Sunshine image - Shattered Origins - Guardians of Unity Game

It's called a Zone Gate, and is used to travel between sectors. Sometimes you can freely open these to choose which sector you wish to travel to, on other occasions, the story requires you to head in one direction.

So I take it this means that - like 99% of space games - ships in this game have no interstellar travel method of their own and are utterly depentent on jump (or zone) gates to get around? If so, they don't deserve to be out in space, at least not beyond their home systems. That's like building a house on sand; the gates get destroyed and bang, you're logistically crippled! The intro cutscene for X-Beyond the Frontier is an excellent example of this.

Except that the difference between other jump gates and our zone gates is that these can be generated practically anytime, because all it does is open a "door" to an already existing link between two sectors. Think of this as a corridor, which your ships enter, and then exit on the other side. It doesn't matter if a gate, so this door is destroyed, because in that case, you just open it again.

Also, this means that it isn't possible to just open gates anywhere you wish, because there are fixed locations for this purpose.

I'll take that as a yes then.

Yeah, it's a yes, but don't think that this implies that spaceships have nothing to do in outer space, beyond their home system. These fixed corridors provide a path between many-many galaxies, and thus travel IS possible to long distances.

You need to put aside your conception of the real outer space in order to accept the kind of abstract alternate universe of Shattered Origins, along with the mysterious radiation, the small sectors and the strange travel mechanism.