Warp Rail
| In simple terms, it is a railway of compressed space which a ship attaches to to travel quickly through space to travel along a path which may wind or even change shape, orbiting planets or stretching out with arms like a tree to many destinations. |
A method of democratized rapid-transit, warp-rails push a craft forward at near or super luminal speeds for fast-travel. Thought of as a sort of modular mass-driver, a warp-rail consists of individual nodes in a chain - the links themselves, called keys. These keys are automated machines nested in higher dimensional space which compress and expand space to form a stream which pulls or throws objects forward - and each catches what is caught by the other, passing it forward.
Visually, a warp rail resembles a three dimensional hole - lensed to represent a differing position. This acceleration phenomena is known to trap light into brief rydberg cascades and other force carrying particles, as well as hydrogen - forming a “twinkling” around the spheres and a thin line stream about the keyhole.
It is very dangerous to fly too closely to the warp rail - with velocity increasing as craft grow closer - and flight is typically automated and corrections to path made by computer — as the capture phenomenon is known to erode hulls with friction and particle collision.
Importantly, the rail is multiplex - that at the same time, objects can travel along it either way. While this seems dangerous, the very small size of vessels relative to the wedges of space or “tube” volume. The controller keys (situated at the beginning and end) issue instructions to fold space in such a way that each traveler is moving in their own discreet lane guaranteed to fit them, not overlap with someone elses lane and as such makes collision almost impossible without deliberate effort. Larger ships are pushed toward the outer radius of the warp rail and as such, travel slower. Towards the middle, light is increasingly smeared and along the core path at maximum speed, outside light is so intensely disrupted that one appears to be traveling within a tunnel.
A vessel can eject or drop off from a warp rail at almost any point — or join at any point along the rail by asking via software or to prevent rapid travel by unsafe or potentially dangerous parties. As such, warp rails are highly contested as territory.