Gates are large starbase sized rings for interstellar travel. They create a wormhole network between them. So, an actual space-time bridge. Transportation takes a huge amount of energy, and actually moves whole objects be merging two points in space. This is safe for vehicles and people. If the bridge breaks mid-travel, objects are spit out on one side or the other.
Humans discovered the Sol gate (located in the asteroid belt) and extrapolated the technology into smaller teleporters.
Human Teleport Pads are pad-to-pad transportation. The initial pad tears an object into it's molecular parts, and beams them at light speed to the receiving pad. The receiving pad puts them back together again. Note that this is not instantaneous. Teleporting to Mars takes 15 minutes, even if the disassembly and reassembly is near-instant (measured in nanoseconds).
- Human scientist barely understand the technology. It was cobbled together as a necessity of war. The first use of which was basically D-day in the recent Human-Panther War.
- Teleportation Cloning/Manufacture is still recent, about 10 years in use. They're considered a bad omen. See below.
- Yes, this kills you. They have proof.
- Well, unless you got a Friar with you. And you trust him to keep your soul safe.
- And if that's not enough fridge horror for you, Sliders and anyone protected by a Friar is aware during their time of non-existence. During the initial deployment to Titan, that meant that 10% of the troops experienced 70 minutes of terrifying "I have no mouth and I must scream". Most people can handle a few seconds without too much issue (teleporting to the moon or around the earth, for example.) but, interplanetary jumps need to be trained for.
- Anyone magically active treats teleporter pads like fragmentation grenades.
Mort has been able to animate a destroyed teleporter pad before a person arrived. Unfortunately, the inert matter that appears is destroyed beyond a necromancer's ability to reconstitute. Even scarabs can't do that.