Thanks again for the thoughts.
I'm back and forth on whether to have an artificial trigger on the midgame event. The reason that I'm leaning toward having one is that trekking back and forth is an intentional part of the gameplay, otherwise Alex would have done something like fast travel to avoid it.
If Active Gates is meant to seem like vanilla content, which is what I think we should strive for, then the player should have to feel a little pain from trekking before we give them a gate. This will also make them appreciate the convenience much more.
The other reason to have a trigger is that we can make the event stand out more, seem more urgent, than if it were some ever-present mission. That'll help guarantee that they actually *find* the content instead of ignoring it and trekking forever. And the mission can be easier than if there is no trigger - no need to make the mission itself a progress check.
Experienced players will find a way to trigger the midgame event whenever they want no matter what, so I'm not too worried about them.
I'd like to stay away from assuming that players will always create colonies. What about people doing a bounty hunter playthrough? Having gates will be very helpful to them and let them focus more on the actual combat instead of trekking.
I'm also trying to stay away from scope creep and creating a big mod with conflicts. Already we've started to see concerns raised about mod (vanilla?) conflicts. For example, I'd imaging that changing faction relationships and creating bounties will require special handling to work with Nexerelin. Plus, it starts to get outside the goal of the mod.
It also might be wise to avoid writing too much of my own Starsector lore than could conflict with future official lore. Although that might happen anyway
A way to sidestep the whole issue would be to force secrecy on the player by preventing them from using a gate if there is any other fleet that can detect them on either side (do fleets exist everywhere at once? or just in a radius around the player?). So, the player must go through transponder off and maybe even go dark.
That way, nobody else even knows that the gates are active. And we can give the player the "activation codes" so even if another fleet flew through a gate, nothing would happen. Remember that the games have been silent for 200+ cycles. Nobody is expecting them to activate.
edit: I've implemented many of these ideas in a new mod, Gates Awakened:
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=16562.0Changing Active Gates would have been too much, I think; some people like it how it is and wouldn't want the limitations added in Gates Awakened.