Interstellar Travel

Zexonyte
Zexonyte is a highly reflective metal with an indigo sheen, Zexonyte is always cold to the touch, possessing an incredibly high heat resistance. True unrefined Zexonyte is intimidatingly rare and heavy, so when excavated from craters and pits it is most commonly ground to a powder and used as a catalyst for a more mass-producible synthetic variety. Zexonyte possesses a peculiar quality which allows it to interfere with the natural flow of cosmic energies, making it an essential component of what would later become the Zexonyte Drive.

Zexonyte Drives & Shiftspace Travel
Zexonyte Drives allow ship to travel unobstructed through 13 non-visible infinitesimal dimensions at faster-than-light speed by creating an artificial wormhole tunnel. These tunnels are referred to as Shiftspace

Conventional ships do not possess the necessary fuel to power these drives, which means that most spacecraft will have to resort to Shift Gates in order to travel at faster-than-light speed. Smaller ships within fleets often rely on the Zexonyte drives of larger vessels to open Shiftspace pathways for them.

Shiftspace is a specific set of 13 dimensions existing in a very small bundle. While these dimensions are present in normal space, they do not have an effect on the physics of normal space. The Zexonyte present within the drives moves a small amount of matter from the three "normal" space dimensions to Shiftspace, one effectively changes the laws of physics for that piece of matter. To the human eye, Shiftspace portals appears pitch black, because there is nothing in the visible spectrum to see. The primary purpose of the Zexonyte drives is to accommodate the process of transporting matter from ‘’normal space’’ into Shiftspace.

Shift Gates
Shift Gates are artificially-created stationary rings attached to space stations which are capable of creating a Shiftspace portal which connects to another Shift Gate somewhere in the universe. Due to the massive cost in both maintenance and fuel borne through its frequent use and fragile nature, the use of Shift Gates is usually heavily regulated, and often quite pricey in monetary costs.