Having come from a brutal first half of the 3000s, plagued by constant political wars and squabbles, mankind then entered a second phase of enlightenment in the later half of the millennium. 3506 is the year regarded as the start of the New Enlightenment, and during the period between the years 3506 and 4000 humanity witnessed an unparalleled growth in prosperity and new inventions.
By the year 4078, humanity had terraformed most of the other planets orbiting Sol, and Mars was almost packed to bursting with men. Sprawling metropolitan areas, unfathomably tall skyscrapers and a constant roar of activity were the essence of the planet.
One of the great men that symbolized and embodied the New Enlightenment was Solrac Gabor. “Brilliant” was too humble a word to describe him. He had decided, still a child, that he wanted to be a physicist. To unlock secrets of faster and more efficient travel had been his obsession and goal in life.
It was in October of 4077 that Solrac Gabor published the first three articles on what he named the Gabor Function of Space-Time, which would allow spaceships, through a temporal contraction induced by a module designed by Gabor himself, to travel several light-years in a few seconds, depending on the ship’s physical characteristics. These warps became known as Gabor Thrusts.
The shockwave was immense. Solrac Gabor was, even more than before, the name in everyone’s tongue. The entire Sol system was abuzz in barely contained excitement at this new potential form of travel. Suddenly, the whole universe seemed to be opening up for mankind.
Companies rushed to finance the research and production of the module, wanting to get close to the wealth of opportunities that it promised to bring. Brave souls, filled with wanderlust, planned their trips to far-off Earth-like planets, long ago discovered, but too far to be reached.
After the initial wave of successful “jumps”, the harvesting of helium in Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus intensified greatly, in order to support the fueling needs of ships heading to uncharted space.
One of the greatest and earliest explorers to use the Gabor Thrust was William Browsendson III, born in 4301. He discovered and named many star systems and was one of the greats who paved the way for human expansion beyond Sol.
For the next ten thousand years, mankind spread steadily across the Milky Way. Advances in atmospheric conditioning led to an exponential growth in human settlement of newly found worlds, which could now be transformed and populated much faster.
Although life seemed to be an unavoidable force, present in every new world where the most basic conditions existed, intelligent life was nowhere to be found and mankind felt alone in every direction it looked.
But one day, a gigantic artificial artefact was found in space, orbiting a Light Blue G Type Star, 9 light minutes away from its core. It was named Tannhäuser Artefact after Ferynck Tannhäuser, the captain of the merchant ship who first reported it.
After some exploration, it had been determined that there were several of these large metallic structures of toroids enlaced in each other, constructs of unknown origin, scattered throughout the universe. No one knows who built them, how long ago, or why.
An inter-system joint scientific mission was financed and put together to study the artefact, a difficult task because any object approaching it would disappear.
Only a few years later its purpose was discovered, when disappeared objects and ships started to be found millions of light years away. Soon after, the scientific community established a cause-effect relationship between these objects and their interaction with the Tannhäuser Artefact, later renamed Tannhäuser Gate, and discovered that any object approaching the gate at a certain course and speed would be almost instantaneously sent to another point in the universe, in some instances even being transported in time.
Unfortunately, the formula to predict the destination of anything entering the gates is still elusive and remains undiscovered, but new routes are constantly added to the Galactic Wiki as adventurers explore them and register their data.
Many military groups, encouraged by confidence in their enhanced equipment, have also tried to explore the functionality of these gates. One particularly well documented occasion is that of the encounter between a group of Lumerian Renegades and the Fjelsyn Union, both having been transported in time to the same date, the year 3415, and the same location, Mars. More precisely, the city of Scalabria.
A large number of unknown attempts to use them, estimated to be in the tens of thousands, are performed by daring individuals, who, many times, are never seen again.