Thinking on the construction of Minas Ithil and other related afairs, including a couple ideas I had for the midgets like the Dwarven Halls (family ships are just too mundane):
-2009 began the construction of Moria, and the start of the faction, including gathering people. Those people would have come slowly at first, then have a small population explosion of dwarven fans when they became better known.
-2009-2012 was used in all this expansion process; they would have had some help, but it would be mostly done by thensleves, due to a combination of lack of funds and the main construction companies in Luna being busy in Marduk, Port Luna, Kandor and the Crystal Cities. The Mines of Moria are carved, Moria CHONisc is set up, the first family ships are built, etc.
-2012: The War. Luna is safe, but the family ships aren't anymore. Since they are family ships, this is unaceptable. After the first lost ship, they were all recalled, and the morians decided that their ships needed to be toughter, much tougher. One of the younger dwarves had stuck a friendship with a mardukan vampire (after he mistook him for an elf, and the following fight that earned both of then a six month ban from Kandor bars).
The vampire worked in the Marduk shipyards, so his friend asked for advice. As it turned out, he was working on the new Ariete class ships, so he had a lot of advice to impart. Eventually, this went up the chain until it reached Oscar Vykos and Jesse Kaden. Several meetings (and probably a lot of dwarven booze) later, triing to find a balance between needs and budget, the basic design for the Dwarven Halls was agreed. (Oscar private nickname of the president of Moria Mining, the Low King, may have spread to Marduk city and from it to the rest of Luna, but it totally not his fault. It is unknown if anyone has been brave or stupid enough to use the name in the dwarves' hearing yet)
The Halls are flying rocks, that usually go from a few hundred meters to a couple of miles in diamter. The outer rock is treated with a combination of heat, pressure (via articicial gravity cannon) and handwavium for toughtness: inside that are several dozen, or even hundreds, of meters of rock, and in the heart a small dwarven fortress is carved, with all the basic needs for life and work: living areas, meeting halls, forges, warehouses, and of course breweries. They are hard nuts to crack (only Gnarlycurl is known to be toughter), so they have to be, literally, besieged, in case of attack. Unfortuantely, they are also very slow, but dwarves consider this a good trade-off. Those who need speed for their business usually have a dock near their main gates, wich a smaller, faster ship docked there. The first two or three Halls are lunar Unreal Landscape, but the rest of then are normal asteroids.
The Halls are mostly known thanks to Beregost. This is the prototype Hall, a moutain few miles west of Marduk. It was never designed to be able to lift (or that is what Moria and Genesis claim, and everyone politely pretends to believe), but the empty dwarven fortress inside is a tourist attraction, and it has been used several times to try the Ariete ships's ramming when they were being built (they never managed more than a few cracks in the moutain, wich anyway is a far better result that the nothing they managed to do in the one trial against Gnarlycurl...)
The biggest Dwarven Hall is Erebor, once a mountain-shaped asteroid ten miles long, wich has a full Air processing industry, mechanical forges, a shipyard, and biodomes to produce food. It was considered too slow for practical nomadic use, so it now floats in Jupiter's athosphere as one the the Cloud Cities.
2014-2015: After the war the Morians decided to expand once more. They decided to to try for originality and avoid Unreal State, so they desigen a concentric ring design. Since it was being bulit in the moon, the working name was set up as Minas Ithil as a joke, but it took life on its own, and the design of the city began to swift from the usual dwarven palace to a bright city of glass and white towers; eventually they decided to keep the name of Minas Ithil and use it as the home for Morians that did not wish to become dwarves, and any other fantasy fan. It is worth noting that, with the exception ot the Tower of the Moon itself in the center, the first two rings stilll keep the original dwarven style. The first four cilinders rose from Luna in the spring of 2016, and the new inhabitants quicly agreeded in the location: Saturn, to make sure Jupiter did not get a monopoly in the ari business.
Since the lesser Darven Halls are so heavily fortified, and Minas Ithil looks so open, in Saturn it is a matter of excited debate of exactly what kind of defenses the city must have hidden...
