Synthetic Origins

Overview

Synthetics onboard NanoTrasen facilities originate from a wide variety of places. These places primarily include large corporations which fabricate them in mass to fulfill a wide variety of duties. Belonging to these corporations are countless manufacturing points, some of which are listed below.

Hephaestus Industries

The sole largest manufacturer of synthetics in known space, Hephaestus Industries is a technological giant. Their capability to fabricate any necessary component to fully create most basic synthetics has led to their almost complete domination of the IPC market. While the most high-end robotics are out of reach of the majority of Hephaestus factories, their success can often be found in extremely powerful industrial units.

The wiki page for Hephaestus Industries can be found here.

Hephaestus Production Station Amóni

Location - Geosynchronous orbit of Mercury, Sol I

Compliment - 352,000+ crew

Distance from Sol - N/A

Commissioned in - July 5, 2395

Laid down in - August 15, 2397

Completed in - January 1, 2400

The HPS Amóni, renowned for its unique and recognizable design, has become a staple for Hephaestus’ productivity. Consisting of three complexes converging into a single, enormous facility in the center, the station’s primary purpose is manufacturing and maintaining the churning machine of Hephaestus’ synthetic workforce.

Each of the three complexes serve different purposes. Referred to as the subordinates, all three complexes house individual central intelligences responsible for assisting in administration and workflow. Labelled Central, Exo and Endo, the subordinates provide necessary resources refined and assembled into parts which are then funneled to the central, master structure. The master structure is referred to as Oversight and is responsible for the final assembly of the synthetics in question. Effectively, resources and parts that enter the Amóni come out as fully working machinery, ready for field testing and work. The Amóni rarely fabricates IPCs, but when it does, they are most often the latest generation industrial models.

The Amoni’s construction was the fastest of any station of its magnitude, completed in the span of years(most take decades). This was accomplished due to the exploitation of Hephaestus’ massive robotic production branch, the most populous of any megacorporation. Breaking records constantly and running their workers to near death, the accomplishment of fabricating the Amóni came with bloodshed. While the old robotic units pressed onwards to finish what their weaker employed counterparts could not, they often posed significant safety hazards in their haste. On new year’s day of 2400, the start of a new century, the Amóni was completed, at the cost of nearly six thousand EVA construction crew member’s lives. All were lost to workplace dangers involving inadequate atmospheric safeties and unwieldy equipment.

While the Amóni stood as a testament to Hephaestus’ industrial might, the disastrous results of its hasty construction would be something Hephaestus has yet to forget to this day.

Hephaestus Production Station Sidirourgeío

Location - Tau Ceti, Orbit of Reade, TC-V

Compliment - 186,000+ crew

Distance from Sol - 12LY

Commissioned in - November 19, 2438

Laid down in - June 26, 2439

Completed in - April 5, 2451

Unlike its sister station HPS Amóni, the HPS Sidirourgeío is primarily responsible for the fabrication of extra-corporate brand IPCs. The majority of the Sidirourgeío’s products are baseline IPCs, and like its sister station it is fully equipped to refine the materials and assemble the parts necessary to complete IPCs with few exterior logistics.

The station consists of six separate districts, two of which are residential and serve to house the workforce of the planet it orbits. Work on board the Sidirourgeío is a several year commitment as the vast majority of its employees are citizens of the Sol Alliance. Mostly resulting from the cultural significance of robotic servitude within the Alliance, positronic rights are generally overlooked and completely ignored within it. The working conditions within are dubious as a result with Republic officials mostly unable to uphold basic laws within the confines of the massive industrial station. Regardless, those within the Republic have segmented the station into several portions, “districts” even. Cultural separation and conflict occurs naturally due to the barriers in place, leaving the residents to deal with criminal mischief themselves. Quality of life in the residential districts is dystopian at best.

A great political divide is the greatest of Sidirourgeío’s worries, however, as the rest of the station is left in phenomenal condition. At its peak efficiency, the station is capable of outputting incomprehensible quantities of complex electronics and occasionally IPCs. It remains the primary contributor to the IPC population in Tau Ceti and yields immense amounts of general wares, from home products to working equipment. The other four districts are industrial, made to be entirely dependent on resources specifically from the gas giant it orbits. Most of these resources are valuable materials abundant in the lower-middle layers of the planet’s atmosphere.

Completed in 2451, Sidirourgeío is the newest industrial station fielded by Hephaestus Industries. Its relative young age can be attributed as one of the causes for its chaotic political environment.

Terraneus Diagnostics

A relatively young uprising corporation, Terraneus Diagnostics is best known for its work with the artificial intelligence SUNSHINE and the development of state-of-the-art combat drones.

