Wormholes are the method by which humans have managed to explore and colonise space.

They are naturally occurring 5-space anomalies. Many wormholes are connected to a counter-part. When an appropriate energy field is generated in a wormhole, the ship generating it is, to all external appearances, instantly transported to the counter-part wormhole. These energy fields are generated by necklin rods.

The transition of a wormhole is sufficiently complex that a pilot fitted with a neural implant is required to navigate the ship from one wormhole to the counter-part.

Exploration of the galaxy is done by a ship jumping through a wormhole. If the ship doesn’t come back, then the wormhole is assumed to have no counter-part.

A wormhole route is a series of wormholes that must be traversed by a ship to get from one location to another. It is very unusual for planets to be linked directly, usually a ship needs to make multiple “jumps” to get from one planet to the next.

Distance in wormhole travel is not measured in actual physical distance between planets, but in the number of jumps required to get there. Two stars might be right next to each other physically, but to get there using wormholes might require a considerable round-trip.

While travel through the wormhole is instantaneous, the manoeuvring required by ships to get from one wormhole to the next is what takes most of the time and resources. Hence the lower the number of jumps to get from one location to another, the “closer” the destinations are.

A wormhole nexus is an extremely valuable natural resource. Nexuses are solar systems or areas in space where multiple wormholes are located, allowing travel in multiple directions, instead of the more usual single direction travel.

Sometimes these exist in planetary systems, other-times in deep space. In the latter case it is usual that a space station is built in those locations to take advantage of the trade and traffic moving through the area.