Lone Star

Lone Star
Lone Star 3151.svg
System Information
X:Y Coordinates-4.656 : 50.416[e]
Spectral classM1V[1]
Recharge time202 hours[1]
Recharge station(s)Zenith, Nadir (before 2780)[1]
None (after 2780)[1]
Planet(s)12[1]

The Lone Star system is the location of at least one habitable world and as of 2765 was the regional capital of the Lone Star Province of the Terran Hegemony.[2]

System Description[edit]

Lone Star is located near the Sabik and Atria systems.

System History[edit]

The Terran Hegemony began terraforming efforts in the Lone Star system in the 2410s, focusing on the fifth planet in the system. These efforts included fitting giant station-keeping drives to an asteroid named Vespa and moving it into orbit above the planet to host mining operations and a skyhook. After Lone Star V was opened for colonization in 2533, it would remain an inhabited world until roughly 2825, when survival on the planet was rendered impossible after Vespa fell out of orbit.[2]

Political Affiliation[edit]


Lone Star V[edit]

Lone Star V
Lone Star Orbital View.jpg
Astrophysical
System positionFifth[1]
Jump Point distance2.96 days[1]
Moons1 (Vespa, 2450–2825),[1] None (after 2825)[1]
Geophysical
Surface gravity0.8[1]
Atmospheric pressureStandard (Breathable)[1]
Equatorial temperature22°C (Arid, before 2800),[1] –5°C (Arid, after 2822)[1]
Surface water40%[1]
Highest native lifeNone[1]
Landmasses1 (The Belt)[28]
History and Culture
Colonized2533[2]
Population573,000,000 (2780),[1]
25,000,000 (2822),[1]
None (3150)[1]
Government and Infrastructure
CapitalVolgadon[1]
HPG ClassA (before 2780),[1]
None (after 2780)[1]

Lone Star V, more commonly known simply as Lone Star, is the fifth planet in the system and during its history of human habitation was a major agricultural and industrial world with a wide manufacturing base. The close proximity to the nearby system zenith and nadir jump points fostered a high level of development on the world because of the ease and profitability of exporting goods produced there.[2]

Planetary History[edit]

Early History[edit]

Lone Star represented a difficult terraforming challenge, because the planet was outside the goldilocks zone for the system primary, making it desperately cold, and this was further complicated by the thin, nitrogen-rich atmosphere. Those water reserves available on the planet when terraforming began were locked up in the polar regions, and making the world habitable for humans involved the extensive use of algae and planet life deliberately engineered to create a viable atmosphere and environment.[2] Although the asteroid Vespa was steered into orbit in 2450,[1] the planet wasn't declared open for colonization until 2533.[2]

The development corporations responsible for Lone Star drove the unusual way in which settlements on the world developed; driven by profitability, the corporations used land price analyses that showed that dense urban areas saw faster price growth than the sprawling settlements common to most colony worlds, and as a consequence the first planetary government implemented zoning laws that bottled the settlers up into what would become known as Pond Cities. Eight of these cities developed over time, giving inhabitants spacious accommodations in soaring skyscrapers and arcologies, and were structured in such a fashion that there was no suburban fringe to any of the cities; instead, there was a sharp transition between the cities themselves and the agricultural lands or nature preserves that surrounded each. Lone Star's unusual geography meant that four of each of these cities developed along the coasts of the two large oceans referred to as "Ponds"—Big Pond and Other Pond—and took advantage of the slow but enormous tidal cycle of the planet to generate electricity without the need for large-scale fusion reactors. Half of the cities were located on highlands—either natural or manmade—while others used massive pilings or amphibious infrastructure, dykes and sealed buildings, and all of the cities were linked via cheap water transport through the extensive canal network constructed in and around the capital city, Volgadon, which was located on a continental divide between the two major rivers that drained into the oceans. The colonists developed extensive and abundant range of crops and supported free-ranging herds of farm animals, giving the population a diet much richer in meat and dairy products than would be the case on other worlds, helped by the fact that with no native life on the planet, the entire ecology was based on a mix of plants and animals imported from worlds across the Hegemony.[2]

Star League Era[edit]

