FTLA routes are not portals

In Far From Humans, an FTLA route is not a round gate politely waiting for a ship to pass through it. The tear exists within spacetime itself. Human infrastructure merely listens, measures and stabilises it for long enough.

Concorders are irregular constellations of Needles around an empty centre. Each Needle carries metrology, a witness mass, radiators and the means to correct its position. Their arrangement explains the route more clearly than a luminous sign could.

When the route opens, the sky does not necessarily fill with energy. A black seam may instead remove stellar parallax and make part of space appear no longer to belong to the same world.

This design makes the cost of travel visible. Maintaining a route consumes heat, time, infrastructure and sometimes the capacity of other passages. Leaving is therefore never merely a choice of destination.