Ca'anian dimensional gate technology

These gates can be found in many solar systems within the belt, they're more sparse outside of the belt, but they span longer ranges there. It's clear that these gates were initially build to make travel easier for the Ca'anian race but they end up being build all over the galaxy and as such they were also used by other races. Most likely, the Ca'anians build additional gates upon other race's request.

These gates allow ships to travel great distances in short amounts of time by using a 'short-cut' trough 4-dimensional space. Ships are 'shot' at high speeds trough 4D space in a protective '3D space bubble'. After travelling trhough 4D space, this bubble unites with 3D space again so the ship it contains can continue its journey there. This is possible due to the fact that 3D space is curved and as such different locations may be closer to each other if one were to measure the distance between them in a 4D system in stead of limiting the measurement of the distance to 3D space.

There's little data left of the experimental phase prior to the usage of these gates on a large scale, since these gates date back several millions of years, to one of the first Ca'anian empires, Neyo-Tori'yi, which was the most advanced and also gave birth to the two Tanyu classes of capital ships. More recent empires never parallelled the technological level of the Neyo-Tori'yi empire, but as new empires rose and fell and ventured out into space, the gates were still there, and up to this date, they still function.
The existance of natural gates and loops which connected distant parts of space with temporary and often unstable bridges of stretched 3D space might have been the inspiration for the scientists to start working on the gate prototypes. The knowledge of the multi-dimensional fabric of space was known to them but until then they were unable to leave 3D space and enter 4D space. The fact that physical laws might have drastically different effects when in 4D space compared to a 3D reality led them to conclude that travel in 4D space would only be possible if they could maintain an amount 3D space around their ships. Theoretically it was possible to 'detach' a certain amount of space, then by having sensors inside that detached bubble of space it was possible to research the behaviour of small amounts of 3D space within higher dimensional space. As predicted, these bubbles remained identical in structure and all physical laws remained the same within a detached amount of space. Since these bubbles were usually launched away from 3D space along the 4th dimensional axis, chances of them ever merging with 3D space again were very slim, so these sensors had the be accompanied with an additional deviced that could detach space so the data could be send back to 3D space. This also proved that detached 3D space could merge again.
Despite their advanced knowledge, they were not able to visualize a 4D system so instead, a theoretical mathematical model was made to map 4D space. Now that they could succesfully detach and merge space, the time had come to make a map of 3D space in a 4D environment. This was done by launching probes into 4D space along several theoretical higher-than-3-dimensional axes and measure the time it would take for them to merge with 3D space again (if ever). This was a huge project that took many years for them to even map the space around their own solar system. When a rough version of the map was ready, areas of interest were mapped with high precision for future deployment of gates.

The first gate prototypes were only able to transport smaller ships and only had limited capabilities to adjust to the fact that 3D space is in motion within 4D space, resulting in changing pathways through 4D, which means that ships may not end up at their destination or may never be able to find their way back to 3D space.
Perfecting the gates took many years until a final model was build which was able to transport the largest ships in the Ca'anian fleet. The gate structure was immense, most of the machinery and electronics were needed to store huge amounts of energy needed to seperate 3D space from higher dimensions.
The gate was equipped with a self-diagnostic system that could interpret changes to the path through 4D space and -if needed- could slighly change the inclination of the 4D-vector along which ships left 3D space, so they would always end up close to the intended destination.
Eventually all routes had 2 gates, to support travel in both directions.



The smaller, original gates can still be found in space, but without the self-regulating mechanisms of the more advanced versions, most of these are no longer safe to use. Since they also lack the more permanent energy storage of the larger versions, they need to be powered up before use, which can take a while and will limit how often these gates can be used.
The really big ships of the Ca'anian fleet, the legendary Tanyu-class was equipped with their own machinery to seperate 3D space from higher dimensions and special pulse-warp engines that allow travel along a 4D-axis, basically making them able to fly through 4D space whenever they require.