Due to the system primary being a rather dim star, clusters of recharge stations were constructed just within the proximity limits of the nadir and zenith jump points, and during the Star League era these facilities were protected by the system SDS network, and hosted the Star League Defense Force Second Star Squadron. The short transit times between Lone Star and the jump points helped make the planet a preferred site for manufacturing geared around exports, and a wide range of essential subcomponents such as myomers and computer parts were produced on Lone Star and then supplied to industries across the Star League. Helping Lone Star's export was the aptitude the Loner business community had for lobbying the small Star League departments responsible for Periphery affairs. These departments had the ability to place restrictions on items manufactured in the Magistracy of Canopus, Outworlds Alliance, and Taurian Concordat by declaring them to be "disruptive or insightful of secessionism"—and knowing in advance what those items were likely to be, manufacturers on Lone Star were able to position themselves in advance to take up the gaps in the market forcefully imposed by the League. Examples of items that Lone Star exported in large quantities to the Periphery states included computers, fusion reactors, JumpShip drive controllers and medical scanners. The fact that the Territorial States were lumbered with buying from factories six months away that produced slipshod items they had formerly been able to make for themselves didn't endear the Loners to these states; while Lone Star was far from the only Inner Sphere world to engage in these predatory business practices, the Loners excelled at it.[2]

Amaris Civil War[edit]

In common with other such worlds across the Hegemony, the SLDF had built several Castles Brian across Lone Star and there was still an SLDF garrison in place when Stefan Amaris launched his coup that began the Amaris Civil War on 27 December 2766. Amaris had detailed a substantial force of Rim Worlds Republic assets to subdue Lone Star, but the initial attacks on December 27th failed, leaving the SLDF forces still in control of the bulk of the Castles Brian and determined to resist. The Republican forces resorted to the extensive use of weapons of mass destruction to prepare the way for their ground assaults, and as a result the civilian population of Lone Star suffered greatly, as did the local infrastructure. The exact death toll incurred in the Republican campaign isn't known, but estimates place it anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.[10] Amaris' forces had used tactics such as terrorist bombings and chemical weapon attacks when attacking the SLDF units on Lone Star, as well as loyalist militia units, and this left the Loners very wary of the new administration. Despite this, initially Amaris enjoyed a weak majority in favor of his rule when he first seized power, despite some Loners forming active resistance cells opposed to him.[2]

The campaign to liberate Lone Star was fought between 2772 and 2774, and was hugely damaging for the civilian population. During the campaign the agricultural zones all suffered damage from biological attacks, three-quarters of the animal herds were killed, and every Pond City had been hit by at least one attack using a weapon of mass destruction. During the battle between Amaris Empire Armed Forces troops and the SLDF for control of Vespa, the station-keeping equipment drives were destroyed, leaving the moon completely exposed to the gravitational forces of both the sun and Lone Star IV. The liberation was followed by fourteen years of decline; the people of Lone Star dragged out of office anyone who had served in government under the Amaris regime, but the SLDF couldn't provide personnel to replace them. This added to the damage the planetary government had taken during the campaign, and tens of millions of refugees were left with no support.[2]

With the planetary government largely absent, private companies and troops from the Great Houses stepped in to reestablish security and some basic services, but a lack of government regulation led to rampant corruption and price gouging, and the reestablished Hegemony government was of little help, as the crumbling bureaucracy tried to coordinate the recovery of the ravaged Hegemony worlds, only to make matters worse by mistakenly depriving some planets of vital supplies in erroneous attempts to help others. When General Aleksandr Kerensky took the bulk of the SLDF on the Exodus, the population of Lone Star was shocked and appalled. When the nearby world of Inglesmond abandoned the wider Hegemony to concentrate on trying to meet the needs of worlds in the local region, the Loners followed Inglesmond's lead. The intention was to rebuild the Lone Star Province, while deterring the Houses from attempts to suborn Hegemony worlds, and when that was done, work to assist the wider remnants of the Hegemony.[2]

Succession Wars[edit]

Inglesmond and Lone Star might have been successful in their efforts, if the First Succession War had arrived later than it did—and been less devastating in its impact. Initially, loyalist militia forces in the Lone Star Province were able to beat off expeditionary forces from the Great Houses, which prompted the neighboring states to change tactics. The Lyran Commonwealth stepped up diplomatic efforts to bring Hegemony worlds under its influence and into the Commonwealth; the Draconis Combine increased the scope of its attempts to seize worlds by force. With the forces from Inglesmond proving key in a number of defeats, the Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery destroyed the shipyards that Inglesmond had painstakingly restored to working order. On Lone Star, the DCMS used bioweapons, sowing the polar regions with biological agents designed to target the flora and algae responsible for regulating Lone Star's climate. The bimonthly halide dust storms that blew down from into the interior reaches of Lone Star spread the weapons far and wide, and the Loners spent two years frantically trying to preserve the plant life that made human survival on Lone Star possible. In 2789, the Combine threatened a full invasion of Lone Star, and the government had no choice other than an immediate surrender.[2]

