Sketches – Tsiolkovsky / Ticonderoga Station

Following the discovery of the first extrasolar habitable planet in the Gagarin system, its colonization became a certainty as both the USA (precursor to the UNA) and the Russian Federation filed claims to different parts of the star system. While other national groups got their own claims in (the EU secured the outer asteroid belt), the habitable planet remained equally split between the two initial discoverers.

Eventually both the UNA and the Russian Space Forces Fleet (RSSF) built a large combined orbital anchorage for their fleets while stationed in Gagarin. The station itself consisted of two separate national sections, and a combined support and civilian traffic station separating them both. Both of the naval anchorages were built on the same basic structural design, but actual fittings and technical specifications were left to their respective navies. The central transit hall and fittings were built by a third party EU firm, and was acclaimed to be “part spaceport, part city” all on its own. As the UNA and RSSF navies increased in size, personnel often found themselves owning apartments or entire homes in the central station bloc.

The docking pylons themselves were large structures, designed to easily accommodate any ship size, even theoretical hulls more than twice the largest ships in commission at the time of the station’s construction. This meant that even the largest dreadnoughts in service during the collapse war could easily dock to the station. Each pylon wasn’t just a docking point, but the endpoint of a sophisticated logistics system that connected to an orbital warehouse located beneath their respective hab dome.

Designing Tsio/Tico Station was one of those things that came together after an evening when I was doing some abortive writing set on Gagarin. It was a system that had been initially explored and surveyed by the Americans and the Russians (which explains the kind of split naming that goes on through the whole star system), and it would make sense that they’d cooperate in building out the needed infrastructure to support full-on colonization. The round habitation dome structure is something that I’ve been using in a bunch of places, and once I had the mirrored sides, I needed to built a more central structure, and I ended up settling on something that vaguely looked like an airport concourse.