FTL

FTL travel, or travelling faster than the speed of light, is essential to the functioning of the Type II civilizations that inhabit the Milky Way Galaxy. In physics, the speed of light is the universal speed limit, and there is no way to exceed this limit by conventional means. The most powerful thrusters ever made would need years of continuous output to even get to half the speed of light; particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider on Earth can accelerate subatomic particles to within a millionth of the speed of light, but the speed of light cannot be reached, much less broken by conventional means.

The Gateway Network
The Gateways are the gigantic, enigmatic, and incredibly ancient devices in every known star system that exploit the hyperspace nodes to circumvent the laws of physics. Dormant Gateways look like collections of four concentric rings that spin in alternating directions. The smallest of these rings has been measured at over 20 kilometers in diameter, with the largest being more than 50 kilometers in diameter, and radiometric dating puts them at over half a billion years old.

When two linked Gateways are activated, they can bend the fabric of space between them via some unknown mechanism, and create corridors of hyper-compressed space, or hyperspace for short. Within these corridors, the distance between two points in space is compressed by a factor of ten million, give or take; so an object travelling at 30 meters per second in hyperspace would be travelling at the speed of light relative to a stationary observer. Given that capable spacecraft usually travel at speeds far faster than 30 meters per second, the Gateways allow spacecraft to travel at many hundreds to thousands of times the speed of light relative to anything outside hyperspace.

Every Gateway has a set list of several other "partner" Gateways it can connect to at any given moment. The number of partner Gateways is unique to each one. Most have up to 20 connections, with the exception of the Nexus Gateway connected to The Nexus, which connects to over a hundred others.