As the demand for Alpha Matter greatly outstrips the available supply, any reactor or drive system utilizing Alpha Matter represents a critical resource and potential target for pirates, rival corporations, or even nation-states.

As such, large scale Alpha Reactors must be heavily fortified and defended by dedicated military fleets, which poses a challenge for powering colonies scattered across multiple planets and systems. Accordingly, the Alpha Relay Web was established.

Scattered throughout ASC space, each Alpha Relay utilizes a small supply of Alpha Matter to create a highly focused Space Distortion Field. When connected to other nodes in the network, filaments of highly compressed space are formed. Within these filaments, energy can be transmitted otherwise impossible distances at faster-than-light speeds.

The result is a highly-efficient wireless energy-transfer network. Utilizing the network, the Capital World of a Guild or faction operating a heavily-defended Alpha Reactor can distribute power to any number of constituent worlds.

While network nodes themselves are vulnerable, the relatively small amount of Alpha Matter contained in each node is not an attractive target for pirates, when weighed against the practical and political consequences of interfering with network operation. As infrastructure shared by nearly all factions in ASC space, any party disrupting the service risks being seen as the public enemy of the entire galactic community.