Cobblestone

Cobblestone is both the name of a planet and it's solar system, and is an important trading hub along the Steel Road

History

Cobblestone was originally called FUS-944, only solar systems with inhabited worlds are given formal names. The rest are givin labels.

The Cobblestone System(often called just "cobble" for short) was a common stop-over along trade routes as far back as the Golden Age, when it was a common FTL cool-down location. The system then contained no habitable worlds, and was a popular hunting ground for raiders and space pirates. The lack of any permanent habitation made it difficult to police. During the Golden Age, the Foundation frequently placed patrols in the area.

In the late Golden Age, the Runarins built a large space station orbiting one of the gas giants in the out solar system, and attempted to station a garrison of sublight-capable fighters there. However, the garrison had little impact on raiding. Most spacecraft using the region for cool-downs avoided the station, which taxed any traveler and charged very high fees for docking. The Runarin's goal of building a trade hub failed.

By the early Second Age, the Runarin government had withdrawn it's support. A few private groups attempted to maintain the station, but without access to parts, it quickly fell into disrepair and became uninhabitable, and by A.Y. 2100, was abandoned.

In A.Y. 2904, a Foundation ship(which still made regular patrols) made a fly-by of the now abandoned station and notted that some intriguiging changes had happened. The huge station had been a long, narrow tube with very heavy armor, had collapsed into a rough, oblite spheroid, and over the eight hundred years it had sat abandoned, had even gathered dust and frozen gasses. While this process was certainly not unexpected(the station relied on active structural integrity to maintain it's shape, and had a high mass), it was still interesting to observe none the less, and made the rounds on various "interesting news" sites.

More importantly, it sparked an interesting idea. In A.Y. 8913, a terraformer working for the Foundation's WorldCraft subsidiary made a proposal. FUS-944 had no suitable planets for terraforming, but it had, in the terraformers own words, "a bunch of other random crap floating around"

Formation of the Cobble System

With it's new terraforming fleet under construction in the Markhot System, WorldCraft gathered eighteen ships at FUS-944. Their first act was to move a small, rocky planet from the inner solar system into the habitable zone. Then then moved a second, mostly icy planet from further out, and dragged various astroids and other debris. All of these were set on the same orbital path and allowed to collide. The collision of the two small planets was a major event, being observed live by over ten thousand starships and around twelve million spectators.

WorldCraft also dragged six moons from gas giants and hundreds of commetary fragments, piling them all together until the mass equaled a standard-sized planet. The mass, aided some by the terraformers, quickly formed a roughly spherical shape. Atmosphere(again taken from the gas giants) was added, orbit and rotation adjusted, and finally, in just twenty years, and planet planet had quite literally been "built".

Terraforming would require another two centuries to complete, but the new planet was quickly named "cobblestone" for it's lumpy shape.