Based entirely on a recent discussion in the discord, rewritten faithfully to the conclusions found there:
Two types of gate ought to exist: Warp Gates and Hypergates
TL;DR: Hypergates are cheap short-range fast-travel that can't support lots of traffic, are more easily pirated, and are like the "old highways" that run alongside US interstates while Warp Gates are modestly safe long-range very-fast mass-transit but cause "warp corrosion" to ship hulls, are expensive to build and power, and require big logistics efforts to construct.
Hypergates are (relatively) cheap short-range accelerators that allow the creation of chained linear "highways", about the size of a very small station consisting of the Gate structure itself, batteries, and a power source- solar is the most useful compared to the compactness of generator because hypergates need to work without much maintenance or upkeep, you place them and more or less forget them until you need to travel on them. The hypergate boosts the speed of a ship passing through in a linear direction, it only works one-way and only provides travel in a very restricted tube or extremely narrow cone and each ship passing through a hypergate costs the gate an amount of power proportional to the mass of the ship and the speed that's being magnified. The gate structure can be equipped with upgrades/enhancers that increase range, speed, maximum mass and other variable, but its maximum range and top speed boost are limited compared to what Warp Gates can provide.
Further, the speed boost starts dropping off at about 60% of the maximum range of the Hypergate and falls to about 15% by the end of its max range after which the boosted ship quickly reverts to its normal top speed via space jam/drag. As stated you can build chains of these hypergates to support a space "highway" of sorts, but winds up being cost prohibitive over very long distances, their primary use is in setting up early fast-travel lanes, clever uses for ship deployments, and supporting the construction of Warp Gates. The supposed max range of a Hypergate, we concluded, was around 100km if the gate was equipped with only range upgrades and much less without those min-maxed upgrades.
Since hyperlanes exist in realspace, ships need to be wary of obstacles that might wind up in their way, a safeguard of the hyperlane drops ships out of the hyperlane if an obstacle is within ~500m of the traveling ship, allowing it to decelerate before it impacts, but the deceleration may not be fast enough to avoid impact, so a pilot must remain aware enough to evade the object and avoid collision- this allows pirates and militaries to interdict travelers, and promotes cleaners and military patrols to regularly travel a hyperlane and remove offending debris and ne'er-do-wells, and is an essential part of setting up and maintaining a successful space highway. EDIT: A hyperlane can be exited at any time by cutting speed and letting drag take hold of the ship, though the hyperspeed inertia will still take a moment to dissipate (and once lost cannot be regained by increasing thrust), or leaving the hyperlane's zone of effect, which removes the hyperspeed bonus immediately, causing drag/inertial effects to reduce the ship to its normal speed.
Warp Gates, on the other hand are about as costly as large stations and require massive power support to work, but they facilitate fast, long-range, mass-transit with much greater efficiency compared to Hypergate highways. Warp Gates come in pairs and only allow travel in one direction, so you need to build outbound and inbound pairs to create two-way avenues, but once the first pair is built, tackling the construction of the opposite pair becomes much easier. Warp gates have a complex travel mechanism that compromises several travel mechanics to support safer long-range travel but still allow pirates and anti-pirate patrols to initiate their gameplay sequences.
When a Warp Gate is online it consumes a static amount of power and provides a set travel duration and can support ships up to a given mass based on its own set of upgrade modules. Ships entering a Warp Gate under this system begin traveling on a hyperlane for the first 10-20km, certain upgrades reduce the length of this hyperlane phase of travel, once the end of the hyperlane is reached the ship is assumed to have accumulated sufficient "warp charge" on its hull to enter warpspace and achieve stupendous velocities impossible within of realspace, avoiding the danger of deep space debris and pirate or military interdiction. However, hulls charged with "warp energy" suffer corrosion, a necessary cost of the miracle of warp travel, so a key service at receiving gate terminals is likely to be anti-corrosion service, both to repair corroded hulls and "hose down" exiting vessels to eliminate corrosion stacks on ship plating before the corrosion sets in. When a ship reaches the end leg of their journey through a Warp Gate they exit warp space and travel another 10-20km on an exit hyperlane (the same length as the entry hyperlane), dissipating most of the accumulated "warp energy", and finally return to normal travel velocities after passing through the receiving Warp Gate.
