What is the Sundala Starzone?

A Matryoshka Formation

Whether its a natural formation or one that was intentionally shaped by means beyond our understanding, the starzone's formation is dark and hard to spot unless one knows what they're looking for. The structure's vast dark clouds of gas and shaped structures of dark matter are laid out in a way which mostly hides the systems that lay within and its surrounding formations of dark matter make most approaches with FTL drives hazardous at best and lethal at worst.

A Darkmatter Shell

A massive halo of exotic particles, the dark matter 'shell' wrapped around the starzone was one of the major delays for humanity accessing the cluster of stars and systems that lay at the formation's center. It's shape varies and changes as the starzone orbits the galaxy but overall there are only two main approaches who's dimensions change and twist with the interstellar winds. FTL outside of these carefully curated points is next to impossible due to the concentrated structure of the formation's dark matter forcing one to jump along the invisible tunnels of normal density space.

Carefully Curated Garden Worlds

Where is the Starzone located?

1.5 Kiloparsecs below the galactic elliptical, roughly below the Orion Spur in a gaseous tendril of of the Perseus Arm. While mostly enclosed in cold dark nebula a few of the systems were open to observation in a freak gravitational lensing event witnessed by Aadrika Sundala, a deep space astronomer stationed near Pluto. Using various techniques she and her team determined the cluster of systems held an unusual number of worlds displaying signs of habitable atmospheres and liquid water. Her discovery would sit off to the side as a curiosity for nearly half a century.

What happened to earth?

“Polluted and scoured for a start, it was still viable for some agriculture and of course dealing with billions of us. Then came the final war, nukes and kinetic bombardment, first burned to embers and then dropped into the deep freeze of an impact nuclear winter. They still managed to evacuate some, their stories preserved for the record. But our pale blue dot is more or less useless for at least the next several thousand years.”

- An unnamed survivor of the Solar System

What is the method of FTL?

The Light Gate

Shorthand Note: A pair of stargates that are always on, they allow entry into a pocket dimension that dramatically shortens the distance between the gates via space time tunneling aka a wormhole. One gate can be used to enter various different pocket dimensions via the approach orientation (IE your 'aiming' through your current gate at another one).

The Fold Drive

The Original Jump Drive