Asterospolis
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The Asterospolis is a large space station in the Hermates sector, which is home to approximately 720,000 Gambians and miscellaneous aliens native to the Ithassa Region. It is also one of the two most significant bases of operation for the Free Trade Union. The Asterospolis is in fact not so much a station as it is an asteroid that has been converted to enable humanoid habitation. It usually travels slowly through space as a free floating body, using the inertia gained from the gravitational pull of nearby stars to propel itself. The Asterospolis is equipped with thrusters to provide limited manoeuvrability. It's present location is forty-one light years from Deep Space 17, right on the edge of the Ithassa region.
Like Federation colonies, the Asterospolis utilises artificial gravity generators and an environmental containment field to create an M-class environment on a large asteroid. But there all similarity ends. Imagine the main town (the polis) as some immense yeast culture, left in a damp cupboard by an absent-minded lab technician, festering uncontrolled, and running rampant in the ideal growth conditions.
Set in undulating tropical rain forest, from orbit the urban area resembles nothing so much as a giant pool of crapulent vomit on somebody's expansive unmowed lawn. Almost every building is roofed with corrugated iron in various advanced stages of rusty erosion. A single rearing skyscraper at the town's centre provides the headquarters of the Free Trade Union elite. This is the only building discernible from space with the naked eye. In the direct vicinity of the skyscraper are an intergalactic bank, an advanced communications array and large general stores and warehouses. Few other buildings reach higher than three storeys however, and most are crumbling mud-walled houses randomly clustered and packed alongside narrow pot-holed streets lined with deep purulent drains. Looking down from the airy white-bleached facilities of the FTU – established nobly on a hilly elevation above the town - the roofs stretch out as an ochrous tin checkerboard, a bilious metallic sea, the paranoid vision of a mad town planner.
Tactical Systems
The Asterospolis itself is well-armed, but its exact tactical specifications are unknown. At any given time, the base is home to a number of Free Trade Union starships that can bolster its defences.