Scout Ship Economics

SCOUT SHIP MAINTENANCE COSTS

Fuel

Fuel Tanks = 32 tons

4 tons for standard operations for 30 days (no interplanetary/interstellar travel)

14 tons needed per one-parsec jump.

Unrefined fuel: Cr3200 (Cr100/ton)

Refined Fuel: Cr16,000 (Cr500/ton)

If no jumps or interplanetary jaunst are undertaken, the ship can operate normally for 8 months without refueling.  Under strict power rationing, can operate for over 12 months or so.

Life Support

Life Support Cost

Cr2000 per person per month

--Includes consumables like water, food, air, etc as well as recycling equipment and filters

--Scout Ship's normal capacity: 4 crew/passengers designed for; 8 considered safe maximum. Going beyond this limit may unduly stress life support systems and may lead to break downs and malfunctions.

Berthing Costs (standard for starports)

Cr100 for the first 7 days; Cr100 for each day afterward.

Crew Salaries (NPCs)

2 x Enginner-1 Cr8000/month (Cr4000 each)

Annual Maintenance

Must be performed at decent maintenance facility (typically Starport types A,B, or C)

Cr34,000

LINDSEY

LINDSEY

3235 Delphi/Breda

C52A787-A

Lindsey recently had its starport upgraded from D to C.  It has also started including its native sentient population in its planet listing along with its human inhabitants, raising its population number from 5 (400,000 humans) to 7 (8 million Trifins + humans)

Primary: Class 2 Brown Dwarf

Other Inhabited Worlds: various automated mining outposts

Lindsey is an unusual world in several ways.  For one, it is one of 38 satellites of significant size orbiting a Brown Dwarf, which mostly radiates in the infrared, so is a 'dark', unlit system.  The 'sun' can only be seen as a faint, dull-red circle in the sky on most worlds in the system.  The system also has several thousand smaller asteroidal bodies and a small out comet halo, like normal star systems.

Lindsey only has a tenuous atmosphere, mostly oxygen, but it is far too scant to breathe by humans and does little more than produce a faint haze over the surface a few kilometers thick.  The surface does support anaerobic microbes and small extremophile plants tat can survive the near-vacuum conditions.

The planet is covered over completely in water ice.  The ice has many striations and streaks, which result from cracks forming and water bubbling up from below to fill them and freeze over anew.  The surface of the planet is very young, turning over in a much faster rate than life bearing worlds like Earth.  What few craters there are indicate the surface is less than 10,000 years old.  This ice layer can be miles thick, especially near the poles, but some areas, such as those near the most recent major cracks, it is only a few hundred meters thick.

But Lindsey's most unusual feature is that it has a planet-girdling ocean under the ice.  Much like Europa in the Sol system, the tidal stress of the planet circling so close to its primary as well as the influence of the other bodies in the system keep its core churned up and hot, resulting in frequent vulcanism.  Combined with the insulating layer of ice above, the water stays warm enough to remain liquid.

But whereas Europa's under-ice ocean only produced a few complex amino acids, Lindsey's dark ocean developed a full-blown thriving ecology with many plant and animal analogs.  This ocean is completely lightless, and most creatures within it use a combination of thermal senses, water-motion senses, and/or sonar.

THE TRIFINS

This ecology has produced a native sentient race, called the TRIFINS.  These Trifins resemble dog-sized crabs with three large sweeping vanes on their back protruding from their shells.  They have claws which they use to manipulate tools, supplemented by half a dozen agile pedipalps around their mouths, nominally there to help them eat but which have become quite adept as acting as the Trfins' 'fingers.'

Trifins have thermal camouflage, similar to the way cuttlefish on Earth can change their color, they can naturally and swiftly change their heat signature to match their surroundings for a short time.  Since most other creatures on the world hunt with thermal senses, this gives them natural camouflage for their environment.

The Trifins have a natural tech level of 3 (~Iron Age), using many natural volcanic vents to forge and shape metals, shells, and coral-like analogs for tools.  They have built many elaborate cities around these vents, and are at times in conflict with 'nomad' Trifins who have domesticated many of their fellow sea creatures and consider the city Trifins 'unpure' for using 'dead' technology.

DNA analysis has shown that they are a very old race, at least 10 million or more years old, and their culture has been stable for most of those eons.  Shortly before the Rebellion broke out, the Trifins were formally contact by humans, after several decades of study to make sure their society could handle the potential culture shock.