The wiki page for Terraneus Diagnostics can be found here.

Terraneus Diagnostics Central Manifold “Nomad Alpha”

Location - Geosynchronous orbit of Jupiter, Sol V

Compliment - 72,500+ crew

Distance from Sol - N/A

Commissioned in - September 2, 2452

Laid down in - July 1, 2453

Completed in - December 27, 2458

TDCM Nomad Alpha is the designation of Terraneus Diagnostics’ central construction facility, the oldest in its class of three. Constructed in 2458, it is still very new. This facility is devoted to fabricating the most complex positronics Terraneus may provide, some exceeding ten million credits in their most basic forms. Designed for extreme data processing and sold off as the highest quality bounds available, these can be found in repetition across hugely populous areas. Very rarely these are purposed for military use, becoming central intelligences for the cutting edge flagship vessels leading the navy of the Sol Alliance. Beyond positronics, much more complex integrated intelligences along the lines of SUNSHINE may be found on the assembly lines within Nomad Alpha. These are generally too large to be outfitted on anything mobile, and are taken in segments to wherever they are sold.

Separate facilities surround the central manifold for purposes including personality implementation, environmental, and power draw testing. While Nomad Alpha is capable of working independently it largely relies on these facilities to fine-tune and finalize the creations within.

The design of Nomad Alpha is by no means unique, adopting a similar style to other stations used by Terraneus Diagnostics. It covers an enormous surface area, most space being used for solar arrays to power the station’s growing industrial facilities. These solar arrays are wholly retractable and maintained to a great degree, with a span at its longest of nearly 75 kilometers. The whole array dwarves the facility itself, merely three kilometers across at the center most portion. Due to their size, it can take up to a week for each array to be fully retracted or expanded. This means each collision with the array must be anticipated some months in advance, usually perpetually known by Terraneus Diagnostics’ full fleet of seeking drones. In the most dire situations, the portion of the array damaged is detached, deconstructed and replaced.

Reflectivity of the entire array can be an issue, with the light reflecting off from each panel easily blinding the naked eye. Because of this, all exterior windows of the facility are tinted to near opacity. Crew regard this as a curse most of the time, bringing a sense of claustrophobia or even isolation to the interior design.

Bishop Cybernetics

Rarely delving into the fabrication of complex positronics, Bishop Cybernetics can mostly be seen purchasing positronics of their own only to place them in a chassis and sell them off for much greater prices. This works excellently, and the end result is yet another growing business in synthetics.

The wiki page for Bishop Cybernetics can be found here.

Bishop Production Factory Adhama “Glory”

Location - Epsilon Eridani, Oran, εEri II

Employees - 13,000+ employees

Distance from Sol - 10.7LY

Construction started - January 25, 2453

Opened - August 11, 2454

Bishop Cybernetics, being flashy and pretentious at heart would find no trouble overcomplicating its own facilities. Its largest manufacturing plant, known as Adhama or “Glory” is a massive tower built into the craggy silicon steeps of Oran. The factory itself delves deeply underground, where its entirety is divided into three sections - exterior prosthesis, organ prosthesis and robotic chassis. It is capable of intaking and maintaining patients seeking repair or addition of prosthetics, from intricate mechanical hearts to Bishop’s signature limbs. In the lowest levels are branded IPCs fully fabricated, with their positronics imported and activated with specialized personalities and frames. Little variation exists in available frames, with what little being created exceeding prices of 250,000 credits at the bare minimum.

Its operations speak “luxury,” and its employees are provided to more of the same. To Bishop, they deserve nothing less.

Zeng-Hu Pharmaceuticals

Zeng-Hu Pharmaceuticals as a conglomerate has swayed away from robotics for some time, only recently fielding its first IPC chassis designs. Among their first was the highly famous mobility frame, adopting unique digitigrade stilt-like legs and flexible polymer exteriors to achieve speed and dexterity unparalleled. Their highly mobile and specialized designs are their strong suit, never delving into the realms dominated by other megacorporations. In this niche, they have found great success.

The wiki page for Zeng-Hu Pharmaceuticals can be found here.

Zeng-Hu Manufacturing Facility Kyūkyoku

Location - Stable low orbit of Sirius

Compliment- 22,500+ crew

Distance from Sol - 8.6LY

Commissioned in - February 20, 2445

Laid down in - January 26, 2446

Completed in - May 5, 2451

Particularly secret is the inner workings of the Zeng-Hu facility Kyūkyoku, the central manufacturing point for the majority of all their specialized robotics products. The structure’s original design revolved around genetics and cloning research, near the advent of the original mobility frame. Conflicted and without necessary tools to fully automate, Kyūkyoku would find itself awaiting completion for nearly two years before work resumed in 2448. By 2449, the complex was torn apart and reconstructed from the frame up exclusively to house robotics manufacturing facilities. It was rushed and finalized in 2451 despite concerns regarding its hull’s integrity. These concerns voiced by Kyūkyoku’s construction crews were never addressed publicly, with Zeng-Hu finding it more beneficial to simply silence them and mend issues as they come along with rudimentary patchwork by the station’s maintenance personnel.

