At any given time, there are millions of spacecraft traveling at FTL speeds all throughout the bay. Naturally, this travel is exteremely dangerous if unregulated. Hyperspace collisions, while exceedingly rare, are exteremely destructive and can endanger the livelihoods of entire planets if they are large enough. To address this issue, all ships constructed and registered in the bay that are capable of FTL travel are required by decree of the DBUS to maintain certain safety systems and software. Among these systems is the Interstellar Hyperlane Positional Database, or Hypercron. Initially developed by the VAF in 1845, the Hypercron allows ships to calculate optimal FTL routes through the bay based on hyper precise prediction models of the movement of all known planetary bodies in the bay. All ships capable of FTL travel are required to reserve at least 4500 exabytes of high speed RAM to store and access the Hypercron, per the 1859 Gelford Memorial Act of the DBUS. Of course, prediction models are not always perfect, no matter how advanced. This necessitated the development of the Anomalous Movement Alert Signal System, or AMASS. Developed shortly after the implementation of the Hypercron, the AMASS was the first interstellar signal system capable of transmitting information quickly and accurately to spacecraft going above light speed. While initially very rudmentary, it has advanced considerably over the years, and its networks are now used by many other providers to provide non emergency related access to the clusterwide signal web during FTL travel. AMASS was designed to very quickly detect errors in prediction programming, and transmit those errors to ships in lightspeed so they could alter their course accordingly. With the advent of AMASS came the founding of the Interstellar Transit Administration, or ITA. Initially a private watchdog group for the developers of the systems, it soon became a clusterwide agency at the forefront of FTL travel safety, working closely with almost every government in the bay to ensure safe and efficient transportation for all.
