Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility
(Also sometimes known as the "Crossings Hypergate Facility".) The best-known and most senior worldgating facility in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
The Crossings is a massive, almost entirely artificial joint private / commercial worldgate complex originally built on the site of a naturally occurring worldgate on Rirhath B. Over some thousands of years the facility has been rebuilt and augmented many times, until it now spans an acreage which (in Nita's estimation) is probably equivalent to that of a very large city, or a very small state.
Some of the technology powering the Crossings is native: some is imported from other gate capable cultures on this side of the Galaxy, and it has an ancient affiliation with the Interconnect Project based out of the Alterf system before that star went nova. (Many Interconnect Project facilities were relocated to the Crossings after the rafting out of the populations of Alterf IVa and the system's other inhabited bodies.) The fortuitous combination of Rirhath B's relatively high mass (for such a small world), its isolated position close to a high-energy star, and its low permanent population, along with an Alterf-originated SunTap gate power system, has allowed the Crossings to implement an extraordinarily large number of gates without risking such dangers as threshold crash, which have hampered the largest-scale implementations in the past.
The Crossings is famous for the power, range and number of its worldgates -- some six hundred "hard" (fixed) and four hundred "soft" (programmable) gates, with half again as many more of each type now being added in the ongoing Phase Fifteen expansion project. The facility is also renowned for its beautiful late Lilene architecture, and in particular for its implementation, on a massive scale, of the Lilene "elective ceiling" concept -- which both protects daytime travellers from the system's ferocious Class O sunlight, and allows nighttime travellers an unparallelled view of the planet's extraordinary night sky. (Rirhath B is sited in the middle of a particularly tight cluster of short-term variables.)
Administration of the Crossings is handled by a special committee of the Rirhait planetary government, which appoints a Stationmaster from one of the Rirhait species best suited for such duties. The Master is directly responsible for all management of scheduling, passenger handling and physical plant. (SYWTBAW et seq.)
See also: Rirhath B.
(BTW, greetings to our inlinking cousins from the Television Without Pity forums.)