Ok.. so here is a general thougth: In place where current wormholes from system to system are, devs could put a normal jumpgate.

Why? Well.. current wormholes are nothing but just a places in space. The ship gets there, activates a womhole and.. dissapears.
Besides take a look at http://www.jgdev.com/~tritian/gateconcept03.jpg
With little effort the system to system travels could be more fun. There are some suggestions:
1) For example every jumpgate would have some limit of energy which it needs to provide a stable hyperspace system to system tunnel. It should be about 250 - 300 energy units (but culd be less or more). So if you have a ship that has heavy battery, and it's almost full you are able to activate every jumpgate. But if you have a FC, some of them would need to be charged for a second time. While you have a pirate on your tail it MIGHT be a problem... (even quite big one..)

2) Every jumpgate remains open for anybody for about 10s (that means anybody who gets thru the ring within that time is warped to another system. After that time tunnel colapses (dissapears would be a better word) and you have to charge it again

3) every jumpgate is one - way (why I will explain later)

4) In some very imporatnt systems you might be able to mount some defensife structures over the jumpgate.. but they must be simple (some turret for example.. ).

And now.. the most important: how do it work with current storyline. Ok here is the story I have told Firemage:

1. Humankind is capable of making hyperspace jumps, but it requires some amount of power.
2. that power increases goemetricly with the range of jump (i know that i almost quote somebody .. please give me a sign who and where it was on this forum!), so a common ship is able to make a jump within about few light days, but a jump of length about one light month exceedes the power output of big stations.
The system are at least few light years away from each other
3. And here the wormholes (as we know them now) comes: A place called wormhole a place where the border between all dimensions is a bit thinner than in other places. The reasons of that are noy yet known (maybe there is a black hole here in paraller universe, or maybe strong graviton waves interfere there). The fact is: that tere are 500m to few kilometers wide areas where with very little energy you are able to made enormous long jumps (between systems..).
4. Yet that power exceedes the power output of most small ships (like ours now). So you need a special device which can make that scrach in time-space even bigger. Here comes the jumpgate: full mechanical (without ANY electronical part) micro graviton accelerator (just like Fermilab or CERN). With gravitons spinning fast around it creates a kind of controlled black hole (but VEERY small - the event horisont is smaller then atom). That black hole lowers the power requirement for generating hyperspace tunnel.
5. When you requered power to jumpgate. It releases it in one controled burst, creating a temporary hyperspace tunnel. Even if nobody enters the tunnel it should be visible on the other side (so you know that someone avtivates a wormhole on the other side)

And now about circumstances:
1. Due to high gravity and other blah blah blah things connected to such an unfriendly enverioment like wormhole (and nearby black hole) Any electronical device that will stay there for a longer time gets fryed (that's why you are unable to mount sophisticated turrets, FOE systems which prevents enemies from avtvating jumpgates ans such near jumpgate)

2. The tunnel is created From her to there.. and it's one way (there is a possibility of blind-end .. a jumpgate that leads to forgotten system from which there is no exit)

3. the jumpgates between two systems don't need to be in one place.. or evetn there could be only one way route between them (but we need more sophisticated universe to do that.. now it means a VEEERY long trip around the universe to get to the other side)

4. The wormholes should have a dynamic value of requred energy: for example if a womhole is caused by slow rotating graviton pulsar (which acts just like a normal one, but it's slower) you could noticed something like that:
For two hours the requred energy to ativate the jumpgate would be around 200EU (energy units). After that it would rise (very fast) up to about.. 20.000EU, and stayed at that level for about 12hours.
The information about current power requirement and jumpgate batteries you culd get by getting /charinfo or buying some special addon to your ship

5. Althought it's not recommended there is a possibility that every ship can make it's own tunnel without a help of jumpgate.. It just HELPS you to lower the power requerement (it lowers it about 10 - 20 times). Big ships (battlecruisers) are able to make their own jump.

6. The same goes to hidden sectors. There might happen that normal wormhole has so high potential that normal warp engine can invoke a hyperspace tunnel

Ok.. despite of my bad english please say what you think.. especialy any issues with current storyline.

Wormholes used to be visible, but they were replaced with the invisible ones we have now......as It would be impossible to have hidden sectors with visible gates...

I like this idea, like I stated in the other thread, but I think that jumpgates should be able to travel much greater distances than regular wormholes.

I like your idea that there needs to be no gate on the other side. This means we can point the Gate at any sector with the right requirements. Perhaps only a sector with certain specifications can recieve a wormhole from the Gate.

But we dont need special ships to open the Gate. We can have a higher fee to open a longer hole.

The storyline explains why the wormholes work like they do.
The universe map does not show a spatial representation to the systems. It's just a connectivity map. Wormholes may die and new ones may form.
Technology did not extend to extreme jump distances.

Grundaulater: you can't put a jumpgate anywhere in space... it doen't create a tunnel but helps small ships creating it..

Moreover you can't change a direction of that tunnel.. It's always from point A to B

Phoenix: let me quote: "6. The same goes to hidden sectors. There might happen that normal wormhole has so high potential that normal warp engine can invoke a hyperspace tunnel". That means NO jumpgate.

raybondo:
> "The universe map does not show a spatial representation to the systems. It's just a connectivity map. Wormholes may die and new ones may form."

Never the less systems must be far away from each other.. the skybox is diffrent in every system, and that means 'really far away'

> "Technology did not extend to extreme jump distances."
So i said: "but a jump of length about one light month exceedes the power output of big stations.". Mankind is unable to make jumps further than about a light week.

Everything depends on current wormholes, powerfull ships can make jumps WITHOUT any external help, small ships like fighters don't have enough power to make it on it's own.. they need jumpgate to help them store power and lower a bit power requerement for jump

http://www.roguelazer.com/vimages/Roguelazer/octree1.jpg

That's very pretty rogue. Now make a pretty animation to put inside it :P

Sorry Ciuciu.....but your english is rather not good......And as ray said it doesn't fit into the storyline. Plus it would just be more useless work instead of bug fixing or adding more gameplay/mission content.

There's a very specific reason why we didn't use jumpgates. There is little benefit to them, and they unnecessarily group users together in a small area, creating bottleneck areas for network gaming. The wormhole areas are extremely large, on the other hand. Not to mention you limit the scale of the craft in the game to whatever can fit through the gate. It really isn't worthwhile, so we developed the entire game and storyline around the wormhole concept. This will be expanded upon in the future, and has an important role in future "Galaxy Exploration" and other things we want to add.

btw CIUCIU, the quote about power was mine, and it was a random bit of garbelygook that i put into a thread at one point. I wasn't meant as a part of the storyline.

I guess we'll just have to wait for secret wormholes then, right? Sure, no problem, only over 200 sectors to look in out of 30 systems ;).

[Bit of off-topic]Very rubbish flash making, didn't take long, ever if it did take a while, it would of still been rubbish anyway :P
http://cpga.vendettaweb.net/warp.swf (Sorry about the box, couldn't be bothered editing it :P) [/off-topic]

I think that "Jumpgates" if the larger ships that can't fit in the gates could warp by them selfs, without the gate's help...

well.. i inteded quite opposite: large ships could open wormholes just as we can now.. but small ships might not had enough power (for example wh needs 310EU, but ship with FC has only 250)

Wh to hidden sectors could be temporary (short phase shift period) and had small energy requirements.. but i think that devs already decided..