Warp gate

The warp gate was a form of protoss teleportation technology, derived from the gateway, the structure the protoss used to transport infantry across vast distances. A gateway opened a swirling rift that warped protoss warriors from their home territories directly to a military colony, and the warp gate developed from it allowed those warriors to be summoned to nearly any point within the protoss psionic matrix. Built on technology reverse-engineered from ancient xel'naga structures, the warp gate was one of the defining advantages of protoss warfare, letting the Khalai and their rivals reinforce distant fronts in a matter of seconds. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty; Gateway (StarCraft II official site))

Function#

A gateway created a swirling rift that warped protoss warriors from their home territories to the location of the military colony housing the gateway. The operation demanded a phenomenal amount of energy, and like most protoss structures, a gateway could only function while powered by the psionic matrix formed by a network of pylons. Through this matrix a gateway could summon warriors from light-years away, with the travel time measured in mere seconds. Deactivating a gate trapped anyone in mid-transport within the gate's energy matrix, leaving the travelers potentially aware of what had happened until the gate was reactivated and the suspended transport completed. (Gateway (StarCraft II official site); StarCraft Field Manual; StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty)

Origins in xel'naga technology#

The gateway was an inferior form of the xel'naga warp gate. The technology was later upgraded, based on the ancient xel'naga warp gate, giving the protoss access to true warp gates of their own. The protoss barely understood the principles behind the technology, having reverse-engineered it from ancient xel'naga structures found on both Aiur and Shakuras. The warp gate thus stood as an example of the protoss inheriting and adapting the works of their creators without fully grasping how they functioned, a recurring feature of their relationship with the xel'naga legacy. (Gateway (StarCraft II official site))

Factional variants#

Different protoss factions fielded distinct forms of the gateway. The Tal'darim used gateways capable of warping warriors from much farther away than their Khalai counterparts, though their travelers were occasionally torn apart en route, a hazard of the greater range. The Ihan-rii employed gateways that emitted high amounts of dangerous Void energy, marking their teleportation technology as more perilous still. Across these variants the underlying principle remained the same, an inherited xel'naga design that gave the protoss the ability to project their forces across enormous distances in an instant. (StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void)