Much to my wife's dismay, I've been watching Battle 360 on the History HD channel -- it's a mixed real and CGI (mostly CGI) footage account of the Second World War in the Pacific, from the perspective of the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Watching, I was fascinated by the superstructures of the battleships of the time, most notably the Yamato. It struck me that I could use the basic idea as the basis for a futuristic battle tower. So there it is. Modeled and rendered in Bryce. Stars and other postwork in Photoshop. Couldn't resist using Ron's Fogs again for the sublimation. --- Rampart Base was the main Martian Imperial Marine Guard surface installation on Mercury. At the onset of the Martian-Belter war, Rampart Base was home to the Third Cohort of the original MIMG legion. The base occupied the site of a worked-out mine in the badlands north of Verdi Crater. Much of the base was underground, but the Rampart Tower dominated the ridge above the spaceport field. In conjunction with scattered targeting arrays and orbital assets, it stood as the guardian of the facility, powerful as a destroyer and heavily armored. In the long early hours of dawn, wispy mists graced the Tower, escaped water vapor and carbon dioxide from the base complex quickly sublimating under the blazing sun and dissipating into the near vacuum. Rampart Tower guarded the base for over a century, finally falling under Venusian assault in the First Mercury War. A commemorative golden plaque marks the crater where the tower once stood. --Rampart Visitors Guide, 2780 Edition.