A Thordonian battlecruiser patrols planetary space in orbit, watching for any unauthorized engine signatures or heat sources that can show a potential surprise attack.

Thordonian artiplanets (artificial planets) range from 40,000 to 100 million kilometers in diameter, in turn giving them ginormous surface areas up to many quadrillions of times greater than that of Earth. The primary purpose of these worlds are to provide refuge for rescued biospheres, allowing huge numbers of individual biospheres from different planets to be sampled and preserved in their own maintained sections on the great constructs' surfaces. The large spaces on the surfaces of artiplanets allow for staging of huge military forces and surface based forgeries to produce planetary scale constructs such as planetary transformers and planet ships.

There are multiple classes of artiplanet based on size:
Standard artiplanet: 40,000 km diameter
MASS artiplanet: 1 million km diameter
L-MASS artiplanet: 2 million km diameter
SUPERMASS artiplanet: 10 million km diameter
ULTRAMASS artiplanet: 100 million km diameter

All MASS and higher class artiplanets are composed of three parts; a stellar mass central black hole to provide gravity, a solid pure xenonite surface shell with a uniform thickness of a couple hundred meters, and a suspended translucent xenonite worldhouse roof to provide surface protection against natural and enemy sourced hazards.

Artiplanets are usually not constructed in civilian space until a protected civilization independently achieves interstellar transportation. This is to avoid excessive media exposure which can cause unnecessary social unrest and change.