OC Lore: Rift Travel
So rift travel, huh. Must’ve been one hell of a rock you’ve been living under if you’ve really never heard of it.
I can’t really give you all the details, on account of me being neither a witch nor a gate engineer myself, but you’ll get the "pilot who’s flirted with her fair share of witches"'s perspective.
The long and short of it is that witches can create portals, which they prefer to call rifts, to voidspace. Essentially a different dimension that, as far as we’ve been able to probe at least, contains not much of note. Add some training, or well, more like years full of training, and those rifts can be of a scale and distance that allows spaceships to travel through them. I’ve been told that most people can pick up the basics of void magic and make their first stable rift in a few months, but y’know, a spaceship needs a slightly bigger rift than the poor coffee mug you’ll have sacrificed during training.
Which brings me to the next point: there are a ton of ships out there, but not nearly enough witches capable of interstellar travel for each one to have their own. Of course big corporations and the military and such can afford to employ witches for all their important ships, but the average person is rather out of luck there unless they happen to be good friends with a powerful witch. Unfortunately nobody has found a way so far to create rifts without a witch being involved, but there are ways to stabilize and maintain a rift once created, which is what those big gates are. It’s interesting how different their designs can be though, some look very industrial, some are more sleek, and some look like they came right out of the laboratory that invented them with big crystals and magic gadgets on full display. I think that last category you see most often when it’s constructed and operated directly by some arcane institute.