Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Maxient (section)

==Attributes==
It is now nearly impossible to find the core of the Xerxes III from which Maxient arose.  While its original shape and size were normal for its classification, the station has since bloated like a tick.  Now, the station is a hideous amalgam of great, spiraling lumps of metal, protruding bulges of aftermarket additions, and the thin needles of starship dock spindles.  The only piece of the original station still accessible from the outside is the huge Astropathic Temple-spire that juts out from the ventral surface facing, allowing it to be severed and destroyed in case of a daemonic flesh-gate opening among its residents.

As time went on and the station grew older, so did the Cloudburst Sector.  The gradual process of finding more routes into the Oldlight Exo-zone, the Cloudburst Circuit, and the growing Cloudburst Sector made Maxient’s position relative to the thrum of Imperial commerce change.  While the station itself has not moved from its lonely orbit around the star GHE848, the border of the Sector has pushed past it into the Cloudburst Circuit.  The station has grown as much as it has for two reasons: urgent need, followed by bitter envy.  At first, when the station was repurposed from being a supply depot into a proper port, it simply lacked the onboard weapon and quartering capacity needed by a proper border fort.  Rather than gut the six massive storage modules originally installed, the Navy instead opted to add additional modules to the outside hull and chain them together.  This swelled the station in size nearly all the way to that of a Xerxes IV, but the cost was deemed worthwhile by the Imperial Navy, who reasoned that it would be cheaper than meticulously removing the interior storage and replacing it.

Over time, more and more modules appeared on the hull.  These were not added because of the need for stronger defense, but instead because the Adeptus Mechanicus found itself unhappy with the reduction of its role in the status quo.  With the Navy now in command, the Mechanicus could no longer claim rulership over a platform it had striven and spent to build.  The original terms of the agreement forged under the watchful eye of the Adeptus Arbites would be that he Mechanicus would be allowed to retain control over half the station, but the Imperial Navy would have the other half as well as overall control.

The ambiguity of that resolution indirectly caused the slow growth of the station.  When the tension over the perceived loss of status that losing command of the station entailed reached a boiling point, the Adeptus Mechanicus ordered the conversion of an interior storage bay into a huge temple complex.  This was a direct snub to the leadership of the Imperial Navy.  When the huge temple was done, welded, and powered up, the Naval Admiral stationed on Port Maxient asked the Mechanicus which half of the temple was his.  When the Adeptus Mechanicus demanded an explanation, the Admiral simply pointed out that half of the station fell under his command, and therefore half of the new temple was his.

Enraged but unable to deny the logic, the Mechanicus instead reached a compromise: they would add another module to the station and return its content to an even number, thus allowing the Navy to maintain control independent of the temple, which would remain theirs.  The Navy found that quite agreeable, and soon enough, the station had a new fighter bay.

This pattern repeated itself again and again over the course of the ensuing millennia, as one faction chose to increase the size of the station, and the other sought to counterbalance the other’s expansion of control.  Sometimes this has taken the form of co-owned modules, but most expansions are of the paired sort, built in twos and split between the two.  A few specific modules and expansions have been exempted from this petty division, such as secondary reactors to power the ever-greater sprawl, but since only the Adeptus Mechanicus can operate those, the Navy is usually quick to claim other compartments onboard as compensation.  Likewise, the ever-growing population of Port Maxient has necessitated larger and larger facilities for the other Adeptae.  In time, Adeptus Administratum tithe offices, Ministorum chapels and pilgrim residences, Arbites courthouses and even a full Precinct-Fortress have emerged from the expanding disc of metal, only to be swallowed up by its slow accretion of more, more, more.

The ‘outer’ hull of the station rarely stays as such.  When a fighter bay or repair yard, or some other function that can only work when exposed to the exterior, is swallowed up by the growth, it is generally stripped bare, its parts relocated to elsewhere, and the empty space where it had been filled with something else.  At times, the station commander will attempt to outpace the metastatic expansion of the station by adding some useful new function on a spur or outgrowth at the end of a long umbilical, or even a dedicated orbital train on an enclosed solid line.  Thus, the station looks like nothing more than a virion from a great distance, with blinking lights and open docking cups on long stalks sticking out of an ugly, asymmetric blob of alloy and clashing paint.  Over time, the unwieldy expansion of the station gave way to somewhat more organized increases in size, with new modules being added adjacent to each other and expanding outwards in a spiral.  Other times, however, the civilian residents of the station began their own expansions after buying permits from the Naval officers overseeing operations.  These have included all manner of Rogue Trader and Merchant Noble houses that have wanted to add more storage, sales, and residential structures over time.  Thus, there are smaller growths that simply stick out from the hull in random directions.

Other expansions of the station have been less welcome.  One of the chunks of discolored metal rammed awkwardly into the lumpen spiral of deliberate construction is the lingering remnant of the Ork Kroozer ''OrdgargZak'', which attempted a suicide ramming attack on the station in M41.898.  Over time, scrap and salvage teams have partially dismantled the ship, starting with its horrifyingly unstable Warp core, and broken it down for recycling.  This kicked off another jurisdictional battle, since it slammed into a shared part of the station.

The massive station enjoys extensive defenses.  Perhaps the only real benefit of the frenzied and competitive expansion of the station is that the Imperial Navy and Basilikon Astra frequently try to out-compete each other to protect the station.  The hull of the station bristles with well over a hundred capital-weight weapons, of the fullest range of the Imperial military’s capacity.  These include Nova Cannons, macro-cannons, laser weapons, plasma weapons, lance batteries, missile and torpedo tubes, and kinetic kill rocket racks, as well as more esoteric weapons of the Mechanicus.  Its primary weapon battery is presently the colossal quadruple-barrel missile battery built into the largest Mechanicus portion of the station, although the Navy is already floating plans to one-up it.

From a distance, the hull looks diseased.  Swatches of Mechanicus red and white alternate with Imperial Navy grey, with gigantic Aquilae and Iron Skulls alternating on disjointed architecture.  Antennae and racks of huge guns jut from surfaces in every direction, with the irregularly-blinking lights of protruding vox masts and docking spindles interrupting the undulating alloy surface at random.

The interior isn’t much better off, most of the time.  The hundreds of Rogue Traders, Free Captains, Chartists, Missionaries, and more public-facing merchants who dwell on or pass through the station tend to stick to the nicer bits of the station, near the core, where the commerce is to be found.  The Imperial Navy portions of the station are rigid places of discipline and immaculate cleanliness, perhaps to impress upon the Mechanicus contingent the professionalism of the station’s true masters.  Meanwhile, the Mechanicus portions are sprawling religious hubs, with icons of the Omnissiah and Machine God, and sparking shrines to the Motive Force, stuck at random throughout.  Meanwhile, the Arbites and Guard stationed there look at the two bickering factions with utter contempt and pity, as the Rogue Traders get rich and the Ecclesiarchy condescends them all.

Beyond the parts of the station controlled by the Adepta and military, Port Maxient has become a riot of activity.  Over ten million humans call the huge station home, and those are the ones the Adeptus Administratum cares to count.  Nearly six hundred thousand more dwell in the underdecks and forgotten corners of the inefficient sprawl of a station.  Outside the power and life support, the decks that are no longer on the direct path between the busiest Naval and Mechanicus portions of the station, part of the firefighting protocol, or near the munitions lockers are collectively referred to as the Underguts by their morbid residents.  Taken together, the Underguts contain a bewildering variety of locations.