Sentinel

Sentinel

The legends told us that Sentinel, the guardian star that crossed the heavens every night, stood vigil between us and the Angels. It protected us from the darkness beyond. There was surprising truth in those tales...

Sentinel is an asteroid, honeycombed with tunnels and large openings for landing bays and docks for starships. It was moved into orbit of Bifrost by our ancestors, and serves as the largest "artificial" moon of our planet. It was the first goal of our early spaceships once we convinced the Angels to let us fly above the atmosphere once again. Once there, we found a treasure trove: it was a storehouse of long forgotten knowledge, useful technology, and an entire starship in good (if unusable) condition. For six hundred years, Sentinel had been silently guarding our people from a very specific darkness: the loss of knowledge.

With what we found on board, we were able to rediscover techniques for building larger and larger space vessels, eventually developing the first interplanetary spacecraft and even eventually regaining the ability to build primitive Spike Drives. The facilities on Sentinel have served the Navy well both in the roles of logistics and command and control, as well as the large habitable volumes being used for training and familiarization of many of the initial navy recruits. With dozens of new stations now orbiting Bifrost and multiple large habitats spread through the solar system, it is considered a great honor for an academy cadet to be selected for one of the classes on Sentinel. In particular, there is a great amount of competition to be one of the lucky few classes assigned to Sentinel during the annual academy graduation ceremony.