Its engineering department and the rest of Kyūkyoku’s non-robotics personnel are generally underpaid and unprofessional in nature. Its mistakes are masked by a powerful paramilitary presence in vicinity of the station, keeping the internal affairs out of public view.

Regardless of its issues, Kyūkyoku is a stable, consistent source of Zeng-Hu’s finest robotics. With no ability to fabricate complex electronics of their own, however, all positronics for their integrated frames are imported from external entities. These primarily being Hephaestus Industries and its subsidiaries, whose close ties to Sirius allow for easy and cheap transportation of expensive materials.

Non-corporate and unrelated

"Metal Dunes"

Location - Southern polar regions of Mars

Formation - Some time in the late 24th century

For almost two decades, the polar canyon regions of Mars would serve as a popular scrapyard for the failed, obsolete and/or abandoned machinery leftover by the robotic boom of the 2300s. Starting in the early 2370s, megacorporations such as Einstein Engines began to dispose of their obsolete lineups by storing them in gargantuan “lots” for later retrieval when the manpower needed to sustain them returned. This would never be the case, and for years to come other megacorporations would do the same in haphazardly tossing their waste electronics into the canyon regions as time went along. Soon enough, entire valley floors would be covered in excess mechanical waste of all shapes and sizes. In places, the ground could not be seen for kilometers. In 2405, definitive action was taken to prevent the excessive usage of this disposal, and it quickly halted. What was left were what would be referred to as the Metal Dunes of Mars, endless electronic scrapheaps as far as the eye could see.

To this day, scrappers and tinkerers can be found sifting through the Metal Dunes to uncover abandoned synthetics to restore them. In many cases, those restored in modern time are granted upgrades along the lines of positronic circuitry and sold off once more to start anew.

Reade’s Artificial Satellites

Location - Low orbit of Reade

Formation - Some time in 2440

In orbit of the gas giant Reade in Tau Ceti, there is a myriad of large industrial complexes and gargantuan megafactories. Owned mostly by Hephaestus Industries, these facilities alongside the HPS Sidirourgeío have little regard for their waste output and use the gas giant below to dispose of waste electronics. From malfunctioning positronics to failed prototypes, anything remotely deemed unacceptable would be disposed of and tossed into the atmosphere of the giant below to burn up in re-entry. Waste is typically cobbled together in large “clusters,” most of which sit in orbit for years before being knocked out of orbit. As the size of the clusters grow, the effort required to create a path of descent grows, and the desire to be rid of them lessens. Massive clusters of this waste are up to six kilometers in diameter, while tens of thousands of smaller bodies exist.

Like the “Metal Dunes,” the artificial satellites of Reade are seen as a treasure trove for scavengers, though in this case the chances at recovery of pristine robotics of any sort are slim. What little can be recovered from the clusters is malfunctioning at best, and often ends up being sold off for illegal activities.

New Julapol

Location - 15.2 light years from Sol

Founded - 2421

Population - 230,000+

Founded in 2421, the colony of New Julapol was the successor to the nomadic vessels of the same name which had been destroyed in a disastrous bluespace incident a year before. The following crashes fortunately had few casualties, but left the survivors stranded on a barely habitable world with whatever supplies they could gather from the wreckage. Having prepared for such an event, the crash site was quickly renovated exploiting the crew’s diligent and hasty usage of the on board construction robots. In the span of a few months, a colony had formed around the wreckage before the site was finally found by Alliance authorities. Now having called the place home and decreed it New Julapol, the residents inside had proposed settling for good. Unlike other colonies formed in similar ways, however, New Julapol would be unique in the sense that its reliance on synthetics would be its greatest asset. The common usage of servant androids in daily life has eliminated the need for many once-necessary fields of work, and a mere ten years after its founding, the colony was self-sufficient off of its automated servitors.

Since its automation, New Julapol’s exports to Alliance space include a variety of native wildlife and valuable minerals. Sustaining this export is the slow trickle of more robotics into the colony, which grows alongside the population. The native populous of the original crash consisted of only seventy thousand individuals spread across one hundred and two ships, some of which have been restored to working order in modern day. Others serve as hollowed out housing districts and impromptu space ports. This number has grown massively since its founding, with the promise of an easy life alongside the working synthetics being attractive to newcomers.