ALIEN - CONTRACTED: New Logan Colony

Following the last entry's trajectory, here is the history of an extractive colony that could be the staging ground - or ground zero - for the next scenario in the ALIEN universe. I will return here and expand this with more details on some of the colony's characters like the Prophet and his family, the local InterStar office, an average first-wave colonist, and a prospector. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The planet LV 317, located in the coreward reaches of the Crestus Prime cluster in the American Arm, was first surveyed by remote drone in 2074, and again in 2080. With a gravitation of just over 1g and an existing, if thin, atmosphere, the planet was deemed a viable candidate for a future colony. InterStar applied for first colonization rights with the ICC a year later. The remote world was then earmarked for further exploration by InterStar’s prospector corps further down the line.

The deep space exploration vessel Apollonia touched down on the planet’s surface in 2089. The prospectors discovered large above and below-ground deposits of hydrocarbons, as well as promising mineral deposits across the planet. These survey results brought InterStar’s colonization machine into full gear. The company now began to recruit an initial colonization crew. In 2095 a ground breaker team of twenty replicant laborers and four humans were sent ahead to prepare the site for the later colony. They began construction on the temporary habitat modules that would be a home for the colonists for the first years. These habitats would provide a home for the colonist community while they worked on the permanent structures that would eventually make up the actual colony. The initial colonization crew then arrived in 2103.

This crew consisted of one hundred and seven Universal Order of Enoch adherents, accompanied by two synthetics. The colonists had undergone a rigorous two-year training program to equip them with the necessary skills and knowledge to build habitats, begin construction on the atmosphere processing plant, and prospect for exploitable resources. With the arrival of the colonists, the work for the ground breaker crew was completed. The replicants and their supervisors were shipped off-world again, having stuck around for an extra month to aid the colonists in transitioning into their new lives. After a brief orientation period following their arrival on LV 317 the colonists went to work. InterStar frequently supplied the nascent colony with material to continue construction, as well as with food and water supplies.

The colonists first completed the central module of the future colony. These colony modules were assembled from uniformly prefabbed pieces, manufactured in orbital factories in the core worlds before being shipped out to wherever new planets are colonized. This process has not changed much in the past fifty years, just the technology used in manufacturing, and the technology integrated into the colony modules has become more sophisticated. The main hub module contains the colony’s life support, hydroponic garden, water reclamation, and sewage treatment plants. These various modules began operations in 2106. In a special worship service, the community named the colony New Logan, after New Logan, Utah, the birthplace of Prophet Dallen Wingert, the community’s spiritual leader. New Logan was now on track to become a self-sustaining outpost of human civilization – and of Universal Order of Enoch Mormonism – among the stars.

Over the course of the following five years, the colonists expanded their town, and began the construction of the atmosphere processing plant. LV 317’s atmosphere was not breathable at this point. However, atmospheric pressure was high enough that the colonists could venture outside their habitats without cumbersome pressure suits for extended periods of time.

In 2110 the New Loganites had laid sufficient groundwork for InterStar to send in a dedicated workforce of specialist engineers that would finalize the massive atmospheric processing plant. As is often the case in these situations, frictions between the engineering crew and the highly religious colonists developed quickly.

Setting up the atmospheric processing plant took several years. Individual members of the engineering team had to be replaced after they ran into irresolvable issues with the colonists. In 2113 an incident involving a female colonist and an engineer resulted in a widespread revolt by the colonists. Colonial marshals had to be called in to mediate. During the confrontation, the aging Prophet Dallen died of a stroke. The conflict receded, as the community went into a period of mourning, and choosing the successor for Prophet Dallen. The next in line of succession was Reliance Laurent, who adopted Dallen’s five wives and their respective children into his own extended family. Prophet Reliance did his best to reign his flock back in. He sought to ease relations with the engineering crew, however insisted that the crew and his people no longer freely mingle. The processing plant began operations in 2119, and most of the engineering crew departed, taking with them a score of young men who had been born in LV 317 since the colony’s inception.

In 2121 the last of the temporary habitats was dismantled, its component parts reused in the construction of hydrocarbon pump facilities. Now that the colony itself was up and running, with the atmosphere processor spinning up, InterStar pressed on the agreement that New Logan began delivering on profitable exports.

New Logan had not been the only faith-group-run colony that had seen tensions between engineering crews and colonists in the roughly several decades of faith group/corporate space colonization. For this purpose several ICC companies began recruiting heavily from faith-group operated universities to have a staff of engineers on hand that could easier integrate with communities of their own religious backgrounds. Such a crew joined the New Logan colonists in 2123, to help begin operations with the hydrocarbon extraction. The engineering team together with the colonists erected several extractive hubs, that began pumping hydrocarbons into mobile loading tanks late in the year.

Over the course of the next two years, the engineers set up a hydrocarbon refinery, while the first mobile loading tanks filled with unrefined oil were shipped off-world. Meanwhile the atmosphere processor had increased atmospheric pressure to a point where humans could spend time outside pressurized habitats indefinitely. At this point it was only a matter of time before LV 317 would possess a fully breathable atmosphere.

When the refinery began operations in 2127, New Logan entered its next phase. The colonists were now tasked by InterStar to expand the habitats, and ready the colony to be opened up to outsiders who would prospect for extractable materials and build more hydrocarbon pumps.

The colonist community’s 30-year exclusivity contract expired in 2131. The UOE group watched with mixed feelings as newcomers, most of them secular gentiles, arrived. Prophet Reliance tried to keep his group separated from the swelling second wave of colonists, lest they could persuade them to join their faith. Tensions mounted again. A group of first-wave colonists gathered materials and set out into the wilderness to build a splinter colony, removed from the secularizing influences of the newcomers. Colonial Marshals were again brought in, this time to stop this group from taking materials that by law belonged to InterStar. The ringleader was charged with breach of contract, and the group forcefully repatriated back to Earth. The remaining faithful begrudgingly agreed to honor their contracts, and remain to this day at New Logan.