Though the coming of the 'Nothing Giants' (their word for humans; 'Nothing' being their word for the universe above the surface of their world, and 'Giant' as humans are usually 3+ times larger than them) did cause quite a few stir, the city-dwelling Trifins have come to accept the humans and want to learn from them, for the most part

HUMAN SETTLEMENT

Humans settled the world several hundred years ago.  Originally meant just as a refueling stop over for starships, the discovery and exploration of its underground ocean and the biosphere it contained stirred enough interest in the world to greatly expand the manned presence on it.

Today, about 400,000 humans live on Lindsey, mostly in domed settlements on the surface.  The largest is WalkerDome, near the planet's north pole, with a population of 100,000 and holding the planet's starport.

The rest of the planet's population is spread out in settlements along the surface's major cracks, which sport many drilled tunnels down to the under-ice ocean.  The settlement is best known for harvesting the organics from the ocean for various commercial purposes, as well as a few side industries which include mostly-automated mining outposts on other worlds in its small system.  Thanks to help from Willow, Lindsey ahs built up its industrial capacity in the last few decades and is mostly self-sufficient despite its relatively low population.

The world is run by civil service bureaucracy. Nominally there is a ruling council that is voted into office, but they mostly just pick new department administrators when there's an opening.  Because of the world's low population, however, the bureaucracy is both relatively low on corruption and high on efficiency, so most citizens don't mind its pervasiveness in their everyday lives.

A number of research facilities exist on the under-ice ocean floor, manned by researchers and contact specialists working with the Trifins.

THE RUINS

On the Worlds dubbed Gorgo and Givanni, both lifeless vacuum worlds similar to Earth's moon, ancient ruins of an unknown starfaring culture have been found.  They are thought to be some 800 million years old.  Very little remains except walls and foundations, so their exact origins remain a mystery.

FRIGIDAIRE

FRIGIDAIRE


2833 Delphi/Breda

--RED ZONE--

B4874A0-C (formerly B467220-C)

Primary: K5 Orange dwarf

Other Inhabited Worlds:

Kenmore: Y110300-C (gas giant moon, revamped naval base)
Amana, Maytag, Sears: minor GG moons, mining outposts

Surface Gravity: .5

Before the Rebellion, Frigidaire was known mostly for producing refrigeration equipment.  The world is thought to have been terraformed during the Ancients era 300,000 years ago, and has a 'benign' biosphere of mostly plants and small crab-like animals.

The system saw heavy fighting between Margaret's faction and the Solomani, but mostly around the Naval and Scout bases at the system's only gas giant.  The life bearing world at the center of the system was mostly spared, its starport receiving the only major damage, but that was fully rebuilt in a few years.

Like many worlds around it, though, it suffered greatly form the economic collapse, and its small population of a few thousand shrunk to only 950 due to diseases and limited medical supplies with off-world supplies choked off.

After the war, Frigidaire's pleasant biosphere was intact, the system sparsely settled and defended, but with a starport that still had intact repair facilities.

All that made it far too attractive a prize for rogue elements of Margaret's fleet post-cascade.  Deserting their fleet after months of preparation and selecting only crewmembers they could trust, the rogue fleet elements under the command of a Captain Garwood fled to Frigidaire, easily conquered the world and system, and set themselves up as its rulers and masters.

The occupying fleet consists of Garwood's own 60,000 ton cruiser, two 20,000 ton fleet escorts, and a handful of smaller combat ships.  After conquering Frigidaire, they quickly set about re-establishing the wrecked naval base at Kenmore for their own purposes.   They now form a blockade of both the Gas Giant Whirlpool and Frigidaire, controlling almost all refueling points in the system.  They charge ships passing through exorbitant tolls to refuel, and have the means and firepower to shoot down those who don't comply.

Often--many times on trumped-up charges--ships will be boarded by force and seized if its thought that its crew and officers are uncooperative or hostile.  Sometimes not all the ship is seized, but only some of its crew or cargo may be taken and the rest allowed to go.  Besides the original warships, the system is now patroled by a few dozen of smaller craft seized from crews passing through.

The Frigidaire system is still under the authority of Captain Garwood, in essence a dictator but a pretty popular one, at least with those in charge.  The officers and crews who came with Garwood, along with their families, some 10,000 total in the system, are treated as full citizens with full rights and privileges.  The surviving original inhabitants of Frigidaire, about 1000, are treated as second class citizens, but are still considered free with most rights intact.

