Warp Gate

"The Warp Gate teleports ships between two of your moons without consuming hydrogen and without carrying cargo. After each jump, both moons' gates enter a cooldown that shortens with the gate's level." - In-game building description.

The Warp Gate is a moon building. It moves a fleet from one of your moons to another one of your moons in five seconds, for no fuel, however far apart the two moons are.

One gate on its own is worth nothing. You need a gate on the moon you leave and a gate on the moon you arrive at, and both moons have to be yours. Nobody else can use your gate and you cannot use anybody else's.

Requirements

• A moon
• Lunar Base level 1
• FTL Tech level 7

Every level of the gate takes one building field on the moon, the same as every other moon building. It never appears on a planet.

What a jump does

Flight time	Five seconds, whatever the distance
Hydrogen	None
Cargo	None, unless your alliance owns Gate Cargo Manifest
Fleet slot	One, held for the five seconds
Recall	No. A jump cannot be cancelled
Direction	One way. The ships stay where they land

The ships arrive and stay, the way a Deploy works. There is no return leg, so the fleet slot comes free again almost as soon as you spend it. A Warp Gate Report lands in your Messages listing everything that went through.

Sending a jump

There are two ways in and they end up on the same screen.

From the Galaxy screen, find your other moon in the list and click the sparkle icon on its row. That icon only shows up when both moons have a gate, and it greys out with the reason when something is blocking the jump.

From the Fleets page, pick Warp Gate in the Fleet Dispatch panel. The mission is only in that list while you are standing on a moon with a gate that is ready to fire.

Either way, pick your ships and press Engage Warp Gate. The Summary reads 00:05 for duration and 0 for hydrogen, and there are no cargo boxes, because a plain jump carries nothing but ships.

Cooldown

Both moons go on cooldown the moment you dispatch, not when the ships land. A jump that aborts still spends it.

Each moon's cooldown is set by its own gate level, not by the level at the other end. A level 1 gate paired with a level 5 gate leaves one moon sitting out a full hour while the other is clear again in about half that.

A moon on cooldown is shut in both directions. You cannot jump out of it and you cannot jump into it, so a third moon cannot use it either until the timer runs out.

The Fleets page prints the state under each moon in My Planets: WG ready when it is clear, a countdown when it is not. The Buildings page shows the same countdown on the Warp Gate row.

Levels

Every level costs exactly twice the level before it, and every level takes another 15 percent off the cooldown.

Level	Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen	Cooldown
1	2,000,000	4,000,000	2,000,000	60:00
2	4,000,000	8,000,000	4,000,000	51:00
3	8,000,000	16,000,000	8,000,000	43:21
4	16,000,000	32,000,000	16,000,000	36:51
5	32,000,000	64,000,000	32,000,000	31:20
6	64,000,000	128,000,000	64,000,000	26:38
7	128,000,000	256,000,000	128,000,000	22:38
8	256,000,000	512,000,000	256,000,000	19:15

There is no level cap. It keeps doubling and keeps shaving 15 percent for as long as you want to pay for it.

Build time is the real cost. Level 1 is fifty days on a bare moon. A Capitol is the only thing on a moon that speeds construction up, and it divides the time by one plus its level, so Capitol 4 turns those fifty days into ten. The Lunar Dockyard alliance perk takes more off on top of that. Get the Capitol up before you start the gate.

You can tear a gate back down from More Info on the Buildings page. It costs a third of the price of the level you are removing, takes time like any other job, and refunds nothing.

Alliance perks

Two alliance perks change how the gate behaves. They apply to every member once the alliance has bought them. Both are bought in the Alliance Store with Alliance Points, which an alliance earns from the weekly Incursion. Gate Phase Sync costs 150 points and Gate Cargo Manifest costs 250. The Lunar Dockyard track in the same store starts at 30 points and shortens every moon build, the gate included.

• Gate Phase Sync. Gates stay usable while they are upgrading. Without it a gate in the middle of an upgrade is dead at both ends until the job finishes.
• Gate Cargo Manifest. Jumps can carry resources. Without it there are no cargo boxes on the dispatch screen at all.

When a jump goes wrong

If the destination moon loses its gate during the five seconds your ships are in flight, they turn round and land back where they started, and the report comes in with a status of Jump Aborted instead. The cooldowns are not handed back. The gate fired.

Moving resources

A plain jump carries ships and nothing else. To move ore, crystal or hydrogen between two distant moons you send a normal Transport, which flies the whole way and burns fuel like any other mission. Do not treat a far away moon as a hiding place either. Moons turn up in Oracle scans and can be probed and attacked the same as a planet.

See Also

• Moon
• Lunar Base
• Lunar Dock
• Oracle
• Capitol
• Fleets
• FTL Tech