Accelerator

The Accelerator is a location on the Moon that can be visited by players. It is unknown whether any missions will take place there.

About
Like Moonbase, the Accelerator is an abandoned colonial site from the Golden Age of humanity. According to Bungie Lead Environment Artist Sam Jones, "It is a pale shadow of a once pivotal and very active machine."

As the name implies, the Accelerator's focal point is its massive Fusion Coil Accelerator (also known as a coilgun or railgun). Though no longer functional, the Fusion Coil Accelerator at one time used electromagnetic coils to accelerate projectiles to high speeds. During the Golden Age, the Accelerator delivered payloads to colonization efforts throughout the Solar System. Now, the Accelerator is useful as a landmark from which players may navigate the Moon's geography.

Design and Inspiration
The Accelerator is designed primarily to meet the "design/art need to create a large and obvious visual anchor point on the Lunar surface", and can be used "as an easy navigation point from all around the Moon." The Accelerator shares some design elements with Moonbase, and both locations were created out of the same pieces of early concept art.

The Accelerator's numerous meteorite "pockmarks" and its layers of moondust are designed with the theme in mind of nature's slow erasure of man’s foothold on the Moon. Its design also uses bold colors and huge letters to help give it "a sense of vibrancy and identity" and "humanizes the location."

Numerous Bungie designers and artists helped to create the Accelerator, including Sam Jones, Tom Farnsworth, Chris Carney, Alex Pfeiffer, Daniel Grafstrom, Aaron Steelman and Matt Sammons.

Trivia

 * The Accelerator's futuristic concept of a lunar launch pad designed to fling payloads long distances into deep space is explicitly based on potential future applications of current real-world technology such as railguns and the Large Hadron Collider.
 * Like Moonbase, the Accelerator utilizes Grognok's "Human Colony Outpost" palette, a "graphical Lego set" that includes the hallmarks of deep space exploration by humans during the Golden Age: "vacuum sealed entryways, accordion tunnels for access, prefabbed panel construction, and lots of assorted hardware."