The remaining 9,000 people in the system are 'indentured workers', basically a slave labor force that were pressed from captured ships and whatever families they may have had since.  Some work on Frigidaire and Kenmore, but more than half work in bare-bones mining facilities on the gas giant moons, extracting ore for their masters' industries and projects at fairly high mortality rates.

Garwood and his cohorts have ruled the system for more than 20 years now.  At least for the time being, they do not seem to have much ambition of spreading out or conquering any of its neighbors.  They do, however, very occasionally conduct raids into their immediate neighbors.

DOUGAL

DOUGAL

2937 Delphi/Breda

X100000-0 (was D100433-D)

Primary: M1 red dwarf

Before the war, Dougal was a small community of miners and vacuum-world homesteaders of about 5000.  The worldlet is an airless rock orbiting the system's only gas giant, the super jovian Double Mountain.  Most inhabitants were concentrated around the colony's one major domed settlement.  Besides some minor production in rare earth ores such as lanthanum, tantalum, and similar, the world was useful as the wayport in the star system, and saw a lot of interstellar through-traffic, especially to Breda, the subsector's former capital.

Today, the Dougal is a graveyard world. Every known inhabitant was wiped out by a Solomani Black War orbital bombardment attack in 3585.  Repeated scans by ships passing through and refueling at the gas giant has confirmed that no living thing remains on or under the surface of Dougal.  Its ruins have been picked clean of all but a few bits of scrap metal and plastic by scavengers over the years.

Yet, over the years, visitors have occasionally reported a memorial being raised on the moon on the site of the former settlement.  It started as a simple pillar with a plaque, but other monuments, such as blocks with the name of dead colonists and small statues have also been reported as being added over the years.  No one knows who is building the memorial, and no one has been spotted on the surface by any passing ship.

Though most agree that Dougal will eventually be resettled, there are no known plans by any known group to do so, even long-term.  Today the system is used mostly for interstellar through-traffic.

HUCHONSON

HUCHONSON

3234 Delphi/Breda

B331721-9

Primary: K5 orange dwarf/M1 red dwarf(close binary)

Other Inhabited Worlds: Koi (Belt Asteroid) X000400-9

Huchonson has a surface gravity of .33

Huchonson is very much a Mars-like world and home to about ten million inhabitants.  The one worlds in the system closer to the sun is a lifeless rock similar to Mercury; outward from Huchonson is a small gas giant called Popov (Neptune-like in dimensions) with a dozen moons, and beyond that is a sprawling asteroid zone called the Koi belt.

Huchonson used to be warmer and wetter, and over a billion years ago used to support microbial life.  But chemical alterations and climate shifts made it increasingly hostile to life, and now only primitive microbes survive on the planet's single highlands region.

POPOV (gas giant)

Interestingly, the Neptune-sized gas giant Popov is home to a fairly sprawling hydrogen-breathing extremophile ecology that analysis has shown descended from Huchonson microbes.  It is thought that an asteroid strike a billion years ago flung meteors containing the Huchonson life forms to Popov, where they were somehow able to survive, and eventually thrive.  During the Third Imperium, Popov was a protected world, pretty much a nature reserve so its life forms could be studied, and could only be used by civilians for refueling.

KOI ASTEROID BELT

The Koi belt in the outer system is home to some minor mining operations, and supports a population of barely a thousand, almost all independent miners and their families.  Of all the groups in the system the tech shortage has hit them hardest, but pride themselves on sticking things out for so long and making do with what they have.  One of their main industries is capturing icy bodies in the outer system and sending them back toward Huchunson, where they are sliced up and dumped into the planet's atmosphere in order to slowly increase the planet's very dry hydrographic percentage (less than 1%.)

HUCHONSON

The main world was settled almost 600 years ago by explorers from the original Mars in Earth's system, who were more than happy to settle on a planet very much like their own home.

Huchonson's atmosphere is very thin and is made up mostly of CO2 and nitrogen. There is some oxygen present, but not enough for a human to breathe comfortably (less than 5%).  Excursions on the surface can use compressors instead of full life support systems for breathing, however.  Most settlements are of the domed-and-underground variety, and most are clustered around the equatorial highlands and their glaciers of water ice, the only open source of water on the whole planet.

