BARD PAPER: OPAL8647 | Home | Traveller | BARD | OPAL |
BARD PAPER: OPAL8647 | Home | Traveller | BARD | OPAL |
The Ancient site on Tetzel is one of the best preserved and most extensive in the entire former Imperium. Because this site was discovered by civilians attached with the old Ministry of Colonisation, and because of its size, no attempt could be made to keep the find secret. Instead the Imperial government made the world a Naval Reserve in 604, and declared most of it offlimits to civilians.
At least four main sites have been discovered, plus a dozen smaller auxiliary sites, around the breadth of the system. From the debris that has been collected Regency scholars have deduced that the site was a major manufacturing world. Tantalising remnants of Ancient starships have been found in what appears to have been a large surface starport that once covered four hundred square miles of the surface. At other sites were found advanced robots that worked at a diversity of different tasks, from mining to manufacturing. Surveys indicate that the local facilities were attacked on four seperate occasions. After the third attack several smaller sites were abandoned by their inhabitants, and dating has shown that these were destroyed in a final attack about five thousand years AFTER the accepted end of the Final War, an incongruity that remains unexplained by current scholarship.
Some ninety percent of the world is offlimits to unauthorised personnel, and this prohibition is reinforced by several squadrons of 154th Fleet units based in orbit. Visitors are confined to the Downport and the surrounding community of Tetzeltown. Most visitors are accredited arcaeologists, physical scientists and engineers attached to prestigious research institutions or working for the Regency government. Several universities maintain "garages", small contract research labs that work under contract to the Ministry of the Navy and/or Interior and Science. Tourists have to be content with visiting the extensive musuem that includes a full-scale mockup of what the Ancient facilities are thought to have looked like.
Despite hundreds of years of research, however, deciphering of Ancient secrets has been painfully slow. Most of the research has concentrated on the destroyed downport, largely because of its military applications. There has been more progress since the declassification of other Ancient sites around the Regency, as research carried out at these sites has been synergistic in some cases with local work.