LAST EDITED ON Nov-25-12 AT 06:25 PM (EST)
>I may have only seen this in a dream, but I vaguely remember that the
>AT&T was only fold-capable because it was powered by some notably
>dangerous reactor system. If that is the case, and not simply my
>dreaming, then mothballing it would probably include taking down the
>fold reactors, to keep the risk of Something Very Bad happening. This is so; in fact, all GENOM spacefold technology was incredibly dangerous, because their engineers didn't have access to actual Reflex technology and so ended up sort of brute-forcing the same result. This is why the crash of the Executioner destroyed basically the entire surface of Musashi. (Even GENOM themselves phased out the technology for general use thereafter; by 2300 it was out of service across the fleet, and only reappeared in the AT-series battlestations out of strategic necessity.)
If just one of those fold cores, sufficient to move a quite large but not astronomically-scaled starship, could do that to a Minshara-class planet, imagine what havoc an array of them big enough to shift a small moon would wreak if they got out of hand. That system wasn't just shut down when the WDF captured the AT&T, it was removed entirely and very, very carefully scrapped. This required some pretty significant structural compromises, which is one of the main reasons why I said in my other response below that the station is not what you would call a going concern in the early 2400s.
--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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