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