For that matter, has whatever technology allows the construction of the AT&T been used again, for the purposes of building artificial planets? If another situation like Krypton develops, and an entire planet needs to be evacuated, why not just evacuate them onto another structure the size of a planet?

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.

Even if this isn't the case, the first time Gryphon is aware that Unicron might be coming back is in Holiday in the Sun, which would appear to be concurrent with an unreleased part of Cybertron Reloaded. That doesn't give much time to bring a battle station back to operating status, particularly one the size of a planet.

>
>For that matter, has whatever technology allows the construction of
>the AT&T been used again, for the purposes of building artificial
>planets? If another situation like Krypton develops, and an entire
>planet needs to be evacuated, why not just evacuate them onto another
>structure the size of a planet?
>

It really depends on the time/manpower problem, which I expect Gryphon to hand-wave away - this is space opera, not Hard Science-Fiction. But it took about five years to construct the first one; if there's that much time to spare, it's probably easier to find an actual planet.

Also, that's five years with Largo pushing the project, which probably means that profitability had been thrown out the window, and breaking even followed closely behind it. So, if somebody has several fortunes to throw away, it might happen. But if it's impractical and financially unfeasible, there's probably no reason to do so. Call back once they have reliable planet-construction nanotech, and you might get a different answer.

Peter Eng
--
"What went wrong?"
"I don't know. But instead of a new planet, we've got a planet-sized glob of cherry pie filling."
"Anybody have a solar-system sized graham cracker crust?"

At this point, to say the AT&T is "in mothballs" is a little like applying the same expression to a mummified pharaoh. I mean, you could technically take all the organs out of the canopic jars and put them back into the body cavity, but you probably still wouldn't get a viable government official out of the deal. :)

Admittedly, it's in better condition than the prototype, which was blown to smithereens in an unpublished-but-alluded-to battle during the early-2390s Corporate Wars that followed the fall of Largo (both Wedge Antilles and Wilhuff Tarkin made their names in that fight, which has been hinted at in Rogue Squadron), but still... by the early 2410s it's not what you would call a Going Concern. Which is not to say that, looking down the barrel of a Unicron attack, the Chief wouldn't quite like to have it back, but it's not really a feasible option. It would probably be quicker and cheaper to build a new one*, which would still take far longer than the time available.

>For that matter, has whatever technology allows the construction of
>the AT&T been used again, for the purposes of building artificial
>planets? If another situation like Krypton develops, and an entire
>planet needs to be evacuated, why not just evacuate them onto another
>structure the size of a planet?

Neither of the GENOM Armored Tyranny stations was actually the size of a planet (the reference to the AT&T in Crossroads being "roughly the size of Terra" is in error on several levels), though either one would still have been handy for the Krypton evacuation (even more so if transporter technology had existed at the time; without transporters on a very large scale, you're still limited by the shuttle bottleneck in that sort of mass evacuation). I would imagine that the series has been scrutinized extensively by space habitat engineers and naval architects in the years since the reorganization of GENOM. There's a limit to how much it can tell them, though, since there was nothing really revolutionary in the ATs' construction. They were just really, really large expressions of fairly-well-understood technologies.

And yes, that does mean the first one was officially designated "Armored Tyranny" and the second "Armored Tyranny and Terror". The whispered joke around MILARM Command was that if Largo commissioned a third one, it would be even larger and they'd have to come up with another T word to add - maybe Armored Total Tyranny and Terror, or, since Admiral Thrawn was reputed to be fond of wine, perhaps Armored Tyranny, Terror, and Terroir. ("Death Star" was a Salusian Intelligence Service codename which was technically only applied to the prototype, not the larger one that the WDF captured in the Second Battle of Zeta Cygni.)

--G.
* after Babylon 4 disappeared, the Babylon Foundation did consider this, but decided it would, er, Send the Wrong Message
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.