government funds so called router expeditions so that new territories may be explored, make new travel routs/highways in the galaxy and open up unexplored space. Router expeditions usually takes between months or years as the expedition ship needs to travel the distances between one relay to the other one in “standard ship travel time” instead of hyper speed. The time is approximately ten double the hyper jump time, less or more.

All currently found routers are heavily controlled by its founders. To make a hyper travel by using a router you often need to have a certain certificate or pay a fee.
Space stations are often located close to the router so that the government/organization can have some control over the router. They also schedules the “travelling scheme” (they don’t want any coalitions on the highway) and maintains the router’s condition. The space station also protects the router from invaders who wants to take control over it, as the highways are very important for trade, economics, politics and war.

So this is my first brainstorming ideas on the travelling system. I hope it isn't to confusing... english isn't my native language, and neither is SF my specialization . There are still a lot of topics left to cover, like what travel speed does the ship have in hyperspace, what happens if a router is broken while ships are travelling the highway, can ships be detected when travelling the hyperspace and so on. If you have any opinions or advices (or if you think it’s to unoriginal) I would be happy to hear any suggestions!

Other brainstorming ideas involves how humans came to the galaxy and why and so on. It’s still too early to put it up here.

I’ve also drawn some modifications on the map. The next step would be to place out the routers if the idea is good enough to be used! I also attached a pic with the galaxy without anything layered over it.