Age of Ruin

The Amilguiaro sector is the very definition of Frontier space. With few exceptions, the worlds of Amilguiaro are underdeveloped and reliant on resource extraction to sustain their weak economies. Industrial services are few and far between. The cities on the worlds themselves are generally walled affairs, insular and isolated, and always built around a network of mines and refinement facilities.

Conditions are harsh on these worlds, and have only worsened recently as the Stellar Republic has slowly withdrawn material support and all but the most token protection for trade routes going to and from Amilguiaro Sector.

Where the Republic has failed to provide, starship manufacturers in the region have stepped up to profit, offering specially-equipped ships designed to withstand the rigors of long-haul cargo runs, hostile atmospheres, patchy spaceport service, and even hold their own when confronted by hostile pirates. These ships range in size from small sprinters barely a fifty yards long, up to mighty vessels a hundred times the displacement that stretch the ability of their thrusters to re-enter a planet’s orbit.

Formal spaceports are often a luxury mining settlements on the frontier can ill afford. Ships looking to do business here must be able to contend with landing on rough and unsteady ground. Frontier ships, as they are called, are thus often equipped not just with simple claw landing gear, but legs enabling them to land in one place, then walk while grounded, allowing for less-than-perfect landings and saving strain on the main thrusters.

As all things do, these ships break down. The power-hungry main and maneuvering thrusters are generally the first things to fail on any starship. If repairs to a landed ship’s main drives cannot be repaired or replaced, the vessels are either parted out or abandoned.

Abandoned ships are, however, generally perfectly structurally sound, and the durable walking landing gear almost always works just as well as the day the ship first broke anchor. This has lead to a very curious effect on many a rough world on the frontier where dozens or hundreds of grounded starships can be seen walking from one settlement to the next, driven by ship herders in massive, bizarre trade caravans.

Motive systems for walking robots is well understood throughout most of the galaxy. These ship herds will often have a favorite walking ship from which they control their caravan, the herd’s many control systems slaved to the herder’s.

Even the relatively complex walking landing gear frontier ships are equipped with is inherently much more durable than sublight thrusters, and operate with orders of magnitude less power. Ship hulls, no longer being subject to the rigors of space, are under vastly less strain than they would be if they remained in service. Thus there are many ancient, centuries old beasts of steel and composite roaming the plains of Amilguiaro’s worlds.