The capital city and downport is called New Tharsis, and has a population of about 200,000.  Other towns are usually much smaller (about 10 K at most), and arrayed more-or-less in a rough circle a thousand kilometers deep around the highland area.  The Highlands themselves are off limit to everyone except government personnel, to ensure the preservation of the planet's only supply of free ice and to protect Huchonson's few remaining native life forms.

Like the original Martians, the people of Huchonson see themselves as fiercely independent and libertarian.  The government is a particapatory democracy, and does little more than is necessary to keep things running on the world (defense, interstellar relations and trade, environmental concerns, etc.)  With a relatively small and dispersed population (about 10 million) such a system is easily workable for them.

They take pride in personal fire-arms, and see them as a status symbol. The planet has no official armed forces beyond a militia.  Members are almost always expected to provide their own small arms.  The firearm mentality is so ingrained that one of the major punishments for crimes is suspension of the right to carry a weapon; those natives seen without a gun are almost always shunned and treated like second-class citizens. Most will make allowances for off-worlders, but any significant time on the planet would require them to get/carry around guns or else be considered social outcasts.

One activity beyond standard maintenance the government is allowed to participate in is environmental engineering.  Huchonsons eventually want to terraform their planet the way Mars was in the Earth system, and the government is doing what it can with its limited resources to move that forward, albeit very slowly.  For example, they do commission ice rocks form Koi Belt and loose them into the atmosphere to increase the ambient water.

Outside of the settlements, there are over 100,000 'free range' enviro-prospectors, who roam the planet in elaborate rovers and long-endurance vacc suits working the land to make it more amenable to terraforming.  For example, they survey in detail, spread 'seeds' of engineered microbes to slowly alter the soil, and induce the release of more CO2 and Methane in order to build up a friendlier greenhouse effect.

Scout Ship Deckplans

Craft ID:   Scout/Courier, Type S, TL 15, MCr 33.245 

Hull:   90/225, Disp=100, Config=1SL, Armor=40E, Unloaded=1224 + vehicle, Loaded=1475 + vehicle 

Power:   9/38, Fusion=660 MW, Duration=30/90, 1/2, Fuel Cells=1 MW, Duration=3/9, 1/2, SolarCells=1.620 MW, Duration=indef. 

Loco:   7/14, Jump=2, 12/24, Maneuver=2G thrusters NOE=40 kph, Cruise=750 kph, Top=1000 kph, Agility=2 

Commo:  Radio=system x2, laserComm=system x1, maserComm=system x1 

Sensors:   ActiveEMS=far orbit, PassiveEMS=interstellar, Densitometer=HiPen/1m, Neutrino=1 Gw, ActObjScan=Rout, ActObjPin=Rout, PassObjScan=Form, PassObjPin=Form, PassEngScan=Rout, PassEngPin=Form 

Offensive:   1 hardpoint. Detached Duty Scout is unarmed; 

Defensive:   Def DM +4 

Control:   Computer=1x3, Panels=DynaLink x300, Special=HeadUp Disp=x3, Environ=BasEnv, BasLS, ExtLS, Grav Plates, Inertial Comp 

Accomm:   Crew = 3 (optimal) (Bridge Crew = 2, Engineering = 1) Small Stateroom = 4, Subcraft = Air/Raft 

Other:  Cargo=5 tons Fuel=440 kl, FuelCell Fuel=25.9 kl, Scoops, Purifier=35.2 kl/hour, ObjSize=Average, EMLevel=Faint

Blake Estate Maps

BAGLEY

Red Star = main settlement   Red Dot = active/open mine  Blue Dot = abandoned/closed mine 

BAGLEY


3034 Delphi/Breda

D100434-9

Primary: M5 red dwarf

Other Inhabited Worlds:

Atheris: X445500-8
Tomino (GG moon): Y219434-9

Bagley has one of the best kept secrets in the sector: a world in its system that is the end result of a ‘covert’  terraforming project and left to its own devices once the Rebellion broke out.

BAGLEY

Bagley has a surface gravity of .2 standard.  It has a population of about 9500 scattered in various settlements and mining bases.

