Antares Ship Yards

Location: Loknar Tamash Planetoid, Outer Alukk Reaches, Alukk System, Alukk Sector Aesthetics: A planetoid two hundred plus kilometers long and wide, with a hollow interior. Berths are anchored in offset rows inside, along with workbee hangars. Forcefields and a thin skeleton of SIF-reinforced girders hold open the hollow side where starships and transports can access the interior. One spot on the outer surface of the asteroid is an obvious domed city that sits atop several open-top arcologies, verdant green and blue, looking a like strange growths on a stranger fruit, with the surrounding surface covered with the white gleaming metal of heavily automated pre-assembly areas. The comfortable colony-city and the industrial apparatus next to it is connected by internal gravity-rail to the work areas in the center.

History of the Site
No surprise what's first.

The abandoned former shipyard complex at Loknar Tamash was once one of the best kept open secrets of the Alukk system, but a series of events following the Starfleet exploratory report in 2315 has cast a great deal of scrutiny on the location. While the report itself was never made public, as it held no classification rating it was presented to several interested parties on official request and from there its findings were disseminated to the Orion Union Navy and eventually leaked to the public through enthusiast magazines. This led to a large number of follow-up surveys and studies by interested parties, starting with the Orion Union Navy in 2318 but also several hypercorp teams and even Rigellian entrepreneurs and a team from the Sarqel Treaty Organization. From these reports we can paint a far more compete picture of what the development of a major shipyard at Loknar Tamash would look like.

Development of the asteroid is not difficult, but is... the best way to put it is it will be strange. Space is not at a premium, but the shipyard structures and associated assembly and storage areas must be anchored to the asteroid rather than free-floating but held by gravity in an orbit. This creates an entirely different series of engineering problems than your typical orbital shipyard, complicated by the presence of the original Orion Empire mounts on the asteroid surfaces. In order to make our berth structures mount correctly, we will need outside expertise or to commission an extensive redesign study, as this is not a problem any of our Ship Design Bureau teams have studied. The closest experts we have among our members and allies, are, strangely enough, Yrillian Upsider work gangs, as they have operated asteroid-mounted shipyards for hundreds of years. I am a little hesitant at recruiting a Yrillian work gang as subject matter experts for a project of this importance, nor do I know if any of them would be willing to bother. But this is a solvable problem, and the Orion Union has been pushing solutions at us for half a decade.

The distance from planetary infrastructure is also prohibitive. In-system sub-warp craft will have difficulty accessing Loknar Tamash on internal energy reserves, and several way-stations will have to be built, at least one around the solar orbit of Alukk VII and at least two in the outer system, in order to move materials and personnel between the shipyard and the planetary industries on Alukk. Storage yards and living complexes for the shipyard workers will have to be built around Loknar Tamash itself. An alternative proposal was penned by an ambitious team of hypercorp experts, and suggested that engineering ships coupled with explorer-class energy generation could tow the asteroid complex closer to Alukk itself. The soundness of the proposal aside, it would require at least two engineering teams including ships equivalent to our Ranger-class engineering ship, at least two explorers with power generation at least equivalent to our Excelsior-class, the supporting engineering assets to clean up loose debris in the complex, and would occupy those teams for an unknown number of months.

However, the quality of Alukk's planetary infrastructure and potential personnel pool is excellent. As long as the shipyard is kept under Starfleet operation and management and no critical jobs are contracted or subcontracted, we should have no issues with supplying it and with completing work of the same quality as UP. However, such an arrangement may prove a sticking point with many Orion corporations and the Orion pubic, who are hoping that there will be "trickle-down" advantages to a federal project in significant contracting and subcontracting opportunities.

Defensively, while the spaceborne defenses of the Alukk system are passable, Loknar Tamash is not actually protected by any of them except the early warning sensor grid and the Union Navy ships. The remote location means that all static defenses will have to be constructed on-site, adding a large materiel and time expense and also a much larger power requirement to the shipyard. However, the Alukk system is located many light-years from hostile borders through some of the strongest defensive arrangements in Federation space, including the mighty Amarki navy and the hardening shell of the Sarqel Treaty Organization. Internal dissent has calmed greatly since the suppression of the Syndicate and so has satisfaction with work arrangements. That said the remnants of Cardassian-Syndicate intelligence contacts, as well as dissidents under Klingon influence, likely still operate in Orion space.

The Orion political establishment have been pushing for major shipyard expansions ever since the end of the war. The political willingness to get this done second-to-none. It is noteworthy that if Loknar Tamash is not developed in concert with Starfleet soon, the Orion Union feels it is in their interests to develop the complex in conjunction with another majority interest. If not Starfleet, then perhaps the Sarqel Treaty Organization, or even the Confederacy of Amarki Navy. Or if none of those, then if Union economy growth continues, they may choose to develop it as a national yard themselves. Do not expect this site to be available forever. But while it is available, it represents one of the best locations we have, if the distance issue can be resolved.