Over the years New Logan grew to accommodate a larger population. The colony served as the staging ground for prospecting expeditions on the planet. The original colonists began to die off due to old age. Some decided to return to Earth. New faithful replaced them to expand New Logan, which in the 2130s served as LV 317’s space port, and the sole landing grid became a bottleneck for shipping materials extracted from the planet off-world.

Prospectors discovered several significant coltan deposits in 2139. This prompted InterStar to accelerate the expansion of New Logan’s spaceport facilities. The corporation also flew several mining crews to the colony, who set up mining camps at the remotely located deposits. The planet exported what amounted to roughly 20% of InterStar’s coltan extraction by 2148. The local coltan boom resulted in a rapid expansion of the colony, which now had to service a steady stream of prospectors, miners, corporate agents, oil workers, and all sorts of frontier roughnecks.

But the boom ebbed off quickly when Weyland-Yutani’s newly opened coltan mines on Thedus flooded the market with cheap ore in 2153 that drastically lowered InterStar’s revenue in the mineral. InterStar’s prospectors also discovered other deposits on the rimward planet HR 143, which was easier to reach than LV 317. New Logan remained an important exporter of hydrocarbon, but the mineral mining boom days were over by the mid-2150s.

Today New Logan Colony is a small industrial frontier outpost that has clearly seen better days. The population of the colony gets easily lost in the facilities that now are too large and expansive. Most of New Logan feels like an empty mall. Many of the lesser-used facilities are not as well kept as the Mormon temple and the habitat of the Prophet. The remaining Mormons still serve as New Logan’s custodians and construction crews, and generally to their best to keep the entire colony in good working order. However, their numbers have dwindled over the years.

In 2180 roughly 600 people live in New Logan, while the colony’s facilities at its peak housed roughly five thousand permanent residents with a capacity for another two thousand transients.

 

Map of the colony can be found here: https://imgur.com/t4aqYtV

Colony Layout

-         Landing Grid

To the northwest of the colony, the spaceport consists of two medium-sized hangars, six landing pads, a flight tower, and the colony’s interstellar communications array. The landing grid has a series of fuel tanks, as well as a sophisticated loading pump system to directly fill trans-atmospheric tankers. The colonists have received materials to construct an additional hangar facility.

-         Main Colony Complex

The main colony is comprised of three complexes that each were built successively after the other as the colony grew. 

        Complex A

The first hub of structures is arranged in a roughly circular fashion around what seems like a central square. Due to the heavy weather conditions of the changing atmosphere, this square is however only very rarely used for gatherings. To the south of the square are the colony’s main habitation units and commons area. To the west is the expanded central colony module, as well as the adjacent operation-, and medical wings. To the north is the Corporate Module, which houses the local InterStar administration office, and Extrasolar Colonization Administration offices. To the south-east of the central ring of structures is the colony’s temple, with an attached habitat that houses the Prophet and his family.

        Complex B

Situated to the north-east of the initial cluster of structures, Complex B was added to the colony when the colonial population outgrew the initially built structures, after the completion of the atmospheric processing plant. Complex B's most important buildings are the greenhouses and water plant, which produce food and water for the entire colony. Since the decline of coltan mining and the subsequent population loss, the greenhouses operate only at minimum capacity. Complex B also houses the prospecting offices of the colony, including a sophisticated laboratory for geological surveys. Complex B is clustered around a group of three large crew barracks buildings, which are connected to a second recreational hub. Complex B also houses the local Colonial Marshall's office, which, like all things in New Logan, operates at reduced capacity with only one Marshall and three deputies on duty. 

        Complex C 

At the south-east corner of the main colony, Complex C was constructed last, at the peak of the coltan boom. Complex C is a large, expansive housing compound, that at present moment stands mostly empty. Unlike the other two complexes, which are arranged in a circular shape, Complex C is a long cluster of buildings, which offer both advanced suites, as well as another cluster of housing barracks. The complex is book-ended on both sides by overflow mass housing facilities, large halls that were built to catch a population explosion that never came to be.

         Container Dock

South of the landing grid is a pile of interstellar shipping containers, which the colonial workers use for cargo shipments. An industrial crane shuffles the containers around. Even now that mineral extraction has slowed down, there is usually a couple of filled containers with processed ore waiting to be picked up by a cargo hauler sitting around.

All structures of the colony are connected by extensive underground tunnels.

 

-         Hydrocarbon Refinery

To the south-west of the main colony complex, outside of the central complex’ storm walls, is the imposing structure of the hydrocarbon refinery, which itself takes up as much space as half of the colonial structures in Complex A themselves. To the north between the refinery and the landing grid is a set of six large tanks that contain the refined oil, ready to be pumped onto a tanker ship. The refinery operates near peak capacity, with the powers that be consulting whether or not to add a whole second refinery complex to the colony. Hydrocarbon extraction is currently the prime reason New Logan is still in operation.

 

    Mineral Ore Processing Plant

South of the main colony is the hulking structure of the local ore processing plant, including a large slag heap. With the heyday of mineral extraction past, the plant still operates, processing whatever left-behind miners bring in. 

Three gravel paths, traversable by ATV tractor, lead from the colony to the south, and southeast, and east with the atmospheric processing plant and the nearest hydrocarbon fields in a few kilometers distance. The path out the eastern gate leads to the main mineral mining operations, of which only a smattering are still in operation.

 

In 2180 roughly 600 people live in New Logan.