Project Stardust

"No, we're not building a death star."

-Sarah Cleran, Defense committte representative

Project Stardust was partially declassified in 417 after a civilian publishing company exposed its existence. The project is headquartered in, and eventually took control of, the North Polar Solar Station. The North Polar Solar station is a research laboratory sitting exactly above the Sun's north pole, not in orbit but hovering with massive sails on the pole's extremely strong solar wind. The station utilizes magnetic scoops to capture the charged particles of the Sun's wind, and uses these particles as fusion fuel to power the station. The station also has emergency thrusters powered by its fusion reactor. Before being requisitioned, the station was a research outpost dedicated to studying the composition of the Sun's corona by analyzing its solar wind. The North Polar Solar station created detailed maps of the extreme magnetic fields on the Sun's polar region, and made scientific breakthroughs in magnetic containment technology.

In 413 however, the station was bought out by a shadow company secretly owned by the Interplanetary Governance Council's Defense committee, which allowed the station's research to continue as a front. What the Defense committee actually did with the station is expand its magnetic scoops, increase its fusion capacity, and constructed massive power receivers above the station's sails. These receivers would soon begin to channel power into the station from massive Solar arrays around the sun's equator, and powered up its new improved fusion reactors to begin creating helium from the massive hydrogen stores the Sun provided. This helium fusion provided a massive stock of energy to be had, and the station continued to store its excess energy in massive heat sinks. Continuing down the chain, the stations uses other specialized reactors to fuse helium into carbon at a temperature of over 10⁸ K degrees, six times hotter than the Sun's core. This happens through a process known as triple-alpha fusion, and produces unstable lithium and beryllium atoms as byproducts. Some of the carbon also fuses into oxygen or other, heavier elements. These reactions are energy-positive when occurring inside a star, but without the extreme density and heat of a star's core, the North Polar Solar station can only produce 51% efficiency with triple-alpha fusion. This means that the process is energy-negative, and the North Polar Solar station must draw on its extensive energy reserves to maintain the reaction. This is the extent of the Defense committee's official press release regarding the project's mechanisms, and its official purpose is to explore technical fusion of advanced products.

Further inspection however, reveals that the North Polar Solar station has executed live-fire fusion missile tests, likely producing the missiles using the station's fused carbon as casings, the station's oxygen and hydrogen as fuel, and helium or hydrogen for the fusion core. The commonly accepted theory is that this station was created to test self-sufficient defense platforms, and is designed to use its unique position above the Sun's pole to strike at any targets in the Solar System. Because it is not actually in orbit, the station can dodge almost every attack directed on it from long range, as some malcontents have discovered by experimentation. The station's weapons are entirely produced from matter gathered from Solar wind, and it will likely become a formidable bastion for the Solar System in the years to come.

Ever since the Interplanetary Governance Council's armada was defeated in the Hermian war, and especially after the disastrous battle of Ganymede during the War of Stars, the IGC has completed and begun a number of covert defense projects in an attempt to secure the Solar System against further system-wide attacks. Though the rumors about these projects are wildly inaccurate, the North Polar Solar station is the best-documented site of any such activities, and the only one the ICG has officially recognized, though it continues to maintain that the North Polar Solar station purpose is only advanced fusion research. Because of its commonly-known features, the station is now referred to as The Starforge in popular culture.