Part of what drew me to Stellaris was it appeared like a spiritual successor to a little-known series of old PC games called 'Space Empires', which I came across as a kid and young Teenager. It had a very similar point-to-point warp travel system as in Cherryh.



One of the features in Space Empires was the ability to unlock amazing feats of Stellar Engineering. You could cause Stars to explode into Supernovae, or could collapse them into Black Holes (both of these often had unfortunate consequences for the inhabitants of those systems). You could even manually open Hyperlanes, or close them.



Having been playing around with Jump Drives, Wormholes and Gateways in Cherryh, and using a Collosus for the first time, it occured to me that if a Collosus is big enough to devestate planets, and is a similar size and level of sophistication to a Gateway project, it's possible - just possible - that a Collosus could mount a weapon of creation, not destruction, and still be just as useful.



I put it to you, Paradox, that an option for a Collossus would be to mount a Hyperlane creator. Move your Hyperlane creator Collossus to a system you have access to, get outside of the Gravity well, and click to build a new pathway between the system it is in and the system it (and your other fleets) want to move to.



This opens up a lot of options for more defensively minded Empires, who could use this tool to create a bolt-hole between valuable systems they want to quickly move fleets between. It could be used on the offense, to create a new way into a system you want to move into (perhaps to attack it...) without requiring your fleet to find a way around or to Jump into it. And it gives defensive or peaceful Empires a reason to take the massive investment in resources & Ascention Perks to get a Collossus but aren't interested in glassing enemy worlds.



I think that creation of hyperlanes tied to such a uniqie, fragile and demanding platform is inherently pretty balanced, but for those who disagree, perhaps a limit on how many can be created - or sustained - at a time. Maybe it'd require the Collossus to actively maintain the Hyperlane. Maybe once the lane was created, it would remain, but you can only create so many. I'm sure the finer details of that can be worked out.



Anyway, this idea is on the house! It's something I think could be quite clever.