Bagley is a small, barren, airless moon of the gas giant Levar and is very rich in rare minerals.  It has been inhabited for nearly a thousand years, and in that time has been used almost exclusively for mining.  The world is honeycombed with ancient mine tunnels and dotted with equally ancient and abandoned bases and outposts.  It has a reputation for being haunted, a claim which is occasionally bolstered by the discovery of the mummified remains of some long-forgotten prospectors from previous eras.  The locals love to play this up with newcomers, some even going so far as to sell newbies 'psychic' charms which can supposedly protect them from the ghosts and bad luck.

Bagleyans tend to be a tough, cynical lot, most coming from lines of hard-working miners and their families.

They tend to be tight-lipped about Atheris.  Though the world is no longer a secret, they are still very protective of it.  They suffered only a few minor raids during the Rebellion, and they don't want 'outsider poison' coming in and doing to the Bagley system what they've done to the rest of known space.  The world is run by a council, whose members are chosen from the general populace by other council members when a vacancy opens up.

Even so, they recognize the necessity of dealing with outside systems, and Bagley is a member of the Willow Accord.  It represents not only itself, but Atheris and Tomino as well.

TOMINO

Tomino has a surface gravity of .31 standard.  It has a population of about 1500, concentrated mostly in a cluster of bases near the moon's north pole.

Tomino is a world covered over in ices--methane ice, dry ice, and water ice.  As Bagley has almost no native water, an extraction center was set up here to provide its industries with volatiles.  At first the facility was fully automated, but as it was expanded over the centuries, maintenance crews were added, and the community grew very slowly from there over the centuris.

Despite its somewhat exotic setting, Tomino has a definite small town feel.  Almost everyone knows or knows of everyone else.

ATHERIS

Atheris has a surface gravity of .45 standard

Atheris was an experiment in terraforming originating a few centuries ago by the Imperial scientific hierarchy.  Its existence was kept secret not for any nefarious reasons, but to prevent possible sooners from colonizing it before the biosphere could be fully stabilized.

Atheris was a poorly kept secret on Bagley and Tomino, but for their own reasons those populations were willing to be tight-lipped about the project to outsiders.  They even became protective of the world once the Imperium was forced to pull out.

Atheris orbits close to its primary, but is tidally locked to it, meaning one side is perpetually baked by the star, making it an unlivable desert with temperatures climbing to nearly 300 degrees, and the other is perpetually frozen, locked forever in glaciers.  There is a planet-wide atmosphere that helps to mitigate the temperature extremes, but it was easy to see why the world never evolved life of its own.  Instead of trying to remake the whole world, the terraformers took the unusual approach of trying to terraform just the twilight band between the lighted and dark hemispheres. where there was just enough light and heat to support a human-friendly ecology.

After several centuries, they succeeded in a limited way.  The twilight life zone is about 100 miles wide, and is centered around a single great Ring River that completely circles the planet and feeds back on itself.  Centrifugal force from the planet's tight, two-week orbit around its star keeps the river flowing steadily.  The river is fed by melting glaciers from the cold side, which can often be seen as mile-high cliffs in the distance, frequently calving off thousands of tons of ice at a time.  On the other side of the river is artificially sculpted highlands that help to channel the river and functions as a crude thermal barrier to protect the lifezone from super-heated air masses from the hot side.

The biosphere is populated by many genetically modified plants and animals.  Terrestrial crabs and their gene modified cousins make up the bulk of the animal lifeforms, chosen because of their hardiness in surviving in varying extreme conditions on Earth.  There are some specimens large enough to threaten humans, and though they've been engineered to find humans bad to the taste, they can still be provoked.

After the Rebellion started, a few of the project scientists remained behind on the world as the rest of the staff left to either fight or join their families.  Slowly, over the last few decades, various refugees have found the world by various means and have settled down on it.  At first by mutual consent, and then by enforced societal pressure, no attempt was made at forming any kind of formal government.  People were free to do what they wanted as long as they threatened neither their fellow refugees nor the planet's delicate artificial biosphere.  Many people considered the idyllic, untouched world a form of divine deliverance after the horror they were fleeing from, and consider Atheris the next best thing to an unspoiled paradise.

Atheris now has a population of just about 100,000, all refugees or descended from them, all spread out along the roughly 12000 miles of the Ring River valley.  They live in either small communities or by family, with some smattering of hermits here and there.  Some of them have very unusual beliefs or practices, some are non-humans of various types.  Most agree that the planet has become a haven for oddballs and outcasts.

The planet has a very loose, libertarian society with a barter economy.  However, as more refugees are showing up all the time, infringements and conflicts are starting to happen more often, and some resources are becoming strained.  This is in turn forcing some to call for a more organized government, but they have met with resistance so far.

