Black Flag Technology

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Space Stations

Space Stations are fairly common. Most frequently they are used as docking points at the top of a space elevator, the majority of stellar ships are not designed to be landed on a planet. Ring stations are the most common form of station. They use centrifugal force to imitate gravity, providing a simpler and more healthy environment for their human inhabitants. Ships docking at these stations are secured with nose grips, that hold them with their noses pointing inward and their engines outward, so that the station spin will provide the ship with a pseudo gravity roughly equivalent to the one they get from constant acceleration.

The Black Flag's secret base, Tortuga, is a tethered station. A six mile cable connects the base, which was built into an asteroid, with a much larger asteroid, which it revolves around. Construction of it being started by amateurs, it was plagued by a number problems, and when a genuine structural engineer was found in the brig of the Planetary Juanita he was immediately offered a job, even though the Brotherhood does not usually recruit marines. Thus Blood's first task upon joining the Brotherhood was to finish building their station, quite a promotion for a young marine looking forward to a court martial and dishonorable discharge. Perhaps finish is the wrong word, however, Blood designed the station to be expandable. A wise choice -- less than a year after he declared his work done and moved back to the Revenge, a fourth ship was added to the Black Flag fleet, and the station's first addition was needed.

Tortuga is 'guarded' by four robotic deepspace sentinels. 'Stationary' space constructions occasionally use sentinels as a means of preventing a ship in subspace from dropping things out of subspace, and directly into the construction. The sentinels can only detect ships in wormspace by bumping into them, but as lining a ship in subspace up with a realspace location accurately enough to aim at it is careful finicky work, a few robots wandering about are usually enough to prevent this sort of sneak attack from being attempted. As with other deepspace technology the Tortuga sentinels have the advantage of being able to actually detect ships in wormspace.

Below are some of the concept sketchs for Tortuga and Barataria.

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Copyright © Michelle Bottorff

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