Planet Cracking

**Planet cracking** was a term used to describe when a planet was literally cracked open to be mined for valuable resources.

## Overview

The first step of planet cracking was determining a planet rich with the desired minerals and ores via extensive surveying. Once this is done, a colony was established in a ring-like shape around a site about a kilometer across, and power gravity tethers were built while mining operations were carried out to carve around the planet piece to be removed. Once ready, tethers onboard the colony and a "Planet Cracker-class" ship in orbit are used to break off the massive piece which was hauled into space and brought inside the ship where it was stripped and its ore content was studied. The USG *Ishimura*, owned by the Concordance Extraction Corporation was the oldest and consistently largest of the planet crackers. The mining vessels used gravity tethers to pull massive sections of the planet up to be processed from within the vessel's mining deck. Over the history of the CEC's planet cracking endeavors, only one operation of three dozen met with less than optimal results.

The first planet crack carried out on an unmined planet is known as "popping the cork."

## History

The first planet cracking operation was successfully completed Earth's solar system on Titan, one of Saturn's moons, which was repeatedly cracked and mined until it was almost entirely gone. The remains of the moon would form the basis of Titan Station.

Eleven years prior to the disastrous events at Aegis VII, a mining operation on Wanat, presumably a mining colony, resulted in a planet cracker, three supply ships and the colony lost due to gravity tether failure. Since that time, the CEC worked closely with the manufacturers and held crew training lectures to ensure that a disaster of this magnitude never happened again.

By the time the Aegis VII disaster, the CEC owned at least five Planet Crackers. The *Ishimura* herself was dispatched to carry out an illegal mining operation in the Cygnus system, establishing a colony on Aegis VII where a single planet crack was carried out. An outbreak of Necromorphs resulting from the discovery of a Red Marker on the planet's surface (and being subsequently brought onboard the ship itself) killed nearly everyone on the ship and the colony with only a handful of survivors. After an EMP blast from the Marker shut down several important gravity tethers holding up the piece of extracted rock, it fell back down onto the planet, wiping out the infestation and all but destroying the planet, which was left unstable and exploded some time later.

The decommissioning and eventual destruction of the *Ishimura*, as well as the publicized disaster of Aegis VII, caused planet cracking to lose its credibility as a business. As a result, unemployment numbers in the CEC grew drastically.

## Dangers

It is implied that planet cracking operations are potentially very destructive, as it can result in significant disruptions of the planet's gravity and geology, possibly rendering it uninhabitable. Once a planetary body has been sufficiently mined away the gravity of an entire area of space can be affected, potentially disrupting an entire solar system.

Should enough of the gravity tethers installed on the colony fail, or if the ship in orbit suffers failures in its own tether system or comes unable to maintain altitude, the massive piece of harvest rock it is carrying can make planetfall and cause catastrophic damage. The damage can range from wiping out all life on the planet and rendering it uninhabitable to even potentially causing its complete destruction and destroying anything in its area. Whether or not this is what happened on Wanat is uncertain but entirely possible.

## Known Planet Crackers

* USG Castle
* USG Ishimura
* USG Perseus
* Unidentified CEC planet cracker-class ship, destroyed by gravity tether failure in the Wanat Disaster in 2497.
* Unidentified CEC planet-cracker class ship
* Unidentified CEC planet-cracker class ship

## Text Logs

* The USG Ishimura
* Planetary Mining
* Mining Timeline

## Sources

1. ↑ Dead Space Extraction Remastered
2. ↑ Dead Space Extraction Remastered
de:Planeten Cracking

es:Excavación Planetaria