In the begining the races only had 'Stargates' which could travel instantly between two fixed points.

In the GC story, the old stargates were not instantaneous--they were basically big fixed-destination hyperspace conduits (taking as long to travel as it would with the first generation hyperdrive).

Any new "stargate" functionality would be something more along the lines of controlled/artificial wormholes. Some of the devs are in favor of this, but Brad has cited the difficulty of making the AI properly utilize them as the reason they've not made an appearance.

Even if they're not instantaneous, they could be very useful as a secure method of traveling. Traders could benefit immensely from them.

Instant travel isn't neccesarily a good thing for gameplay, it opens up some horribly cheesy tactics and makes it a damn sight harder to defend against an uber kill fleet which just runs around massacring anything that isn't defended to the hilt.

If you can see it coming you can try to muster a counter, if it just appears out of nowhere and wipes out your poorly defended colony (why not jump in the transports with it) it comes down to who has the bigger kill fleet. Master of orion suffered from this alot in the late game stages.

It could be done well, but it has to be done carefully. If you dig deep enough you might find the discussion thread we had on this back in the early betas (maybe even before beta 1 come to think of it).

Actually, that would be pretty relievable by making them 1) very expensive to maintain and 2) require you to build both sides of it. There would be limited uses for them, but they would have their uses -- imagine if your ally, who lives on the OTHER SIDE of a Gigantic Galaxy -- surrenders to you. It'd be a pain trying to move ships all the way to and from it. A super-stargate would make travel between them much easier.

Of course, this is a rare thing and would probably be too much work to implement for the tiny situational thingy. But it's still a neat idea, in my opinion.

i figured if a stargate acted like a trade post, you make a ferighter somewere and select a planet to trade to. Same principle but can have a selectable connection of transportation. Like you built 3 constructors, 2 made stargates and the last one connects the two. You get a constructor and select the first stargate, then he'll be miniturized like frieghters coming from planets. but when the constructor is minimized, he selects the other stargate, making a connection, and you see the event horizon appear . I also had another principle, make a stargate on one of your planets (it takes a building slot) and then make a DHD, hyperdrive, inerchal dampeders, and sublight engines on a ship to enable it to be a mobile rally point for ships to get to. Why i mensioned all of those things for a ship? i want it to be difficult for someone to control such a thing, i mean if it was easy to get, everyone one whould be using them and it would be no fun. The size of each would be 1, the engines would be cost 2.

the AI could treat them essentially as rally points

Actually I don't think the AI does use rally points. With their perfect little AI minds they have always got a handle on what goes where. They just don't always know the whens, whys and wherefors