2 - The earliest jump gates and the first inter-stellar travelers.

Once the Amarr Empire had reached the technology level were it could enter space, it started to vigorously chart their home system. Due to technological limitations this survey took a long time. Finally, the Amarrians stumbled upon the remains of a jump gate at the outskirts of their solar system.

By studying the remains, which were more or less intact, the Amarrians were able to garner enough information to build a jump gate of their own. The jump gate was operational but obviously it lacked connections to other jump gates, as it was the only one of its kind. Thus the Amarrians were forced to physically send ships capable of building jump gates between solar systems before a stable wormhole could be formed into the system to connect the two gates. These gate construction ships often took decades to arrive, the crew suspended in cryo-tanks for the duration of the voyage. Only in recent years with the coming of jump drives capable of jumping between systems with no jump gates in them is it possible to overcome this time-consuming prelude to inter-stellar traveling via jump gates and still today dozens of gate construction ships are enroute to a distant system.

But patience is a virtue the Amarrians have mastered well and they steadily expanded in every direction from their Amarr home system. Now, more than two millenniums since the construction of their first jump gate, the Amarrians occupy hundreds of solar systems.

The Gallenteans and the Caldari discovered jump gate technology at relatively the same time, due to the simple fact that their home worlds were then in the same system. This was a little over 700 years ago. The Gallenteans and the Caldari did not enjoy the luxury of finding a relatively intact jump gate relic in their system as the Amarrians did. Instead there were only fragmentary pieces to be found, so they had nothing to build on. Still, these fragments pointed the researchers into the right direction and many jump gate theories were tried out. It wasn’t until after the discovery of a companion brown dwarf, making the system a binary system, that the gate research got on the right track. It wasn’t long after that before the first working jump gate was erected. The Amarr type of jump gate and the Gallente/Caldari one both work on the same principle (see next chapter), but there are some minuscule differences in how the different parts of the gate work exactly.

At that time both the Gallente and the Caldari worlds were bursting at the seams and major effort was made in sending ships to nearby systems to build jump gates. The mass exodus of the Gallenteans and the Caldari to other systems was nothing like the calm, deliberate expansion of the Amarr Empire, where only one system was colonized at a time and every aspect of the expansion was rigidly controlled by the state. Instead, private firms, the first of the Caldari Corporations among them, were chiefly responsible for surveying systems, sending the constructions ships, and selling the territory to the colonists. In the space of 500 years or so the combined expansion of the Gallenteans and the Caldari had almost equaled the total expansion of the Amarrians in 2000 years.

The Jovians are not very forthcoming with information about their technological advances in this regard. Today they employ jump gates functioning on the same principle as the other’s, but nothing is known on where or when the Jovians acquired their jump gate technology. However, they’ve revealed an interesting fact: according to ancient Jovian legends, the Jovians used the ancient jump gates that scatter the world to travel between solar systems a long time ago, before the jump gates crumbled. The legends stay silent about the makers of the gates.