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The stargate were not instantaneous. Sometimes taking weeks to get from place to place. No point in having them around anymore when a ship can get there faster with hyperdrive.

W/R
SUralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

Actually it often took years, not weeks, to travel through the star-gates.

Indeed. The stargates basically made a weak hyperdrive bubble between worlds. Humans made it stronger and put it on ships.

The stargates, being basically slow, fixed-destination hypergates, were disassembled and used to construct the first hyperdrive-equipped ships (i.e., your colony ship and survey vessel).

They were also massively expensive and left you open to attack (the Drengin blitzed the Arceans by taking over their Star Gates). Hyperdrive is faster anyway, so there is no point in having them.

just curious really, what if you turn off two stargates while a ship was travelling between it?

They were also massively expensive and left you open to attack (the Drengin blitzed the Arceans by taking over their Star Gates).

That never happened. It was part of Brad's original story-manuscripts but it didn't happen in the game.

IIRC, the story in the game is that the Drengin pretended to be a peaceful race when they got in contact with the Arceans. Both races built one stargate each so that they could travel to each other at which point the Drengin sent through a big warfleet. However, the Arceans were ready for them when they exited the gate and disabled their stargate so that no more Drengin reinforcements could come through and annihiliated the whole Drengin fleet.
All this happened before hyperdrive and before the first game.