The FTL Beacon was a device designed by the early Scavangers as a cheap but effective method to improve the efficiency of FTL drives, without having to resort to expensive and often dangerous warp gates, and also to not make conventional FTL drives entirely redundant. FTL Beacons are specialised satellites which use low power Warp Gate technology to streamline paths between nearby FTL beacons, without directly tearing holes in spacetime. This helps make FTL jumps smoother, cheaper and faster. This led to the development of "FTL highways" made of these beacons between high traffic sectors, to save time when shipping goods via the use of conventional FTL drives.
However, a major issue with FTL beacons is that, unlike warp gates, they still necessitate the target vessel to be fully equipped with an FTL drive to utilise them. There was an initiative to install specialised equipment on FTL beacons which would take the role of the navigation equipment of standard FTL drives, to save space usually taken by computer banks, however the initiative never gained enough funding from the New Scavangers, who, at the time, had their leader under the control of an exostential being.
