Monday, December 26, 2016

Helkaraxe: for StarCluster 4 - Out of the Ruins

I am working on a support thing for StarCluster 4 - Out of the Ruins. I had a problem with Ruins - basically, because of the lack of an outer gas giant in either of the two systems, it is impossible to fly directly between the two with the typical short range space ship, which typically needs to use outer system gas giants for slingshotting to speed up or slow down into or out of systems, so travel between systems was only by long range ships.

So last night, I dreamed about Helcaraxe.

Helcaraxe is from Tolkien's Silmarillion, which is the holy book of the Ruins setting. It means the Grinding Ice, and it was the means for those Noldor who couldn't leave Valinor to return to Middle Earth.

In my dream, Helcaraxe was a rogue gas giant - that is without a sun. It was hot, but that was not enough to heat its moons which were all covered in ice. It had eight moons, and four of them had space stations orbiting them. the stations were mining ice and breaking it into hydrogen and oxygen, and mining minerals for their stations.

And that was the solution to my problem. Going into and out of Helcaraxe would be easy - no big ass solar gravity well to fight! - and with the stations to refuel them, they could, by stopping at Helkaraxe, reach the other system with enough reaction mass to brake in.

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