KILLSTAR
KILLSTAR mass drivers are the one of the two key components of planetary defense doctrine within the Terran Hegemony. All colonies before the hegemony had access to mass drivers as a cheap means to fling things into orbit, though these payloads were much lighter and civilian in nature. During the alien incursions of the 2350s, many military development sectors sought to convert this in place civilian infrastructure to planetary defense, though none succeeded at the time.
It was only long after the war in 2402 that a Dr. Gus Tavish alongside his team at a research firm located in the Donum system made critical breakthroughs with mass acceleration. Their breakthroughs allowed for significantly more acceleration in a short period of time without regards to the mass, accelerating objects at a not so insignificant percentage the speed of light at the cost of incredible amounts of energy. Dr. Tavish reported it was too prohibitively expensive for civilian application leading to the firm closing the project immediately.
The Hegemonic military however saw the immediate benefits of a long-range mass driver with what essentially equated to unlimited payload potential. Yes, it was incredibly expensive and utilized incredible amounts of energy, but as the Hegemony had learned the hard way, there was no price too high for victory. In 2405, a general by the name of Paul Ripano gained permission to start the KILLSTAR project which sought to identify the strategic applications of such a mass driver.
The project’s history is far from smooth. Constant delays. Financial constraints. Endless engineering failures and repairs. Construction of the test drivers alone took three years. Lovingly named “The Twins”. The project, however, would see success in 2412. Finally, the project achieved the impossible, with a dummy ship placed at an elliptical solar orbit at a distance of 10.2 au, one of the mass drivers built scored a hit and complete destruction of its target using a 1 metric tron uranium alloy penetrator projectile.
The Hegemonic Military was thrilled at the prospect of such a single strike system being viable, the high energy output required however still proved to be a problem. Between the need for the most exotic materials to handle such energy levels and the fact that entire planetary energy outputs were insufficient to handle such loads almost killed the KILLSTAR program.
As things were, General Ripano and other heads of the Hegemonic Military had to petition the civilian government to expand its energy grids across the entire sector in order to better prepare for this developing weapon’s system. With the fear and memory of alien incursion still fresh in some of the populace, the government made easy work of passing laws allowing the subsidizing of excess power plants to be built. Many energy companies jumped at the chance of such payouts, building as much as their budgets could allow. With such a massive inflow of income and a guaranteed government safety net, many such corporations invested heavily into their own research and development.
Finally, by 2424, after the vast expansion of the energy grids of many planets and development of better materials production, civilian and military infrastructure was capable of supporting the KILLSTAR platform in earnest.