These entry and exit hyperlanes allow pirates/militaries to still interdict travelers but must risk setting up near the gate where patrols can be expected to be on the lookout for them (10-20km of open space is still very hard to fully patrol without a large police force, so piracy around warp gates isn't impossible, nor is policing against them), preventing the extreme unfun of being pulled out halfway between two gates and having no realistic way to finish a journey to the other gate location. Warp Gate can have their range, maximum ship mass, and speed upgraded like Hypergates and also reduce the length of their entry and exit hyperlanes- ideas were also floated about having an upgrade to reduce the corrosion stacking rate while in warpspace at the cost of power and speed. Warp Gates are effectively so large, rivaling large or even mega stations in size, that they don't have any realistic limit on how far they can be upgraded, only the feasibility of paying the power costs of those upgrades.
The devs have said that they see a "Tier 1" Warp Gate as being capable of bridging gaps of up to 5000km in length, so the estimated base range of a Warp Gate was set around 1000km (10 max-range Hypergates) and with theoretically unlimited upgrade potential they can go much much farther if the power systems can be constructed and maintained to support them. Furthermore, the corrosion effect of warpspace means very long range Warp Gates may only be accessible to ships built to resist corrosion, meaning not every ship will want to use them and business opportunities for "warp tenders" or "jump ships" open up, as well as incentivising a chain of shorter gates with repair services set up between them to service less specialised ships on those same very long routes. It can also be argued that the cost of Warp Gates would further incentivise continued use of Hypergate highways to service shorter range travel, though it was also recognized that a Warp Gate pair could be set up at a range of 20-40km to avoid entering warpspace altogether and create very fast short-range hyperlanes that maintain 100% speeds at higher maximum velocities than a Hypergate could muster though at a much higher power cost.
Two types of gate ought to exist: Warp Gates and Hypergates
TL;DR: Hypergates are cheap short-range fast-travel that can't support lots of traffic, are more easily pirated, and are like the "old highways" that run alongside US interstates while Warp Gates are modestly safe long-range very-fast mass-transit but cause "warp corrosion" to ship hulls, are expensive to build and power, and require big logistics efforts to construct.
Hypergates are (relatively) cheap short-range accelerators that allow the creation of chained linear "highways", about the size of a very small station consisting of the Gate structure itself, batteries, and a power source- solar is the most useful compared to the compactness of generator because hypergates need to work without much maintenance or upkeep, you place them and more or less forget them until you need to travel on them. The hypergate boosts the speed of a ship passing through in a linear direction, it only works one-way and only provides travel in a very restricted tube or extremely narrow cone and each ship passing through a hypergate costs the gate an amount of power proportional to the mass of the ship and the speed that's being magnified. The gate structure can be equipped with upgrades/enhancers that increase range, speed, maximum mass and other variable, but its maximum range and top speed boost are limited compared to what Warp Gates can provide.
Further, the speed boost starts dropping off at about 60% of the maximum range of the Hypergate and falls to about 15% by the end of its max range after which the boosted ship quickly reverts to its normal top speed via space jam/drag. As stated you can build chains of these hypergates to support a space "highway" of sorts, but winds up being cost prohibitive over very long distances, their primary use is in setting up early fast-travel lanes, clever uses for ship deployments, and supporting the construction of Warp Gates. The supposed max range of a Hypergate, we concluded, was around 100km if the gate was equipped with only range upgrades and much less without those min-maxed upgrades.
