NationStates Jolt Archive

Some time after the discussions with Balrogga
With the successful contact of Balrogga and the establishment of a Seven Spinners claim on a star system, the eight ships of the Expidetion finnaly had a home.
Each ship, some 1.5mi long and host to perhaps a million Spinners of various clans (mostly deactivated for the trip), gradually made its way to the newly designated 'Pax' system.
The sight of these ships, which looked something like a very effecient whale, would have amazed any human, the suddeness with which they executed breathtakingly complex manuvers over the planet, gradually establishing themselves in orbit.
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This is the system?
Yes. The Balroggans provided us with the coordinates, provided they hold to their word and were not in error, this is where we shall settle.
Bit of a dump...isnt it?
The first voice had a point. The system had two asteroid belts, one appeared to be normal remnants, the other the result of a collision or weapons fire. There were a number of odd metal debries, perhaps the remnants of space stations and defensive works.
But on closer investigation, the planets themselves looked to be in order except for the ruins.
Two were selected for the initial colonisation process, four ships to each. Two of the ships would beach themselves on each world to provide raw material for housing and so forth as well as easy access to material on the ship.
The others would remain in orbit, eventually to be converted into stations and shipyards.

It was, as usual, a peaceful dawn on Pax II, lacking any extraordinary event aside from the huge spaceship screaming through the atmosphere.
A race of small rodents that was about to invent a new form of fire was almost immidiatly wiped out by the engine wash of the ship as it plummeted through the atmosphere, dragging several bedraggled clouds in its wake in its frantic descent to earth. Several sonic booms tore through the air as the ship boomed over a lake where another tribe of rodents was fleeing a second tribe of rodents that had enslaved them for a thosand years or so, by pure coincidence the wake left by the ship lasted just long enough that the first group of rodents got to the other side and was able to return several decades later with rather more advanced technology and enslave the second group.
A few minutes later, another ship did the same thing, only louder.
For all their flash and creative destruction during their entry, the landing was rather soft.
The ships halted abrupty fifty feet above the ground on a wide, flat plain. They extended a number of landing legs and plopped themselves down with suprising care.
For a few minutes, nothing happened.
Then a number of ramps appeared as if by magic and the ship began to disgorge hundreds of thosands of robots. Most of these appeared vaugly avian in construction, short and stoutly built, although their heads seemed vaugly outsized, as if built on a different scale than their bodies. These immidiatly set to work taking apart the ships with the aid of large cranes which had materialized on top of the ships themselves.
It took some time, but eventually, and by dint of much effort, the ships were reduced to several large piles of neatly sorted metal, plastic and other assorted materials. Various pieces were retained, including two huge steel cubes which appeared to be hollow.
Once sorted, the first thing to go up was a massive framework for some kind of tower. The construct looked as if it would be rounded when it was completed and was quite tall, nearly half as tall as each ship had been long and quite wide at the base, perhaps wide enough to house one of those steel cubes.
While this went on the remaining material was neatly divided up and put into other buildings. The ships generators were removed and set up as power plants, and so forth. Several other large buildings went up. The arrival of supplies and further colonists from the orbitting ships was of great help in this matter.
Roughly a week later (using a 34 hour and 12 minute day) a city had appeared surrounding the gleaming central tower. A number of exploratory mines had been founded and various manufacturing concerns had been established, eagerly awaiting their first shipments of resources from what would, hopefully, be highly profitable sources.

A similar colony had been set up on Pax V, with small outposts on planet VII and I to exploit the resources of those planets.
However, thanks to an abundant supply of materials present on Pax II, things went quite well there and the population expanded much faster, reaching 3 million very quickly and the city grew to keep pace, engulfing much of the plain where it had first been constructed. A few villages broke off eventually, quickly growing to cities and then promptly being engulfed by the aforementioned megapolis that was Central.

In orbit the shipyards had gradually grown to the point where they were visible from the surface on a clear night, inhabited by perhaps some 500,000 beings themselves, they hung over the otherwise peaceful planet like rocks often dont.
Inside the four main bays a small fleet of ships, three armed and one larger ship, apparently unarmed, gradually took form. Inside a miriad of smaller holds the 'drone' fighters slowly came together, legions of them. The fighters were small and lightly armed, but piloted by the aces of the Spinners from centuries ago, they knew how to work in a group and how to exploit larger ships.
After a month or two of construction, and a generation of the Ixi workers had expired, the first ship of the new Seven Spin Clans was launched, the SSN Pax. It was mostly hollow, in fact, %90 of its internal space was composed of air.
One might argue that, in the interest of trade, one might wish to construct a number of smaller ships, but perhaps one might not realize the mentality of the Spinners demanded a solid base to start with, working out the fiddling details came later. The ship was, quite simply, a leviathon. It reached roughly a mile in length, although the entire crew was situated in a cabin some hundred feet long and seventy feet wide on the front of the ship, while engines at the rear provided a moderate turn of speed for such a large ship.
If one was not a Spinner by nature, one might also have commented on the Six large, apparently purposeless, pipes running along each axist of the ship. These may be explained later, or they may not.