Bastion

Bastion

Created by: WingedCat

Technology: +3 (Slipstream Mastery) Environment: -1 (Survivable) Resources: +2 (One significant export)

Connections

Aloha, Clipping, Dandelion, Flare

In-system Travel

Part of Bastion's unique nature means that it does not have a true 'slipknot;' instead it has a region by which slipspace can be accessed that is about 400,000 km 'below' the sphere's surface.

The megastructures orbiting the primary are about 800,000 km 'below' the sphere's surface, but travel time between them and any point in either the habitable shell or the jump shell can vary wildly.

	Slipknot	Bastion	Megastructures
Slipknot	3 days	3 hours	3 hours
Bastion	3 hours	3 days	5 hours
Megastructures	3 hours	5 hours	3 days

Description

This appears to be what remains of those who attempted to ascend from what is now known as Clipping. It is unknown what the full system is, as all jump points are within a single megastructure: a giant metal shell (covered in soil and water to an average depth of 1 km), about 1 AU in radius, which sustains gravity pointed outward - 1G on its surface - and an artificial sun at its center, with atmosphere near the shell. No one has gotten through the shell and returned to tell the tale (either they're vaporized reaching it or sucked out without being able to send images back, while holes far into the metal layer quickly seal themselves up); metal-penetrating sensors report no signals beyond about 5 km below the surface, as if the universe just ended that far down.

The surface is habitable enough, though frequently wracked by extreme weather, mostly hurricanes and storms. No fixed infrastructure has been able to stand for more than a few years. As a result, all habitation is mobile. This is the main thing that has degraded the local industrial base, although it started at the upper edge of T4. This extreme weather, and the energy spikes that occasionally burst up through the shell (apparently originating from the sensor void), create compressed materials not generally available in the rest of the cluster, though these must be opportunistically mined.

A humongous ancient structure, believed to be the remnants of the transcendence engine, is in close orbit of the star, providing a day-night cycle for most of Bastion's interior surface: 16 hours day, 1 hour dusk, 6 hours night, 1 hour dawn. The "poles" it does not shield are the hottest and least habitable regions. Salvage expeditions have yet to return anything useful, though the interior is not yet fully mapped.

There was intense interest at first in finding out what went wrong, to allow the ascension to complete. Few now live who were alive back then; the current residents are more concerned with survival, though some lingering curiosity remains.

A few decades ago, cloning for reproduction was common - and taken to degrees (called "programming the clones, rather than raising them") that unsettled other worlds in the cluster, as well as some of the locals. There was a mild social revolution, and those extremes are not as common any more, though cloning is still around.

While generally supportive of Dandelion's efforts, Dandelion's ascension is going on by a different set of technology than Bastion's did. There is not much desire on the part of Bastion's residents to switch paths; those who do have largely already left to and through Dandelion.