Humans developed the capacity in the 24th century (the main setting is the 28th century), and the drive allows travel to any points that have a signal node. I've recently enjoyed diving into the Dropzone Commander universe, and all species use variations of the foldspace drive. Auto pilot doesn't function if there are hostiles in the area, to prevent the ship's computer from unwittingly flying the pilot into a line of fire. Local gates can be controlled or locked by the nearest base or someone with the proper codes.
No mention is made of whether such drives require any sort of recharge time, as is the case with B5 engines. Capital warships have their own internal jump drives for independent travel, but the game suggests they'll coordinate with a local gate before jumping. Since tachyons can't travel slower than the speed of light, it's a pretty efficient way of connecting distant parts of the galaxy. In a gate, a tachyon coil sends energy into a ripstar and causes it to warp, and this warp releases a very large wave of tachyons that the ship then "rides" to the next sector in the form of a wormhole. Ripstar fragments are also used in a few weapon designs. Several of the factions maintain enclaves there because the ripstars provide a useful defense, and one faction wants to gain an economic advantage by secretly developing the technology to harvest them. Ripstars in open space are a potential threat because they're only a few meters across but generate very strong gravity, and only one explored region actually has them in any abundance.
Tachyon gates were built around a type of singularity called a ripstar, which is relatively rare and very dense. I used to greatly enjoy the first-person space game Tachyon: The Fringe, which had an interface similar to those used in X-Wing and related games, and had a FTL system similar in a few basic ways to the B5 system.
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