The original scientists who stayed behind are still alive and active, doing what they can to shore up Atheris' still fledgling biosphere.  They have a small orbital station, but are mostly found in a small floating gravitic 'town' that slowly courses its way along over the Ring River, taking samples and monitoring things.

All is not perfect in paradise, however.  The scientists maintain that the terraforming was only partially complete, and left on its own the biosphere will collapse in only a few thousand years, returning Atheris to a lifeless world.  That is, if the growing human inhabitants don't end up accelerating the process greatly.

Bagley more or less acts as 'patron' to Atheris, and protects its interests as best it can.  Many Bagleyans often visit Atheris, and trade with the locals for some of the valuable bioproducts the terraformers set up the ecology to produce.  Bagley does worry that Atheris is vulnerable to any kind of major attack, as Bagley and Tomino only have enough ships to protect themselves, and even then only from minor raids.

PENSACOLA / LETHE

Pensacole

PENSACOLA/LETHE

2936 Delphi/Breda

Pensacola:  X655736-5 (former: B655936-B)
Lethe:   B7C0636-B

Primary: G3 yellow dwarf

Other Inhabited Worlds:
Various mining bases in Murielle Asteroid Belt.

PENSACOLA

Pensacola was once the main world in the system, but since a major Black War attack that shattered its moons and devastated the planet, the colonies on Lethe have since become the main focus of travel in and out of the system.

In 3585, the Solomani unleashed what many called 'weaponized planetology', and made its then-frontine Black War attacks on the Breda subsector one of the major testing grounds for it.  They used advanced and detailed knowledge of a target world's planetology, combined with meson guns and other devastating weapons, to not just knock out installations and factories, but to devastate the world so thoroughly that it could never recover.

In Pensacola's case, a fleet of Solomani capital ships, after neutralizing most of the world's orbital and ground defenses, used sustained, concentrated meson gun fire to smash the world's four small moons along their known internal fault lines.  The gigatons of debris choked over the orbital space above the world.  To add insult to injury, the Solomani peppered many of the larger clusters of debris with cobalt-60 bombs, making the new rocky ring around the world radioactive.

The moon debris began raining down on the world, many hundreds of millions of tons massive, causing apocalyptic destruction. Heroic efforts by surviving ship crews in-system, as well as some eventual out-system help from Willow and other worlds, managed to stabilize in orbit the most massive planet-killing chunks, at least for now, preventing the planet from being rendered completely lifeless.

Still, the damage was extensive.  Pensacola's population dropped from about 4 billion to now what is estimated to be only about 80 million survivors.  Almost all industry on the planet is in ruins, its former biosphere is devastated, and most survivors live by scavenging. Continuous bombardment by moon debris large and small has not let up for over twenty years, and a radioactive taint has seeped into the atmosphere from radioactive dust these meteors bring to the world.

Pensacola now also has what's called the Kessler Syndrome, where its orbital space is so choked with debris that interface travel to and from the world is quite hazardous.  Only heavily armored ships can make it through the chaotic debris rings to the surface and back again.

LETHE

Lethe is the closest major body to the system's primary, and in many ways resembles Venus of the Terran system.  It is a hothouse world with a surface temperature of over 700 degrees and with an insidious, poisonous, crushing atmosphere.

Archaeological evidence has shown it was not always like that, however.  A billion and more years ago, it was a temperate life-bearing world.  But the system's sun slowly warmed as it aged, causing the planet to slowly heat up as well into a runaway greenhouse effect that turned it into its current state some 800 million years ago.

Some hearty organisms do survive, exotic anaerobic microbes in the planet's upper atmosphere with many commercial applications.  These are harvested by a large planet-wide community of floating habitats fifty kilometers above the surface, above most of the atmosphere's pressure and acidic properties.

Orbiting Lethe is also two dozen water-bearing asteroid colonies, brought to the world  by artificial means to supply its atmsophere-harvestors with raw consumable.  Over the centuries, though, the community around Lethe has become heavily populated by disaffected people driven from elsewhere, and they vehemently guard their outsider status, even as they find themselves being drawn to help their fellows on Pensacola and the rest of the devastated Imperium.

