Already Ready Already Colony Program

The Already Ready Already Colony, or ARAC Program for short, was a joint venture between the Alliance and the Gudersnipe Foundation. The Alliance refers to the program as Project Mike, and the Foundation used the code-name "Project Pop-Top". The project consisted of building pre-fabricated bases and placing them in areas the Kamians were not likely to suspect.

Background

Early in the Succession Wars the Kami had established a pattern. Whenever a solar system fell, they would evaluate it for strategic value. If it was strategically useful or had valuable resources, they would fortify the solar system and occupy any habitable worlds. If there was no value to the system, they would render any habitable worlds uninhabitable(regardless of the local population), thus rendering them unusable by the enemy.

The Coalition forces were in dire need of bases for operation. Supply depots, repair facilities, any number of things. The Alliance was especially hurting, as most of the UESAF ships had very short endurance, forward supply bases were vital to their ability to participate in the war effort.

Initial Planning

The concept was originally conceived by the Alliance and brought to the Foundation, whom they believed possessed the technology necessary to make it work. The Foundation, however, could not spare the resources, and instead helped the Alliance develop alternative technologies on their own, and aided with logistical support. Most of the work on the true ARACs was done by Alliance citizens, aided by the industrial might of the Foundation.

Name

The Alliance named the project after a type of instant meal, who's ad campaign made light of how easy it was to prepare. The Foundation made a similar decision, instead substituting easily opened cans. It was both a reference to easily prepared foods and a jab at the bases themselves, which were highly vulnerable to attack. The Foundation did use the fully Alliance name on most documentation, since it translated extremely awkwardly and frustratingly into Kamian.

Concept

The basic idea was to build a fully pre-fabricated base that could be towed to a strategic position, use for a time, and moved again as the war effort demanded. The Alliance had proposed building space stations, but the Foundation felt that surface bases would be considerably more valuable.

The Kamians felt they were denying the enemy strategic positions by destroying habitable worlds. With nowhere to build a surface base, they reasoned, the enemy would leave the solar system alone. The Foundation countered by proposing Pop Top construct surface bases anyway, but in places the Kamians would never suspect, such as asteroids, small planets, and moons.

The bases themselves were surprisingly cheap to construct, and did not require many materials that were in high demand during the war. Re-enforced concrete, cheap steal, even some wood was used in the construction of very large habitats. These could actually be built deep inside Alliance territory, on planet surfaces, using easily trained labor forces. Building them was, by and large, not much different from constructing a parking garage or hydro electric damn; it was not entirely a "simple" task, but it could be done, and it could be done for a fraction of the cost of construction in space.

Deployment

Once complete, Foundation ships would arrive for the heavy lifting. Moving a structure that weighs several million tons off a planet surface is not a simple matter. In fact, getting it out of the gravity well of a normal, habitable world, is generally regarded as impossible.

Unless you have a terraforming ship.

WorldCraft had moved its main terraforming fleet as far from the fighting as possible(In fact, the fleet was even part of a backup plan being put into place by the Foundation to simply cut losses and relocate to an unexplored region beyond the Kamian's reach). However, nine of the original Golden Age-era ships were still operational(despite being nearly five thousand years old), and were much more than equal to the task(Alliance engineers were very concerned about weight on the first ARAC, being completely terrified at the Foundation instructions to make everything stronger and thicker than needed. When the time came, the terraforming ship had no difficulty whatsoever in lofting the massive colony into orbit).

Of course, even at five thousand years of age, the old terraforming ships were far and away too valuable to risk taking anywhere near the front lines. Fortunately, once in space, an ARAC was easily manageable. It still took multiple Crimson Blade capitol-class ships to bring one under an FTL tow, so each ARAC deployment called for around eight battle groups. (After the first, each ARAC came pre-loaded with supplies, making them litteraly "ready" from touchdown)

Locations

Typically, most outer solar systems are considered no-mans land, sparsely defended and seldom visited. The "ideal" location for ARAC deployment was on rocky moons orbiting gas or ice giants in the outer system. Small planets or asteroids, if sufficiently rocky, we also acceptable. A few were even placed on rogue planets. Nebulas for favored if available, since they provided additional cover.

The ideal site was in a solar system that previously had no habitable worlds. Someplace that, since the Kamians did not see any value at all, was unlikely to even be charted.

No ARAC was ever deployed on a place with a breathable atmosphere, the vast majority were surrounded by hard vacuum.

Base Construction

Generally, each ARAC built back on Alliance soil was a large cylander or hexagon. Each base would usually include at least three of them, though most used at least five and some as many as ten. The bottoms of deep craters were considered the best location. Once a sight was chosen, the orbiting ships would use energy weapons and even occasionally missiles to roughly level a site.

Although the area was much too large to effectively grade, a cursory geologic survey was also necessary to ensure the ARAC would at least sit level on the site. One base had almost a two degree tilt, which the crew manning it never stopped complaining about.

It took every large vessel in the deployment fleet working together to place a single ARAC on the surface. The massive structure would be unmanned during it's descent, and all ships involved would use tractor beams to gently "lower" the structure. Surprisingly, despite the huge loads being managed, the landings were always ARACs had artificial gravity but no inertial dampers, so a popular game for the final inspection crews were to balance as many things as they could all over the station, then see what fell down once they arrived on the surface.

Each ARAC could function on it's own, with full life support and hangar facilities for delivering supplies to orbiting ships. Once all ARACs were in place, a base could actually begin operations immediately, the first inventory of supplies was already on hand. Still, tunnels would be constructed connecting the bases, and orbital elevators if possible. If an ARAC were thought to likely have a long operational lifespan, tunnels would be dug beneath it to expand the base into the planetary body. For this purpose