The Combine rewarded Lone Star for its surrender by providing a few atmospheric processors, intended for use in the Pond Cities that had managed to survive up until that point. Lone Star had little industry left of any use to the Combine, and its conquest provided little more than some additional glory for the DCMS. The Loners were still trying to complete the construction of the atmospheric processors in 2803 when the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces attacked and destroyed them, a blow that made Lone Star's environmental decline into an uninhabitable world effectively impossible to stop. With little to gain from the planet, the DCMS hadn't bothered to provide much protection to its people, and for the next two decades the population dropped as people joined a steady exodus off-world.[2]

Within a few years of the destruction of the atmospheric processors, the local agriculture that had survived the DCMS bioweapon dubbed the "Dragon Plague" had ground to a halt, and the millions of people who made up the remaining population began starving to death. By 2822, the planetary population had dropped from its pre-Amaris height of more than half a billion to just twenty-five million people. ComStar hadn't managed to reestablish HPG facilities on Lone Star to replace those destroyed during the Civil War, and in 2824 ComStar removed Lone Star from its interstellar maps. The final blow for the surviving population came just a year later, when Vespa's increasingly erratic orbit culminated in the fifteen-kilometer-wide asteroid crashing into Lone Star. None of the surviving major population centers were hit directly by Vespa when it fell, but the impact sounded the death knell for what remnants of the global environment could possibly have been saved.[2]

While Lone Star retained a breathable atmosphere, albeit one where the oxygen level would continue to drop slowly for millennia, it quickly reverted to being a frigid world, where the only surviving traces of life were those microbial species found around volcanic vents in the sea floor. Salvagers from the Combine looted anything left of value during the Second Succession War, and by the end of the millennium the only people to visit Lone Star were climatologists, who made infrequent trips to the planet.[2]

Military Deployment[edit]

2821[edit]

Geography[edit]

Lone Star V was defined by the landmass known as The Belt that ran around the world in a ring from north to south; when the world was at a habitable temperature, two large oceans existed, divided by the Belt and known as Big Pond and Other Pond. Big Pond was home to some small groups of islands—the Swingway Islands in the northern hemisphere, and Dry Island and the Treaty Islands in the southern hemisphere—while Other Pond lacked any islands of any size. Various regions of the Belt were given their own names, which included the Mu Loam, a tundra region located along the southern coast of Big Pond; the Gardens of Alcinous, a temperate region on the southeastern coast the Vast Dust Sea, a desert that sprawled across the equatorial region of the belt between the eastern edge of Big Pond and the western edge of Old Pond; Gadeirus Terraces, a peninsula extending into the northeastern reaches of Big Pond; Kumari Kandam, a temperate region on the northeastern shore of Big Pond, between the ocean coast and the large lark known as Bagley Basin; Gyges Fields, a tundra region on the northwestern shore of Big Pond, and Doggerland, a narrow band of land between the western coast of Big Pond and the inland sea known as Garner Sea. Other Pond was also bounded by a number of named regions, including a large desert region across the equator known as Selek Sands. A temperate region on the southeastern shore of Other Pond was known as Lydia Fields, and on the western edge of Other Pond was a large bay known as Phiale Bay. While the northern polar region of Lone Star V was home to just a single small mountain range, the southern polar region was dominated by a large mountain range known as the One Range Mountains.[28]

Planetary Locations[edit]

