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Communications & Travel

Although the Spacefold Gates allow for instantaneous transit between star systems, communications and travel between the worlds of 26th-century Trinity is still a long and arduous process.

Data, goods, and people must still be ferried from planetary surfaces to orbit, and from orbit to the Gates. In many highly-developed systems, at least one of the Gates will be above the system's major settled world, in which case data transmission is a matter of seconds-to-minutes, and travel is comparable to a suborbital shuttle flight.

However, in a majority of cases the desired Gate is elsewhere in the system (or the nearest Gate does not lead in the desired direction). In these situations, reaching a Gate can take 2-3 hours for data and 1-2 weeks for goods and passengers burning at 1G (unmanned freight drones can burn harder and make that journey in half or a quarter of the time, but are only operated in more developed, secure regions).
This process must then be repeated for each system the desired route travels through, meaning communication across the vastness of human space can take days, while physical travel can easily take months.

Because of these as-yet-insurmountable limitations on space technology, most people choose to only travel in-system or between clusters of neighbouring systems, creating natural neighbourhoods of colonies deeply intertwined with each other's affairs.