[Forerunner Technology]
Index
- Gateway: History and Introduction
- Gateway: Morphological Description
- Gateway: Function Description
- Gateway: Network Extent
2. Morphological Descriptions
Description and Dimensions
The exposed surface of each Gateway is an equilateral triangle exactly 12 meters along each side and approximately 10.392 meters from each point to the center of the opposite side, with a near perfectly smooth surface. These devices sink an unknown number of kilometres into the surface of the stellar body they are on. It has never been possible to confirm their exact length as they seem to have defense mechanisms that have stopped all mining expeditions to discover exactly how long they are. They are assumed to be less than 473 Kilometers long (the radius of Ceres) since they don't appear to pass the gravitational center point of the objects they are found on and they have never been found on anything smaller than Ceres. All functioning Gateways have been discovered embedded into bedrock in geologically stable regions on the stellar bodies they are found on. They have been found not just on the surface, sometimes covered in a layer of dirt and plant life until activated, but also inside underground tunnel complexes, and on ocean floors.
Nature and Resistance
The material they are made from is nonferrous and completely unknown as no samples have been found that weren't part of a gateway for the purposes of study. All attempts to open or damage the Gateways have failed, including the use of nuclear devices and plasma cutters. However, nuclear weapons, and theoretically very strong electromagnetic pulses, can disrupt the function of a gateway for a short period of time: about a week. One experiment using a directed meteor strike against a gateway on a dwarf planet resulted in the dwarf planet shifting its stellar orbit and the gateway on it stopped working. The current theory is they are gravitationally locked in a space-time deformation to the stellar body´s core creating the geologically stable region around themselves and making them impossible to remove without destroying the stellar body they are installed on.
Vector Conditional Factors
Location Factors
Everything in the galaxy is moving on multiple axes and vectors. Almost all of this is very predictable and could be plotted and tracked with complex enough computers. A Gateway needs to know its exact coordinates in space-time as well as the target Gateway's exact coordinates in space-time to be able to open the wormholes that connect them. A Gateway knows; its location on a stellar body; it knows that body spins along its own axis; that stellar bodies orbit around their star/s (or around a larger stellar body and that stellar body orbits around its star/s); that stars orbit around the galactic core; and the movement of the Milky Way galaxy through the universe. It also knows the same information for any Gateway it is connected to and can calculate a Gateway's locus for any point in space time since the creation of the gateway in question. However, there are a couple of variables that cannot be accounted for and once those variables effect the location of a Gateway it can no longer be travelled to or from.
Tectonic Factors
Movement of tectonic plates is one of them, which is why humans had to travel to other worlds within the Sol system before they found a Gateway. Old Terra is very tectonically active and although a plate's average movement can be calculated, its current movement at a variable point in time is much harder. For example, it could be almost 0 until a major earth quake occurs accompanied by very sudden movement. The average movement could be accounted for but is not exact enough for the creation of a stable wormhole. The Forerunners found a way to lock the location of a gateway in relationship to a stellar body’s core once they had the ability to travel beyond the Sol System. Any gateways on Old Terra though, have been buried and disconnected from the network by millions of years of geology.
Stellar Factors
Rogue stellar bodies, also known as meteors or other things more exotic is another significant variable. When they hit a stellar body, and sometimes just when they get too close to it, they can affect and change some of the constants the gateways rely upon. The stellar body's rotation, or even its axis of spin, and/or orbit around its star(s) could be effected. Not to mention geological stability could suddenly become massively disrupted , although even a minor disruption could throw off a Gateway's connection to the network.
Stellar perturbations are another factor. Stars age and eventually die, the exact timing of such is impossible for us to calculate and the same appears to have been true for the Forerunners. As a star changes in size with age so do a lot of other things that affect a stellar body's orbit; such as the star's mass/gravitational field, solar winds, and physical diameter. Once a star changes enough to affect a stellar body's orbit around it, or just plain swallows that stellar body, the Gateway becomes disconnected from the network. Also if a star goes nova, super nova or collapses into a neutron star or black hole it can affect other star systems around it and change their relationship to the galactic core due to its change of nature and gravitational forces.
(By Sean Wadey - 356597)
