#shipyards

[stone-cold-groove]

Popular Mechanics magazine cover illustration detail - May 1931.

[iskry-iz-glaz]

Полевой скетчбук: День 17 / Travel Sketchbook: Day 17

В день, когда я и Коля нашли миску для Софы, мы проходили по набережной с верфями — место, которое мгновенно меня покорило.

Мы вернулись туда втроём, чтобы рисовать. Было ветрено и смерть, как холодно! Пока ребята доделывали свои картинки, я набросала и их за три секи...

[honourablejester]

Starfinder Deity Spotlight: Groetus

God of empty places, oblivion, ruins. An apocalyptic god of unknown origin, Groetus is the distant and malevolent skull-like moon hovering over Pharasma’s Boneyard—a dispassionate observer who patiently waits for the end of all things. Groetus has no organized faith.

--- Starfinder Core Rulebook (2017)

Morilux: Shipyard of nihilism. Founded in 301 ag by a disillusioned shatori leading a cult of Groetus, the god of the end times, the spaceport Morilux provides its faithful populace a clear view of the dying star around which their planet, Astevint, orbits. Morilux’s squat, makeshift shelters are built amid twisting brass ruins that jut from the ground like the ribs of some dead metallic titan. A jagged chasm tears across the settlement’s center, above which perches Absent Abbey, the port’s primary religious building.

Originally, Morilux simply served as a refuge for doomspeakers to contemplate entropy. However, the nearby dwindling star attracted astronomers who have politely coexisted here for years. Morilux also seems to be a magnet for ruin, with an unlikely number of disabled starships serendipitously sputtering into the area. At first, the Groetans reveled in the dying spacecraft, but eventually, enough ships sought repairs that the faith developed a new tradition: imperfect repair. For a meager fee, Morilux’s nihilistic mechanics repair visiting spacecraft on two conditions. First, the crew must attend the Groetans’ religious gatherings (even if they don’t participate directly), afterward releasing any crew who wish to remain. Second, the starship’s repairs never bring it back to peak performance; the mechanics always leave or even introduce minor flaws that gradually contribute to the vessel’s eventual failure.

--- Starfinder: Ports of Call (2023)

Okay. So Groetus is actually a Pathfinder deity too. He’s the strange skull-faced moon hanging over the afterlife dimension of the Boneyard, waiting for the end of days where he’ll turn out the lights, as it were. But it’s his Starfinder incarnation that I first fell in love with, and almost entirely because of the above entry in Ports of Call.

Because. Look. He’s the uncaring god of doomsayers and nihilists, written about primarily by madmen. He’s not really that interesting? He doesn’t do much or say much. He really is hanging around just waiting for his job to finish at the end of days.

But. When you put his followers into a continuous situation. When you take a nihilistic cult and give them a community, give them a location, make what happens around it their problem, to the point where they have to begrudgingly interact. Like. Morilux is fantastic. ‘Look, all we’re trying to do is have a peaceful dying settlement looking out on a dying star to while away eternity while awaiting the end, and in order to stop your damned shipwrecks cluttering up the view, we’re going to fix you up just enough so that you can limp off and die somewhere else’. Like, it’s callous and cruel, but also kind of hilariously begrudging? Imagine arriving here, your starship dying around you, desperate for a port, any port, and you arrive here. Randomly. Flung out of the drift around this dying sun. And these incredibly dour and incredibly aggravated doomsayers on the nearby planet offer you only the barest skeleton of a repair, with the explicitly stated goal that you go do your dying elsewhere. The despair and the fury and the disbelief you’d have to feel. But you accept, because what else can you do? And you leave on a wing and a prayer to any other deity.

I also love how they had to … Groetus in his Pathfinder incarnation actually had an anathema against artificially extending something’s lifespan, as well as giving hope. In Starfinder he’s too minor to have stated anathema, but I don’t see why he wouldn’t still have that one. So Morilux is playing fast and loose, here. To repair something at all rather than accept its inevitable end is borderline heresy over here. But when you put your cult of nihilists in a continuous situation. When you give them neighbours and an actual temple and a space port to have to look after. Lines get blurred. So we work out some … theological work arounds, a little light heresy, that’ll just shunt the problem off onto someone else. Which is great. A living breathing religion here. Ironically, given the deity that’s in it. Heh.

I also just enjoy the aesthetic of his cults. He’s the god of empty places, oblivion and ruins. His temple-spaceport is built on a planet orbiting a dying star, amidst the titanic brass ruins of some ancient and unexplained civilisation, in a temple called the Absent Abbey. We’re here, we’re chilling, we’re contemplating the inevitable end of all things. (Or we would be, if people would just stop annoying us). Again, he gives me some Sunless Sea vibes. A weirdly charming cosmic horror. You know?

He's not the most interactive of gods. Mostly, he’s just there, a symbol of the inevitable end. But he’s got a weird little religion (or maybe more a bunch of weird little religions) built up around him, and I really do feel that they add a lot to the setting.

And, just. Morilux is amazing? Such a fantastic location to add in.

[kissing-the-abyss]

Spent yesterday at the shipyards since it was also port day.

The unceded and ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

[vox-anglosphere]

The launch of RMS Olympic heralded a new era in luxury ocean liners

Olympic was soon followed by her sister ships, Titanic and Britannic.

[pundus]

"Across the Skies of Mars"

Across the skies of Mars, the turning point of the Federation's final hours in the 24th century begins. Orchestrated by the Tal Shiar, itself orchestrated by the Zhat Vash, the A500 synths of the Utopia Planitia shipbuilding facilities on Mars, then with their might trained onto building ships for the Romulan Rescue Armada, the lobotomized androids had been hijacked by the Romulans themselves, in a futile attempt to save themselves, not from the Supernova, but from Seb-Cheneb of Ganmadan, the end of days.

Ships manned by the synths, serving as guardians to Mars, now run rampant and raging, raining phaser fire from above the tri-hy stations, assisted by orbital weapons platforms pummeling the crust, igniting the flammable gases of the planet.

Happy First Contact day.

[sbnkalny]

Hey man I play the Maracas I go  Chic-chic-ky-boom  Chic-chic-ky-boom  the senioritas they sing  and they swing with "terampero"  it's Very nice! so full of spice!  and when they dance in they navy, shipyards, mills, heating, construction or the jersey devil?

[hagleyvault]

In 1887, the Pennsylvania Steel Company constructed a steel plant at Sparrow's Point, Maryland on the mouth of the Patapsco River. Shortly after construction was completed, the plant was incorporated as the Maryland Steel Company of Baltimore County. That same year, 1891, the Marine Department, which included a shipyard, was created. The steel-works and shipyard continued to operate as the Maryland Steel Company until 1916, when Bethlehem Steel acquired the Pennsylvania Steel Company and its subsidiary, Maryland Steel.

These cyanotype photographs, taken on this date, March 11, in 1891, are part of Hagley Library’s Maryland Steel Co. photograph album (Accession 2008.224), a collection of three albums containing 204 cyanotype photographs taken at the company's steel plant and shipyard between 1890 and 1894. The albums contains exterior and interior photographs of buildings involved in steel production and steel workers, the company’s shipyard and shipyard buildings in use, and the construction and launch of ships built by the company, primarily tugs and coastal passenger steamships.

To view these albums online now in our Digital Archive, just click here.