Originally established in 2072, Ariarcus is an icy
moon with a troubled colony orbiting the blue-eyed
gas giant called Oblivion. Blocked by Oblivion, the colony hardly
receives any direct sunlight. Instead, day and
night is measured by the gas giant’s reflected
planet-light. On Ariarcus, it is rarely brighter than
twilight and never darker than a moonlit night
back on Earth.
Ariarcus has been a major exporter of petroleum
fuels for nearly a century. When the colony
struck oil in the 2070s, a few shrewd colonists
convinced the others to invest in shares of the
operation. Soon, each colonist owned a piece of
Ariarcus. The Weyland Corp. crash of 2098 enabled
the colonists to collectively buy it outright.
They incorporated as the Kruger Oil Corp. and
immediately applied for UA membership. Ariarcus
was granted colonial status in 2100.
Unfortunately, when the Oil Wars began,
the majority shareholders weren’t content to
simply make UA money and started selling their
fuel to the UPP as well—an act that garnered the
attention of federal investigators. The shareholders
were arrested, and the colony was seized as an
asset. Deemed of strategic and economic importance
by Colonial Administration, a permanent
USCMC presence was placed on Ariarcus. The
space elevator, refinery station, and oil tank yards
were converted into Star Fort Nebraska.
The 2180 W-Y census
cataloged 200,000 colonists on Kruger 60 AEM.
In the three years that followed, the population
crashed as those who could leave did so. With
barely 2,200 colonists remaining, most of the colony
is a ghost town.
Ariarcus is cold. The old style Weyland Corp. atmospheric processor
did its best before it was dismantled to build the Fort.
Temperatures hover in the –23° to 0°C range.
Orbital Fort
Nebraska is an aging counterweight station with a
tether connecting it moonside. This fortified weapons
platform started off as an oil refinery module,
but years of modifications have left it a maze of
maintenance crawlspaces, monitoring stations,
refining pipelines, desalination units, and waste
tanks. Normally a full Supply
Battalion is stationed here to handle ordinance and
maintain the refinery module.
A moon-to-space transportation
system, the space elevator consists of a cable
anchored to the surface that extends to Counterweight
Station in geosynchronous orbit. This design
permits a three-story climber car to travel along the
20-meter thick cable in six hours. A series
of flexible pipelines also run up the tether, allowing a
transfer of crude oil directly to the refinery in space.
Conceived to protect the
moon’s oil stores a century ago, the original fort
and anchored tether were built on the foundation
of the colony’s defunct and dismantled atmospheric
processor. Originally a walled fuel tank
compound, the USCMC added surface-to-orbit
gun emplacements, munitions and vehicle depots,
weapons-testing laboratories, and a man-made
chasm with access to the old processor’s sublevels.
The colony’s power supply comes from the
processor’s original reactor core.
Beneath the North Bastion of the fort is the
space elevator tether station. The elevator’s
climber car descends along the cable to rest
within the chasm with access to the base's sublevels.
The fort is normally staffed with a civil affairs
company, a headquarters and services company, a
weapons company and two rifle companies.
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