The Ballet of the Ships is incredible
It's a year-long journey from planet to gate.
At the end of each layover, the caravan is in orbit around a lush world within the habitable zone of the local star. The gates are invariably far past the outer edge of the Oort cloud, two to three light years distant. With the most efficient conventional engines known, the crew would be dust long before reaching it - and while superluminal travel has long been proven possible, no single ship has ever survived a journey.
The first problem is resistance. The hyperspatial medium is entirely unlike the relatively friendly and welcoming near-vacuum of space; sheets of strange matter streaming past at unimaginable velocity will abrade away even the toughest ship hull within minutes. It's possible to generate a shield that can protect a vessel, but mathematically impossible to regenerate it fast enough to do so for more than a couple of hours. No single ship can survive it. But a convoy acting in concert can, rotating out ships from the front while the bulk of the fleet shelters behind them and recharges their shields.
The second problem is coordination. Beyond the shields, the natural laws of normal space are bent and broken. Communication to ships in front of you is impossible, while sending a message to ships behind requires calculating a ballistic trajectory for comms lasers to hit targets which you cannot see.
Hence the Ballet of the Ships. Every hull in the convoy is locked into the ballet, all navigations slaved to it. An elongated toroid, ships in perfect order forming a shield-meshed backbone at the centre as they make their way towards the front, then gradually moving out and falling back as they take their turn burning their shields down to protect the rest. Every movement precisely calculated, planned in advance, taking into account the capabilities of each hull and the needs of the caravan. A shoal of dark metal fish boiling through space with utter blackness behind them and the neon fire of the shield scatter in front.
It's a year-long journey from planet to gate, but at least the view is interesting.
C. Cooke