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.