-2009 began the construction of Moria, and the start of the faction, including gathering people. Those people would have come slowly at first, then have a small population explosion of dwarven fans when they became better known.
-2009-2012 was used in all this expansion process; they would have had some help, but it would be mostly done by thensleves, due to a combination of lack of funds and the main construction companies in Luna being busy in Marduk, Port Luna, Kandor and the Crystal Cities. The Mines of Moria are carved, Moria CHONisc is set up, the first family ships are built, etc.
-2012: The War. Luna is safe, but the family ships aren't anymore. Since they are family ships, this is unaceptable. After the first lost ship, they were all recalled, and the morians decided that their ships needed to be toughter, much tougher. One of the younger dwarves had stuck a friendship with a mardukan vampire (after he mistook him for an elf, and the following fight that earned both of then a six month ban from Kandor bars).
The vampire worked in the Marduk shipyards, so his friend asked for advice. As it turned out, he was working on the new Ariete class ships, so he had a lot of advice to impart. Eventually, this went up the chain until it reached Oscar Vykos and Jesse Kaden. Several meetings (and probably a lot of dwarven booze) later, triing to find a balance between needs and budget, the basic design for the Dwarven Halls was agreed. (Oscar private nickname of the president of Moria Mining, the Low King, may have spread to Marduk city and from it to the rest of Luna, but it totally not his fault. It is unknown if anyone has been brave or stupid enough to use the name in the dwarves' hearing yet)
The Halls are flying rocks, that usually go from a few hundred meters to a couple of miles in diamter. The outer rock is treated with a combination of heat, pressure (via articicial gravity cannon) and handwavium for toughtness: inside that are several dozen, or even hundreds, of meters of rock, and in the heart a small dwarven fortress is carved, with all the basic needs for life and work: living areas, meeting halls, forges, warehouses, and of course breweries. They are hard nuts to crack (only Gnarlycurl is known to be toughter), so they have to be, literally, besieged, in case of attack. Unfortuantely, they are also very slow, but dwarves consider this a good trade-off. Those who need speed for their business usually have a dock near their main gates, wich a smaller, faster ship docked there. The first two or three Halls are lunar Unreal Landscape, but the rest of then are normal asteroids.
The Halls are mostly known thanks to Beregost. This is the prototype Hall, a moutain few miles west of Marduk. It was never designed to be able to lift (or that is what Moria and Genesis claim, and everyone politely pretends to believe), but the empty dwarven fortress inside is a tourist attraction, and it has been used several times to try the Ariete ships's ramming when they were being built (they never managed more than a few cracks in the moutain, wich anyway is a far better result that the nothing they managed to do in the one trial against Gnarlycurl...)
The biggest Dwarven Hall is Erebor, once a mountain-shaped asteroid ten miles long, wich has a full Air processing industry, mechanical forges, a shipyard, and biodomes to produce food. It was considered too slow for practical nomadic use, so it now floats in Jupiter's athosphere as one the the Cloud Cities.
2014-2015: After the war the Morians decided to expand once more. They decided to to try for originality and avoid Unreal State, so they desigen a concentric ring design. Since it was being bulit in the moon, the working name was set up as Minas Ithil as a joke, but it took life on its own, and the design of the city began to swift from the usual dwarven palace to a bright city of glass and white towers; eventually they decided to keep the name of Minas Ithil and use it as the home for Morians that did not wish to become dwarves, and any other fantasy fan. It is worth noting that, with the exception ot the Tower of the Moon itself in the center, the first two rings stilll keep the original dwarven style. The first four cilinders rose from Luna in the spring of 2016, and the new inhabitants quicly agreeded in the location: Saturn, to make sure Jupiter did not get a monopoly in the ari business.
Since the lesser Darven Halls are so heavily fortified, and Minas Ithil looks so open, in Saturn it is a matter of excited debate of exactly what kind of defenses the city must have hidden...