The Parthenon - Jewel of the System
The Workers dreamed of a city of skill and craft. They dreamed of a place built to the absolute best of their abilities. This would be a place of research, knowledge, commerce, and advancement. It would be a no-effort-spared facility. This floating station orbits Poli, featuring a rare artificial gravity installation, full internal shipyards, and the absolute best and brightest in the entire system. The engineers who live here are the type who spit in the face of god every morning. The universe is their toy to unravel and they will unravel it.
Design
Section titled “Design”The Parthenon looks like a giant, floating spheroid, with a slight gap, an opening in its center line that runs around its circumference. The top and bottom are flattened out, with one end hosting the station’s main drive assembly and the other holding a private ship yard for the ship’s defense forces. The surface of the station is studded with windows, airlocks, private cargo bays, communications arrays, and defensive systems.
Station-AI
Section titled “Station-AI”It wouldn’t be a state of the art station without the most advanced AI in the system. Meet Soren. He’s a playful AI system with a snow leopard avatar. He appears on the screens, projects himself holographically, and is always trying to help. It’s best to keep him busy, when he has spare processing power, he gets into mischief.
The Docks
Section titled “The Docks”The public docks are in the enormous gap in the sphere’s center. This gap is a section where the outer plating just stops and instead is replaced by massive openings for hundreds of individual landing bays. These docks operate in a mix of artificial gravity, open-air, and vacuum, depending on their specific needs. The biggest of these bays are open to the vacuum of space 24/7, but retain an atmosphere thanks to their magnetic confinement systems.
Most of these docks feel like a shipyard on earth, if a ship yard could have ships floating above and landed beneath you. Enormous mooring clamps rise up from the floor, sink down from the ceiling, and allow ships of all sizes to be docked to any one of hundreds of berths. A further system of tunnels, clamps on tracks, and hatchways grants access to private-bays on all sides of the docks.
To put it simply: it is a big, bustling, and busy place with a thousand types of activity and the matching high-security for such a sensitive part of the station. It’s illadvised to be causing trouble here. There are heavy patrols, AI monitoring thousands of cameras, weapons detectors, customs officers, and more. A single terrorist attack here could kill tens of thousands, perhaps millions.
The security aside, there’s stands and stores, places to watch ships coming and going, great restaurants for meetings (often a focal point for businessmen and captains haggling over repair work on their ships). Everything here is upscale and polished like nowhere else.