Secrets of the Stars – 3: Spaceport
“K-722-1 is an interesting planet. I wasn’t the one that discovered it, that happened almost a thousand years ago. But due to the circumstances K-722-1 never was a good target for further exploration. It orbits its star alone and can’t hold any atmosphere. Also it has a moon, well it had. Perhaps a hundred thousand years ago the moon broke apart. The largest fragments are still on a stable orbit, but many smaller pieces formed a sort of hull around the planet. A dense asteroid belt that makes any landing a risky endeavor.
Why I selected K-722-1 as exploration target? I made a list of planets that were cataloged but not mapped. Just a very long spreadsheet to filter through and pick the best pieces from. K-722-1 was actually my first candidate. I saw no reason why the moon should have broken apart. So I first focused on the moon, wasting two months until I finally landed on K-722-1. On the entire planet there was nothing but stone. Except one valley, where I found the rings and platforms by chance. The structures are massive and made of very resilient materials. But the hail of rocks coming from the sky with several kilometers per second took its toll. Even I myself was nearly hit one time. It took a few days of guessing what I found there, but I only realized it after I got the Galactic Institute of Exploration in on it. The rings match those found on other worlds and serve as accelerators for space ships, boosting them into a faster than light space. The platforms are new for the GIE as well and probably served as landing spots for the ships. Apparently there are more rings necessary for bigger ships, which explains some constellations on other planets.
There are no traces or hints on the ships that took off from here, or who build the structures. The best guess is the inhabitants abandoned the planet around the time the moon broke apart. But the reason for that is still unclear, since K-722-1’s gravity is not enough for that.
The rings are all facing in the same direction, being parallel to each other. So every ship had to reach the same destination. When the inner workings of the rings is understood one day, we might be able to follow the creators. If they are still alive it would be fascinating to learn from them. In the millennia before they left our galaxy they have to amassed enormous knowledge.”
Another part of the “Secrets of the Stars” series. I started working on the scene more than half a year ago. Unfortunately I lost the vision of what I wanted it to be right in the beginning. Then there were other projects with higher priority, so the scene was on pause until the beginning of this month. I didn’t want to throw the work away and saved myself into a “presentable”. For the next part I do have a precise idea (existing in this form since the beginning of Secrets of the Stars). Even though it is a Science Fiction classic, I will put extra effort into making the result better than all previous parts of the series.
Created with Blender 4.2.
