Technomancer archeology report. # (4?)
[ [ Caution. Classified. Techno rank A or above eyes only. ] ]
[ [ Skullcorp is also suspected to have broken into the archives and obtained these details as well, Which were then sold on the black market to Grimsgate. ] ]
The Brotherhood space station was only discovered a few hundred years ago, around the time of the founding of the Brotherhood kingdom, a pioneer by the name of koppter while surveying the area for a suitable dwelling, noted an unusual geological formation. Ultimately he choose to dwell here as he could charge people entry to view the unusual formation.
It was not perhaps the oddly discolored dirt and regolith that made up this formation that was unusual, times past many a similar material was found, it was suspected to be ejecta and debris from some far distant planetary impact. What was odd, was that it was floating in the air, in complete defiance of all understood notions of Gravity.
Although koppter for a time lived nearby he never had the courage to actually scale or even build on the object, and over time it became simply a local curio, as the nearby townships of Brotherhood and Firetown grew and flourished. Eventually koppter left the area and his dwelling was transferred in ownership to lele and warpig, who extensively renovated it.
The first detailed analysis of the object was by pig_assassin, the mayor of Firetown at the time. He recorded several interesting energy readings and spacial flux fields, which helped him to develop a machine dubbed the mob ship. A machine capable of similar feats of anti gravity, and a cornerstone in the later technology of Paladin technology Incorporated, and Brotherhood Industries. However the residents of Firetown being rather superstitious eventually drove him from Firetown and tore down his castle and research facility. Firetown was then incorporated with the larger community of the Brotherhood Kingdom - and was no longer known as firetown. The origins of the old name are fuzzy, but a clue - a small shrine dedicated to fire located on the former site of the castle offers a possible answer.
The Mobship remained for a long time, and after the former Firetown residents died or moved elsewhere, it was eventually reclaimed and added to the Joint Paladin and Brotherhood defense task force, formed after the loss of a deep space research facility to an unknown attacker. This attacker also attempted to destroy the Paladins Beta stargate space station but on failing to even scratch it, was apparently driven back into deep space by ships from Brotherhood, the Paladins, and a small group of mostly lightly armed or unarmed ships from the Derp Alliance. Unofficially tho, given none of these ships could even damage the unknown ship, and took significant damage in the attempt it is suspected it simply left on its own, the ships posing no real threat, and it being unable to effect damage on the space station.
Anyway, the odd floating object - After the nearby residence was acquired by warpig, he redeveloped it into a small space port. After adding several hundred tons of airfield, and rooms, as well as storing numerous aircraft and space craft on it, it was discovered, it had not even moved. Estimates of the amount of weight it could hold were found to be so high that it was assumed to be in error, and fearing the entire thing could fall out of the sky, and crush the small stargate facility below it (which was used to travel to it safely) - an organized attempt was made to examine the object in detail. Particularly after ground penetrating radar detected several chambers of an unknown material located inside it. This combined with the earlier research notes of pig_assassin prompted them to start excavating the lower levels of the object.
Results came quickly. The object was as expected made up of material originally from space, so was in effect a small asteroid. Unusually it had strange stress fractures and compression in the rock, suggesting it had hit, or been hit by something at a very high speed at some point. It was assumed initially that it was from impacting the ground, however no signs that anything had ever hit the ground were ever found anywhere.
Their next concern is the nature of the chambers and material embedded deep within, and they continued to drill deeper into it. Eventually they found a twisted metal object inside it and further excavation found it to be the shattered remains of a very very large star ship of some sort, of a configuration they had never found before. Not that they would recognize it if they found another one. It was all almost completely destroyed, only a small percentage of the object remained, and an even smaller percentage of that was intact enough to identify what any of it was. Whatever it was, it must have hit this asteroid at quite a speed, and embedded itself. After many tons of bulkheads and scrap material had been cut away, they encountered a more heavily armored and shielded section. Which was also the source of most of the previously detected energy fields. It took them 6 months to cut into this last section, in the end using a dangerously modified stargate to vaporize out one side. On entering the chamber they were stunned by what they found...
It was a combined power reactor, torsion field generator, and a computer core, of such raw power, they could not even guess at the size of the object it had originally been used for. It had enough power to not only hold the entire Asteroid, and Starbase in place, but could probably have held 200 more without even breaking a sweat. They could not understand what so much power in both processing and energy could possibly be needed for.. an entire city in space would need less. Well.. they didn't understand, until that is; someone tried to work out what one of the inactive systems were - they activated one of the circuits outside of the main idling system used to keep it floating in the air. The great computer came online, and in a big way. The entire asteroid started vibrating and humming. Even the ground nearby shook so much that the small gate facility got buried underneath it. After a time figures started flying down one of the read outs, which was translated to be some sort of weight and mass measurement. Which much to their surprise was close to their own estimates of the weight of the object, and space port combined. The shaking continued to increase, although it stabilized somewhat, but energy readings continued to rise, until they went off the scale of their apparatus. At this point fearing the worst, an evacuation was ordered, an improvised exit was dug out of the stargate facility below which at that point was still mostly buried, to allow escape - and they fled and hid in the old mines of Firetown. Shortly after there was an earsplitting howl, shattering windows as far away as Nyan City, much like the sound of a bath going down a plughole only much louder and much higher pitched. After there was silence. No shaking, no energy readings at all.
Those that ventured out reported naught but a few broken windows and dinnerware, and some minor landslides.... and that the object, all the spaceships and aircraft, and the entire asteroid, except for a few random bits of scaffolding was gone. A few readings confirmed no unusual radiation or poisons, and the evacuation was cancelled. People returned.
The whole object was written off, and people moved on with their lives. However, a short time later technicians returned to the small stargate transport facility, mostly forgotten, buried as it was under the former site of the object, with hopes of salvaging the gate for use elsewhere - and an odd discovery was made. Not only was the gate still active. It was still connected somewhere.
Those that ventured to enter the gate never returned, so unmanned cable probes were improvised, designed to go in take photos and air samples, and then reverse back. What they discovered shocked everyone. Firstly, the air sample came back negative. Nothing but hard vacuum. Secondly, on the other side was gravity, slightly weaker than normal, possibly artificial, thirdly, they found the people that tried to go in previously. Well what was left of them after sucking hard vacuum anyway. Lastly most interesting of all.. was the photo showed the power core still intact and still active. The readouts had changed as well, something about a mass hyperbole shift.. which roughly translated meant a hyperspace jump. Well now they knew what it was for. It was a hyperspace computer and drive system designed for something so big it was able to move the entire thing into deep space without even trying.
Eventually space suits were constructed, and they explored further, discovered for the most part their space port.. was now a lot more literally so. They now had a space station not a space port.
The subsequent details are mostly trivial, but they were able to tether it, and link it to the (formerly) dormant beta gate space station facility which had previously been discovered by the Paladins.. but that is another story.
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