R.U.N.G.S

R.U.N.G.S were designed by Travis O'Connor, and are being built throughout the Solar System for long-term interstellar travel. The first of many rungs was built into O'Connor Station, the first and greatest of the Menschen Stapel. These stations use massive lasers to accelerate passing ships up to relativistic speeds, and clear their paths of space debris. Most stations utilize massive fusion reactors to power their lasers, harvesting helium from the myriad of small comets and asteroids in the outer System. Fusion reactors scale with the square cube law, and so the largest of the R.U.N.G.S can have fusion reactors hundreds of meters across, with radiators covering kilometers of space. Most stations use the last dregs of light from the R.U.N.G.S before them to power their onboard systems, and use their lasers for debris clearing and acceleration. Stations also routinely launch "safety capsules", small lightweight capsules that are little more than containers of hydrogen that ships can use in an emergency. A spaceship can rendezvous with one of these capsules at relatively low cost, and survive on the stored hydrogen for years at a time.

Most stations have large rotating habitats for their crews, lit by the waste heat from the station's fusion reactor.

Most R.U.N.G.S. are spaced roughly 500 light-seconds apart, roughly the distance between Earth and the Sun. Interstellar stations have very small populations, most being crewed by under one thousand humans. They operate under a high level of automation, and most of a station's inhabitants at any one time will be drifters, pirates or smugglers, hopping from rung to rung on a slow journey out towards the stars.

R.U.N.G.S.

Relativistic

Utility

Network

Graser

Satellite

Manufacturer

Interplanetary Governance Council