Saturn

Crescent Fiasco

Often large-scale catastrophe brings about sweeping changes in policy and operation. Saturn has been long-envied by star-gazers for its beautiful rings of frozen ice and debris the gas world had captured over its lifetime. In the 20th century some of the most striking images from the long-since retired Hubble telescope were of this world’s great rings, colored by the hands of artistic minds.

When men began moving out into space the journey came as a jumble, groups led by innumerable corporations pushing the frontier ever-further. These great pushes for notoriety and fame accompany every expansion in history, as people become legends – the first of a new breed.

Yet, equally important are the failures, those people who push forward and fail so greatly that their legacy is one of continued shame and humility for those to come. A now long-defunct group, ‘’Crescent Moons’’, was a sizeable resource procurement firm operating long-trek excursions deep into the Sol system when men still stood constrained to one system.

Operating then was a wild-man’s game where gambit pilots charted daring routes to beat competition, procure the best locations, and ensure their success. The pilots of Crescent group were no different, daring individuals who pushed large cargo trolley ships to their design limits and beyond. Still, luck only runs so deep and as the aged story goes these daring pilots of no small skill pushed too far when working to outpace their rivals to reach a new nexus of wealth located near Neptune.

Racing a slingshot course near Saturn the captains chose to use the gas giant’s gravity to propel them ahead of the competition, running side-by-side in a daring maneuver. The end result of their daring actions and a small miscalculation on one of the two pilots was the ruination and destruction of both ships. One erred slightly, shot part of its stream into the others path, and the rest is history.

In the wake of the company’s demise, as those two ships were the whole of their fleet, Saturn was left scarred, forever ruined. The pilots had been looping inside the great rings when they collided and veered off path. The two massive trolley ships careened, crews’ long-dead, through the great ring and left nearly an eighth of the iconic structure destroyed.In the wake of this destruction, when stargazers everywhere looked on in horror at the lasting scar upon the iconic world, the ISA called for action. Their resolution paved pathways of standard transit throughout populated systems. Routes were set for ships by class and payload as to offset future risks, everyone began to wonder how something far more catastrophic hadn’t occurred before this Crescent Moon’s disaster.

Today, the routes still exist; far and wide transit paths of safest travel have been mapped, remapped, and confirmed a third time by the best systems available. Still, the daring do what they would and the technology enables them to do so. Pilots of renown still look on the broken ring of Saturn, pushing the envelope outside of these transit lanes to provide travel that beats everything else.