Owner: Earth Union
Location: Earth, Central Asia
Add-Ons:
- Unknown
Mobile Suits (???):
- Unknown
Mobile Armors (???):
- Unknown
Defenses:
- Unknown
Occupants:

The sprawling Earth Union fortress at Baikonur, Kazakhstan was and remains a key defense and infrastructure point since the end of the Interregnum, originally serving as the chief mobile suit plant of the Human Reform League as well as their main space port facility. While its use as a space port has declined since the construction of the massive launch base in Singapore, the epic scale of its industrial faculties remain in hard use for the Union’s military construction efforts.

Compared to other Union bases, ex-League or otherwise, the Baikonur facility is practically a city unto itself, with multiple vaguely conical superstructures towering towards the sky where construction of mobile suits and ships is carried out below ground, and Union spacecraft moor to the spires as part of the cosmoport’s docking arrangement. An artificial river has been diverted to pass through part of the base, acting as both a cooling supply for the factory complexes as well as a means of disposing of various industrial wastes created during the manufacturing processes of the mobile weapons. Compared to every other fabrication center in Union territory, the Baikonur base produces quantifiable more metric tons of war assets and material combined, ranging from everything from jeeps to GN-Xs to [i]Baikal[/i]-class battleships.

A dozen HLV silos exist near the center of the base, holdovers from the League-era construction of the facility. Only the tips of the vehicles emerge from their launch ports, with the rest existing in deep blast pits arranged in a honeycombed pattern. Blast channels carry the exhaust away from the launch pits, and are easily wide enough to accommodate mobile suits – when launches are not occurring, the channels are used for shipping between the lower levels of the manufacturing structures. Smaller structures lie around the large complexes, ranging from storage buildings and administrative structures to mobile suit hangars and component assembly buildings. Given the many modifications the base has undergone over the decades, a definitively “organic” appearance could be described, especially considering the myriad array of buildings and serpentine cable and piping networks that radiate out around them.

An airstrip runs between several of the larger complexes, with taxiways and other surface transit routes attached directly to their ground floors for direct hangar access. For the most part, the base’s extensive defense batteries are actually positioned in the upper portions of the tall manufacturing complexes, thanks to their extremely heavy armor protection as well as the commanding position it offers. Virtually every structure of importance at the base is provided with a very thick skin and reinforced construction work, effectively allowing the individual compounds to act as their own forts, which in turn provides for an extremely flexible defense.

The airspace for a considerable distance around the Baikonur compound is restricted and heavily patrolled owing to the importance of the base as a critical fabrication center.