ESS Pioneer

The ESS Pioneer was a colony ship built and launched by the Earthen States in 2103 CE (12,500 BNC), to aid in the escape of humanity from a dying Earth. Launched approximately one thousand years before the ESS Adventurer, the Pioneer was tasked with building an initial colonial outpost on any habitable planets in the Alpha Centauri system, and relay any information regarding a habitable world back to Earth so it could send additional ships. The aid in the task of completing this mission, the Pioneer had terraforming equipment, advanced laboratories, and some 50,000 laborers to transform any worlds they founding into habitable planets in the event that none existed.

The colony ship is best known for its role in housing the ancestors of the modern-day Ixanians, who were the descendants of the thousands of survivors of the Pioneer and its gruesome 400-year long journey to Elysia. The Pioneer landed in today's Ravaxa in the Honorable Union of Ixania, and established many of the technologically advanced settlements that existed on the planet at the time of the ESS Adventurer's crash landing one thousand years later. Cannibalized for building material, portions of the ship were buried deep below the surface to hide its origins, and though many Ixanians who know of it no longer know of where it came from, it has the dubious honor of being a "holy site" of modern-day Xiani, as the birthplace of the Ixanian people.