Abyss Station

Abyss Station

The Abyss Station Space Habitat owned by the Astrian Colonial Authority

Sector	6 -5
Home System	Novalia System (7 -4)
Product	Rare Elements

(controlled by the Astrian Colonial Authority) [ D, T ]

The Abyss Station is a massive ring-shaped space station owned and built by the Astrian Colonial Authority. Its name is derived from its location. Located just over half a lightyear from the event horizon of a black hole, named The Tombstone, it's on the proverbial edge of the abyss. The black hole's accretion disk can clearly be observed from the station.

The Abyss Station's proximity to The Tombstone created a unique challenge for the stations designers. Not only does the station have to deal with powerful gravity constantly trying to pull the station inside, but the space-time distortion The Tombstone causes makes it difficult to enter or exit hyperspace around the station.

In order to prevent the station from falling into The Tombstone sets of extremely powerful repulsors are used. The repulsors are powerful enough to be able to keep the station in position even if it was at only half its normal distance away. As an added safety precaution the station has a backup for each set of repulsors as well as a number of regular engines.

Another thing that sets the Abyss Station apart from other space habitats is its use of durasteel, or more specific the lack there of. During the design process it became clear making the station from durasteel would result in the station crushing itself to easily. The force of the structure itself being pulled towards the singularity against the force of the repulsors keeping the station up. The solution was to make the structure lighter yet maintain its strength. An advanced ceramic material was chosen due to its low weight yet high resistance to pressure.

The Abyss Station holds the single most powerful gravitational stabilization system ever designed by the ACA by a very large margin. This allows the station to create a small corridor of stability in space and, by extension, hyperspace. This small corridor allows ships to safely approach the station. Due to its small size, however, course calculations need to be extremely precise. Depending on the size of the ship, even minute errors or rounding could result in ships tearing themselves apart in hyperspace. For this reason the Abyss Station requires ships to send in their hyperspace calculations to them so they can have their main computer can double and triple check the calculations. If at any point the main computer finds a problem, the station sends the appropriate corrections back to the ship and the process starts over again.

The repulsors and gravitational stabilization system require an enormous amount of power. A reliable power source that provides enough power was difficult to solve without requiring constant shipments of fuel. Within the stations ring-shape a massive tokamak fusion reactor is built. While this reactor can produce large amounts of energy, it's mainly used to run the stations raw material gathering systems and other standard operation systems. Instead of this reactor the repulsors and stabilization system use a larger more reliable power source: The Tombstone. The space-time distortions The Tombstone causes are constant enough to draw energy from them. An extra advantage of this power source is the closer to the singularity the Abyss Station comes, the more distorted space-time becomes, the more power can be drawn from it. In simpler terms this means the closer the station comes to the singularity, the more power it has available to keep itself from falling further.

The Abyss Station would never have been built if it wasn't able to gather raw materials, in this case exotic particles. These particles are generally difficult to come by as they usually have very short halflives. Usually these particles are created artificially, though this process requires lots of energy and only creates small amounts of these particles.

The Tombstone is a rotating black hole and near the centre of its accretion disc extreme temperatures and pressures constantly create exotic particles. Often these particles are shot out into the relativistic jets that shoot out from the black hole. The Abyss Station is located directly in the path of one of these relativistic jets, where these particles are gathered in large quantities by the station. Certain types of these particles are also used as an additional power source for the repulsors.