The Lunar Program
Description
During the second technological revolution, Nuxan built a program to reach Ruidus by machine. It never launched. The industry bans came down before the first ascent, the program was scrapped where it stood, and every piece of equipment it owned was scavenged for parts.
It is the most important dead thing in the setting after the gods themselves, and its particular tragedy is that it never got to fail. A civilization built the whole apparatus of reaching the moon, ground the finest glass in its history to guide the journey, and then legislated itself out of the attempt before anyone left the ground. The instruments now used to stare at Ruidus were made for a voyage that never happened.
History
The program was a product of the automaton boom — the same industrial surge reverse-engineered from the Aeormatons of Eiselcross that produced mass manufacturing, mass unemployment, and the pollution that turned public opinion against all of it. Reaching the moon was its most prestigious undertaking and, given the Ruidium in the wreckage above, almost certainly its most commercially motivated one. A shattered moon full of exotic material hanging fixed and close over the Hellcatch Valley is the most obvious extraction target in the history of the world — and the program was building the means to get at it industrially, at scale, without asking anyone’s permission.
Then industry, automation and manufacturing were banned, and it ended before it began. Its hardware was stripped and dispersed.
This had nothing to do with The Luxon. The bans were a secular backlash — pollution, ecological damage, and automatons taking sapient work — and they happened independent of the church. The Luxon does not reach Bassuras and the Hellcatch until the present day. Whatever the church’s interest in the moon becomes, it did not kill the program and was not in the room.
Mechanical Effects
Where Nuxan’s good optics come from. A lunar program needs the finest glass on the planet — tracking, targeting, sustained high-resolution observation. When it was broken up, that hardware went into private hands and into the observatories of the Bassuras sky-watchers. This is the actual provenance of the second-stratum instruments in The Shattered Sky: not generic industrial-boom gear but program-grade equipment, built and never used for its purpose. It is why the astronomers can resolve structures and lights on The Crimson Shadow and see into the breach at all, and it is why the supply is finite — nobody can build more, and what exists was salvaged once already.
Program-era records. The surveys, designs, and observational data the program compiled while planning an ascent would be the most valuable astronomical dataset on Nuxan — a long run of high-quality work on the moon, produced by people whose only agenda was getting there. If those archives survive anywhere, they are worth more than any instrument.
Open Design Questions
- How long ago? Currently unplaced within the thousand years. It needs to sit far enough back that the glass has changed hands and the program is history rather than living memory — and well before the Luxon reach the Hellcatch.
- Did Vasselheim, holding the only existing route, quietly benefit from or contribute to the program’s death? A chokepoint holder has an obvious motive to prefer that no alternative exists.
- How close did it get? “Scrapped before launch” leaves room for anything from a half-built frame to a finished vehicle sitting in a shed.
- The name. “The Lunar Program” is a working label, not in-world flavor.
Related: The Shattered Sky · The Umamu Gate · Ruidus · Ruidium · Vasselheim · The Crimson Shadow · The Falsifiable Dogma · Hellcatch Valley · Bassuras