Skull Star

The Skull Star (スカルスター, Sukarusutā）is a space fortress which is home to a frontier pirate guild. It is capable of FTL< travel and its movement is difficult for even Galactic Empire intelligence to trace.

Appearance
True to its name, the fortress is shaped like a skull. Originally it was much smaller and spherical. The portion of the upper jaw was built as a poorly planned expansion first, making it look like a deformed octopus. After most of the port area was moved up to the eye as 10 km diameter air shielded ports that are about 10km deep, the upper jaw area was kept as a factory, research and storage zone. The lower jaw was expanded as a closed port area, planned much better than the first one.

Details
The Skull Star, a fortress expanded into a free trade port city, is heavily connected with the Pirate Guild, and a lot of trade taking place in it is obviously illegal (including loot, pirated versions of software, illegal drugs etc). It also has various researches ongoing, including weapons and drug researches, quite a lot of them hard to perform because of the need to do human experiments and are quite inhumane. Even though human trafficking is strictly prohibited by the Pirate Guild, some gangsters are still doing it secretly, one such group being the Gens Family.

Since it will accept and pay bounty for different governments, there are also a lot of bounty hunters that will go there. It also contains quite a lot of museums and libraries, collecting a lot of art pieces and books that are banned or lost in time, including a lot of pieces from already destroyed planets.

History
The fortress was constructed thousands of years ago. It was originally a mobile fortress, but it was slowly expanded to become a free trade port city.

Skull Star Arc (Novel-Only)
The Galactic Empire's intelligence division hired the Bentenmaru for assistance in having a small group of people infiltrate the fortress.