Chaos Alliance territory.
The capital system, Manros.
The system's starport differed from the Imperial starports commonly seen elsewhere. Its sheer size even surpassed the ancient starports of the Imperial Beliscorna Sector.
It was shaped like a black cube, as massive as a satellite.
It served both as a docking facility and a shipbuilding industrial center.
Research into the shells of navigation towers had caused Manros's engineering to advance by leaps and bounds. That was the academic foundation that had made it possible to construct such an enormous, unusually shaped starport.
Five thousand ships were docked before the gigantic starport.
Judging by their numbers alone, this fleet seemed capable of crushing any enemy fleet in any war.
In reality, however, only three of those five thousand vessels were warships. They happened to be in the system only because they had returned to Manros Starport for repairs after being damaged.
The rest were civilian ships, large and small.
The largest stretched five kilometers long.
The smallest were only a few hundred meters long.
In their efforts to minimize production costs, many civilian vessels had been built so cheaply that they barely even looked like ships.
The existence of navigation towers meant Warp travel no longer required Navigators, provided the voyage took place within a navigation tower's range.
No Void Shields, shipboard weapons, Warp Engines, or Navigators were needed. All one needed was a metal shell fitted with propulsion capable of moving it forward, and a civilian ship could travel between the stars with the aid of a navigation tower.
The proliferation of civilian ships had also erased the niche once occupied by Rogue Traders and armed merchant fleets.
The ships maintaining economic ties throughout Chaos Alliance territory were precisely these civilian vessels contemptuously called "flying houses."
Navigation towers had brought many other