Since hyperlanes exist in realspace, ships need to be wary of obstacles that might wind up in their way, a safeguard of the hyperlane drops ships out of the hyperlane if an obstacle is within ~500m of the traveling ship, allowing it to decelerate before it impacts, but the deceleration may not be fast enough to avoid impact, so a pilot must remain aware enough to evade the object and avoid collision- this allows pirates and militaries to interdict travelers, and promotes cleaners and military patrols to regularly travel a hyperlane and remove offending debris and ne'er-do-wells, and is an essential part of setting up and maintaining a successful space highway. EDIT: A hyperlane can be exited at any time by cutting speed and letting drag take hold of the ship, though the hyperspeed inertia will still take a moment to dissipate (and once lost cannot be regained by increasing thrust), or leaving the hyperlane's zone of effect, which removes the hyperspeed bonus immediately, causing drag/inertial effects to reduce the ship to its normal speed.
Warp Gates, on the other hand are about as costly as large stations and require massive power support to work, but they facilitate fast, long-range, mass-transit with much greater efficiency compared to Hypergate highways. Warp Gates come in pairs and only allow travel in one direction, so you need to build outbound and inbound pairs to create two-way avenues, but once the first pair is built, tackling the construction of the opposite pair becomes much easier. Warp gates have a complex travel mechanism that compromises several travel mechanics to support safer long-range travel but still allow pirates and anti-pirate patrols to initiate their gameplay sequences.
When a Warp Gate is online it consumes a static amount of power and provides a set travel duration and can support ships up to a given mass based on its own set of upgrade modules. Ships entering a Warp Gate under this system begin traveling on a hyperlane for the first 10-20km, certain upgrades reduce the length of this hyperlane phase of travel, once the end of the hyperlane is reached the ship is assumed to have accumulated sufficient "warp charge" on its hull to enter warpspace and achieve stupendous velocities impossible within of realspace, avoiding the danger of deep space debris and pirate or military interdiction. However, hulls charged with "warp energy" suffer corrosion, a necessary cost of the miracle of warp travel, so a key service at receiving gate terminals is likely to be anti-corrosion service, both to repair corroded hulls and "hose down" exiting vessels to eliminate corrosion stacks on ship plating before the corrosion sets in. When a ship reaches the end leg of their journey through a Warp Gate they exit warp space and travel another 10-20km on an exit hyperlane (the same length as the entry hyperlane), dissipating most of the accumulated "warp energy", and finally return to normal travel velocities after passing through the receiving Warp Gate.
These entry and exit hyperlanes allow pirates/militaries to still interdict travelers but must risk setting up near the gate where patrols can be expected to be on the lookout for them (10-20km of open space is still very hard to fully patrol without a large police force, so piracy around warp gates isn't impossible, nor is policing against them), preventing the extreme unfun of being pulled out halfway between two gates and having no realistic way to finish a journey to the other gate location. Warp Gate can have their range, maximum ship mass, and speed upgraded like Hypergates and also reduce the length of their entry and exit hyperlanes- ideas were also floated about having an upgrade to reduce the corrosion stacking rate while in warpspace at the cost of power and speed. Warp Gates are effectively so large, rivaling large or even mega stations in size, that they don't have any realistic limit on how far they can be upgraded, only the feasibility of paying the power costs of those upgrades.
The devs have said that they see a "Tier 1" Warp Gate as being capable of bridging gaps of up to 5000km in length, so the estimated base range of a Warp Gate was set around 1000km (10 max-range Hypergates) and with theoretically unlimited upgrade potential they can go much much farther if the power systems can be constructed and maintained to support them. Furthermore, the corrosion effect of warpspace means very long range Warp Gates may only be accessible to ships built to resist corrosion, meaning not every ship will want to use them and business opportunities for "warp tenders" or "jump ships" open up, as well as incentivising a chain of shorter gates with repair services set up between them to service less specialised ships on those same very long routes. It can also be argued that the cost of Warp Gates would further incentivise continued use of Hypergate highways to service shorter range travel, though it was also recognized that a Warp Gate pair could be set up at a range of 20-40km to avoid entering warpspace altogether and create very fast short-range hyperlanes that maintain 100% speeds at higher maximum velocities than a Hypergate could muster though at a much higher power cost.
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