Pentalus Assembly
The Pentalus Assembly, sometimes referred to in advertising for tourism or resupply as The Web or The Spiderweb, is collection of five bubbletowns and an industrial hub. Located in the Evermorn System, specifically the L5 Lagrange point of the gas giant Mintigel, these six facilities are arranged amidst an enormous magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) scoop designed to siphon off useful elements from the atmosphere which are blown free from that planet's gravity well by the stellar wind.
Industry & Trade
Aside from gathering and purifying fuel from Mintigel's invisible 'tail' for sale to long-haul vessels, the Pentalus possesses its own fusion reactor for use in nuclear transmutation processes. Raw materials, whether captured along with the gasses or provided through trade with vessels passing through to restock, are broken down into constituent elements with SCWO digesters, further broken down and fractionated with the heat of the reactor itself, then bombarded with the reactor's concentrated neutron or charged particle radiation to change the numbers of protons and neutrons in the elements' nuclei. This process is inefficient in comparison to mining, but is also essential to increasing stocks of biologically important elements which might otherwise be rare in spaceborne deposits, such as phosphorus, nitrogen, or sulfur. The results of this transmutation process are either used aboard the Pentalus Assembly or, more often, are sold to passing colony vessels or agriculture representatives from the local asteroid colonies.
Districts
The five habitable bubbletowns that make up the Pentalus Assembly are known as Pentalus Odeste, Pentalus Hyborus, Pentalus Paldin, Pentalus Frelus, and Pentalus Izkare. Each bubbletown is decorated to look like a different animal (bear, auk, turtle, magpie, and fish respectively) and nebulously occupies a different part of the settlement's focuses (militia and Cobalt Knights training and administration facilities, space traffic control and transit hub, medical and robotics facilities, commerce and entertainment facilities, and hydroponics and aquaponics, respectively). Residents live wherever they please within the cluster, however, and, thus, the cultures cannot truly be considered separate aside from what might be called a friendly rivalry. In addition to the usual Evermornan cultural inclination towards marrying outside of one's own Great Clan, long-term residents of the Pentalus Assembly typically endeavor to marry someone who grew up in the next bubbletown over from them for extra variety and to further reduce the risk of consanguinity.
Architecture
The five inhabited bubbletowns of the Pentalus Assembly are arranged in a pentagonal formation that lies perpendicular to the Assembly's orbit; though hexagons are more common in Evermornan architecture, an even number of structures in this arrangement would make it too easy for one station to get in the way of another's sunlight. Trusses through which gondola shafts pass hold these bubbletowns together in this formation. The infrastructure hub is located at 'apex' of a five-sided pyramid formed by the bubbletowns at the base and five trusses radiating out from the infrastructure hub to form equilateral triangles. The enormous, diaphanous network of charged wires that form the Assembly's MHD scoop forms a funnel with the industrial hub at the narrowest point and the bubbletowns further down the throat. The intake is oriented tangent to the orbit of Mintigel to best gather its gasses. Maintenance of this orientation in space is accomplished by a combination of clever positioning in orbit, the attitude control systems of the bubbletowns themselves, and modulation of the charges in the MHD siphon.
Type
Orbital, Station
Location under
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