I am sitting in a casket of wrought, spun and airtight welded iron, waiting for my turn to jump hundreds, maybe million of light-years into the next solar system. I am only one in a line of ship captains waiting for the same. Pray tell if people actually know hat this instant travel to the next system actually is?
FTL “ Faster than light travel - has been around for millennia. The technology of gate travelling; travelling by use of artificially, man-made wormholes, however is still a rather young technology. Nevertheless, humans alike have grown naturally accustomed to it within only a few generations. Isn´t the adaptability of man a great thing..

The ship up ahead has sent signal to the gate computers of its intent of use. Imagine then the number of computers locking on to the vessel, instantly scanning it for structure, cargo content, ammunitions and turrets, and all its defensive capabilities. Those are inanimate objects and are, as far as quantum physics go, easy to replicate. What pose a challenge is how to disassemble and reassemble all the living and organic mass inside the vessel, transport this to another system, then reassemble it on the other side. Thats when gate travel become amazing.

Imagine the gate computers scanning the ship, down to sub-atomic levels, performing trillions of calculations in mere microseconds. The amount of data needed to correctly calculate sub-atomic disassembly of a ships structure, modules, cargo content and some 2500 strong crew is multitudes that of the power a human brain can comprehend in a single lifetime. Yet the gate computers does this, sometimes thousands of times per day. Imagine the Jita system, with its thousands of visitors per day, possible millions of incoming and outgoing jumps. Hundreds of different ship types, and a staggering amount of different cargo articles. All performed with not a glitch in the process.

As the vessel up ahead is bombarded with energy, literarly dissolving the vessel infront of us as we watcha, sends a tingling feeling creeing up my neck. Its truly a magnificent sight, as a Domonix change from solid state, to a silvery, transparent, shimmering object. Then, it simply vanishes.
Veteran pilots tell legends of mishaps in the very birth of gate travelling, from the time when the prototype tests were performed when all the engineers and scientists had to support their ideas with, were theoretical math, quantum mechanics, physics and theories on biophysical subjects.
Some stories tell of problems in the initial staging, in the pilot runs. Problems in free radicals and fluctuating variables in the tachyon cells caused glitches in subatomic dispersion. Some pilots came out on the other side horribly disfigured, others came out whole, but with completely different personality, and some simply went mad. The problem was how to teach a computer to set up a personality, memories or even line of thoughts, values and beliefs? And even worse - how to do it with multiple subjects within the same matrix defining a travelling vessel?
There are yet stories of pilots who never reappeared at all, leaving solar legends of ghosts in the warp path waiting for the right moment to corrupt a vessel and its entire crew.
No one knows where these alleged ghosts would be, what they would do if they inflitrated a transported vessel, or even wether the legends were ever true. Oh the lure of the unexplained....
Psychosis from travelling through the early jump gates gave another risk factor one had to consider. Several pilots became unexplainably afflicted, and thou science couldn´t find anything clinically wrong with the patients, the condition were reluctantly accepted. For those who were taken by the psychosis, the condition was permanent, and always lethal. Luckily scientists improved variations in the warp stream, and managed to eradicate the problem causing this psychosis. Why only a few travellers were afflicted were never discovered, and the problem soon got lost in legends.

The ship in front of us starts to shimmer, the process of disintegration has started. The ship is a mighty Raven, the Caldari missile powerhouse. A myriad of missile launcher slots, and excellent defensive shield capabilities. A ship like that in the hands of a capable captain is a fearful opponent in all means.
Trillions of charged particles bombards the hull, penetrating the structure to fill every molecule on and in the vessel.
For those involved, time seem to stop as the process overload every brain function, down to the smallest of brainwaves.ingno one feel anth, yet I can´t help but think of the feeling of being ripped apart, disintegrated, vaporized even. And it´s all accepted as a perfectly normal. For me it´s not as time stops, honestly. I have the feeling of being set apart. My senses split and my soul sensing it from beyond. Naturally if you take time to be conscious about it, to notice, to analyze. Most people simply sit back and let it happen. After 3-4 jumps, it become boring, your world goes dark, then you arrive on the other side, and light returns.

Energy from the gate builds up to a climax, with zettabytes of information broken to quarks of information. Using a beam of hypercharged ions, loaded with datas, its blasted into space. Within seconds, the ship, its crews and its cargo has gone from physical object to a hurdling beam of energy and information. Through hyperspace they are transported, passing through fabric of space itself - Halfway between reality and oblivion. Thou we pass both past and through thousands, if not millions of orbital bodies; stars, planets, moons and asteroids, our own matter-stream remain untainted, unchanged and uninterrupted.
Meanwhile, somewhere else a supercomputer receives a signal.

Rinse - repeat, recreate.....