Lethe's Surface

BREDA

Breda circa 3580

Breda circa 3605

Breda Political boundaries (click to enlarge)

BREDA

3035 Delphi/Breda

D669974-6 (former: B665984-B)

Primary: K1 Orange dwarf

Other Inhabited Worlds:
Taupe (Breda's Moon): D000674-8

Ruined Worlds:
Wer (GG Moon, wrecked naval base): X101000-D


Breda has a surface of gravity of 0.79 standard.

It is a world undergoing an immense environmental and humanitarian disaster in slow motion: its surface is being flooded by an underground ocean, and it remaining population of 1.2 billion (out of an original 7.5 billion) billion struggles to hold on.  Its hydrographic percentage has change from 50% to 90% in just 20 years, and in another twenty experts estimate there will be little if any dry land left.

Breda was once the subsector capital, and was arguable the richest and most industrialized planet in the sector.  It also boasted a large and well-maintained naval base in its nearer gas giant neighbor.  Unfortunately, all that made it a prime target for the Solomani in their major Black War offensive.

The navy base and the planetary base was wrecked by invading fleets, leaving the planet itself vulnerable to the Solomani's recently developed 'weaponized planetology' techniques.  This combined detailed planetological knowledge of a target world with combined meson gun fire and other weapons in order to permanently wreck worlds and prevent them from ever recovering.

On other worlds, this 'weaponized planetology' had done things like crack apart moons and induce super volcano eruptions.  On Breda they tried something extremely ambitious, thanks to unique circumstances there.

Many terrestial worlds have a lot of water locked in their mantles, water vapor saturated into the rock there at high pressure.  Breda happened to have a very large such deposit for its modest size, a veritable underground ocean three times the mass of its surface oceans, and it was located right under a birthing ridge between two spreading tectonic plates.

The invading Solomani used their fleets' combined meson gun bombardment first to produce numerous magma hotspots under the water-saturated mantle, then used those same weapons to cut channels from it up into the magma layer under the spreading tectonic faults.

It worked better than they hoped.  The megatons of steam followed the path of least resistance, and burst out through the fault into the ocean basin above, and the process eroded out ever wider and wider channels for the underground 'ocean' to flood out.

At first, Bredans thought the Solomani had left their world with only the expected damage to factories and military assets.  They almost breathed a sigh of relief.

Then, satellites showed that one of their oceans was literally bubbling along a thousand-mile stretch of the fault line.  The sea level rose three meters in the following year, and the levels have been actually accelerating since.

Sea level rise in the last 20 years has been over a thousand meters.  Breda, an older world, had not that many highlands and mountains to begin with.  What little industrial infrastructure remained after the Solomani bombardment was soon swamped by both the rising sea levels and the sheer horrified panic and riots that swept through the population as news of what was happening spread.

With the rest of the Imperium in ruins, there was little hope for any kind of outside help.  Billions suffered through famine and disease as the world's agriculture faltered under rising seas and severely altered climates.  The former unified world broke into balkanized factions as they fought for ever diminishing resources.

Breda today is ruled by five dictatorships (having by necessity or desire declared martial law in what remains of their territory), each concentrated in a former highland or mountain range.  Much of their resources is not spent in trying to find a solution, but in attacking each other for supplies, slave labor, or just in retribution for past attacks.

The current tech level has collapsed down to 6, and is not expected to survive even at that level for long as the oceans keep rising.  Many have taken to nomadic oceanic life where they could, but many are unsure how long they can sustain that once all the land is flooded and they have no more means by which to build new boats.

The Willow Accord currently claims Breda as a 'client' world, and helps in what limited way that it can with relief efforts and evacuating who they can.  Some in the Accord claim that they should take military action, using force to conquer the balkanized dictatorships and bring order to the world to save what they can.  Unfortunately, after decades of war, many in the Accord have no stomach for such actions, and the polity is already strained just maintaining the peace in the cluster.

There has been one ray of hope.  In the last few years, Biotechnika, a Willow-based company, has developed self-replicating seaweed 'mats' that can feed off of Breda's oceanic microbes and which can offer humans a stable floating surface, much like green, ropey, living barges. Some can reach sizes of 100 meters in diameter.  Its in trials on Breda but shows great promise.

WILLOW

WILLOW

3134 Breda/Delphi

A751844-C

Primary (pair): M3 Red Dwarf
         Neutron Star

Other Inhabited Worlds:

Boise: (hollowed asteroid/GG moon): A001614-C
Carlton: (GG Moon) Y2C5514-C Naval base
+ Various inhabited bases on smaller bodies


Willow has a number of unusual features for a life bearing world, most notably the unusual star system which it calls home.

