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.