The system's primary is a binary pair: a dim M3 red Dwarf and a Class 5 neutron star, which closely orbit each other.

The neutron star is not native to the system, and seems to have been 'captured' by it some 300 million years ago.  The neutron star (called Tsun, while the red dwarf is called Dere, from a play on the japanese word tsundere.)   It shifted some orbits of the planets, and is thought to be the reason why Willow's ecosystem is now in severe decline.

'Hyperspace Fortress'

Tsun gravitationally acts like much larger star, pushing the 'safe' envelope for jump drives out to about 18 million miles from the star.  Willow is well within this radius, at a distance of about 7 million miles from the primaries, and Oyster, the gas giant that Boise and Carlton orbit, is right on its very edge.  A second gas giant called Gibbet orbits at a distance of about 25 million miles.

Because of this, Willow cannot be surprise-attacked via hyperspace, a favorite tactic of space navies.  Ships must usually enter the system well over 11 million miles distant from it, giving it plenty of warning of any incoming attacks.  Ships can try to jump in closer, but run a high risk of misjumps (especially in the post-Cascade era.)

Even if a ship gets in close to Willow, the planet has two additional natural defenses: Willow is very close to its primaries, and receives a great deal of radiation from them.  It has a powerful magnetic field, which traps a lot of that in strong 'radiation belts' surrounding the planet, which help to skew sensors within 100,000 miles of the planet.

Willow is also so close to its parents stars that it has a much higher relative orbital velocity compared to other inhabited worlds.  Its 'year' is only three standard days long.  More than one 'surprise attack' on the world failed in part because the ships were unable to properly match its orbital velocity in time to coordinate the attack properly.

While Willow has a fully functioning A-class starport, including extensive ship yards, Boise (originally a moon of the jupiter-sized gas giant Oyster) is the system's official commercial starport.  Boise is a hollowed asteroid O'Neill colony with a population of 300,000.  It has also been made fully mobile with gigantic plasma rockets, and was moved around the system several times during the height of the Black War to help protect it from attacks.  Its is currently in Oyster's L4 asteroid cluster.

Carlton is site of the system's major naval base.  It was also the site of the only successful major attack on the system by the Solomani.  It is still in the process of rebuilding.

WILLOW

Willow has a gravity of 0.9 standard and rotates on its axis once every 18 hours or so.  Its atmospheric 'taint' is actually the relatively high background radiation.  Not immediately life-threatening, but prolonged exposure without protection can lead to health problems.

Willow is a 'post-garden' world.  Its water has been drying up for millions of years, being lost to chemical processes in a way similar to Mars.  Its hydrographic percentage is now only 10% (down from 60%), concentrated in several dozen small 'seas' (actually large lakes) around which its last remaining vestiges of life cling.  Its close orbit around the stars causes these small 'seas' to have periodic and sometimes spectacular tides and surges, however.

The inhabitants of Willow have set about trying to restore the biosphere to its former glory through long and careful planetary engineering, but the process will likely take many centuries yet.  Willow citizens culturally tend to be very dedicated environmentalists, especially toward their own world but to a lesser extent toward others as well.

Its close distance to its parent stars has kept the planet's core churned up, and as a result it has a very strong magnetic field, which also helps to protect its biosphere from said radiation.  Its still somewhat high for humans and non-Willow life, however, so most of the population lives in shielded shelters and domed cities and dress in radiation-proof suits if they need to be out on the surface for long periods of time.  Still, melanoma and other cancers are fairly high among the population, but at TL 12 they can usually be readily dealt with.

The skies at night, and sometimes during the day, are filled with bright and colorful auroras.

Willow has a population of about 200 million.  An extensive cluster of O'Neill colonies, hollowed asteroids, and stations orbit the planet housing about 10 million of those people.

Willow is the capital of the Willow Accord.  Even before that polity's founding ten years ago, it had become a major 'safe haven' for those fleeing from the Rebellion-Era chaos.  Its major cities, especially around its Downport City of New Brooklyn, have become choked with new residents, human and non, from all around known space.

While the refugees have at times been a source of new skills, labor, ideas, and wealth, they have also at times proven to be quite a burden.  Debate rages about the issue.