Lone Star World Map
  • Antediluvia: one of the eight Pond Cities, located on the western coast of Other Pond, and north of the equator[28]
  • Cliffside: one of the eight Pond Cities, located alongside a DropPort on the highlands at the tip of the Gadeirus Terraces peninsula on the northeast coast of Big Pond, east of the Swingway Islands.[28] One of four Pond Cities located on natural or manmade highlands, Cliffside was distinctive for the arcologies that were constructed along the granite cliffs the city was located on, arcologies which would win a number of architectural awards.[2]
  • Hunlare: a settlement of less than one million on the northern edge of a large lake that fed into the Garner Sea[28]
  • Ice Station Antelope: located in the far northern arctic region of the planet[28]
  • Ice Station Zebra: located in the far southern arctic region of the planet[28]
  • Mudflat: one of eight Pond Cities, Mudflat took a different approach to dealing with Lone Star's high tides to those used by the other Pond Cities. Rather than building on highlands or on columns and stilts, Mudflat embraced Hegemony engineering technology, constructing large transparent dykes made out of ferroglass so that people could walk past walls showing the high tide water clearly, while the lower floors of buildings had sealed windows so that those inside could continue working while fish swam outside the windows.[2]
  • Crosscut Locks: a site of interest located on a river in the northern polar regions of Lone Star, linking a small inland lake with the northern edge of Big Pond[28]
  • Sepranta: a settlement of less than one million people located in the northern tundra region of Lone Star, on the west bank of a major river that flowed into the large inland lake or sea known as Begley Basin[28]
  • Soakfoot: one of the eight Pond Cities, located on the southwestern shore of Big Pond to the west of the Mu Loam, at the mouth of a major river; a DropPort was located west of the city[28]
  • Stiltsville: one of the eight Pond Cities, located on the coast of Other Pond[2]
  • Swartzhof: a settlement with a DropPort located to its northwest, close to the inland lake that birthed the Autre River[28]
  • Tidesink: one of the eight Pond Cities, located close to the equator on the eastern shore of Other Pond; a DropPort was located southeast of the city[28]
  • Treadwater: one of the eight Pond Cities, located on the southeastern shore of Other Pond, just north of the southern arctic tundra[28]
  • Volgadon: The planetary capital city, Volgadon was located on a low continental divide between the Grande and the Autre, two major rivers, and featured an extensive system of canals and locks that linked Big Pond and Other Pond together, allowing all eight Pond Cities to trade together via cheap waterborne transport. The canals were a casualty of the Civil War, and wouldn't be rebuilt until 2783.[2]
  • Westlind: one of the eight Pond Cities, located on the southeastern coast of Big Pond at the mouth of a major river to the southwest of the Gardens of Alcinous[28]

Image Gallery[edit]

Map Gallery[edit]

Nearby Systems[edit]

Closest 76 systems (73 within 60 light-years)
Distance in light years, closest systems first:
Sabik 10.4 Atria 11.4 Dyev 14.1 Ko 14.9
Imbros 16.5 Moore 17.1 Lambrecht 19.5 Lyons 21.8
Chaville 22.3 Dromini 22.6 Nai-Stohl 22.8 Asta 26.4
Pike 27.2 Skondia 27.6 Rocky 28.4 Yorii 29.5
Athenry 29.5 Nusakan 30.9 Alkalurops 31.7 Kuzuu 32.1
Kaus Media 32.2 Kessel 34.4 Kaus Australis 34.6 Alrakis 35.0
Ascella 35.1 La Blon 35.2 Killbourn 37.3 Kervil 39.0
Altair 39.1 Dieron 39.3 Styx 39.4 Zollikofen 39.5
Muphrid 41.9 New Britain 41.9 Menkent 43.4 Alphecca 43.7
Balkan 44.6 Unukalhai 45.9 Thorin 46.5 Summer 46.7
Zebebelgenubi 47.7 Rigil Kentarus 47.9 Tau Ceti 48.0 Konstance 48.5
Kaus Borealis 48.7 Eltanin 49.0 Saffel 49.0 Telos 49.6
Nirasaki 49.9 Chara 50.4 Sol 50.6 Komephoros 50.9
Galatea 51.8 Fomalhaut 51.8 Deneb Algedi 51.8 Skye 52.4
Lipton 52.8 Haddings 53.7 Caph 53.9 Elix 54.4
Syrma 54.4 Nashira 55.0 Alya 55.7 Vega 56.2
Miyazaki 56.5 Zavijava 57.5 Ryde 58.0 Mizar 58.1
Kimball 58.3 Sirius 58.3 Xi Ursae Majoris 58.5 Shitara 59.1
Marfik 59.4 Keid 61.0 Procyon 61.5 Denebola 61.7

References[edit]

  1. 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 Touring the Stars: Lone Star, p. 4: "Atlas - Lone Star"
  2. 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 Touring the Stars: Lone Star, pp. 4–7: "Atlas"
  3. Handbook: House Marik, p. 16
  4. Handbook: House Steiner, p. 13
  5. Handbook: Major Periphery States, p. 18
  6. Handbook: House Steiner, p. 25
  7. Historical: Reunification War, p. 159
  8. Handbook: Major Periphery States, p. 18
  9. Historical: Liberation of Terra Volume 1, p. 11
  10. 10.0 10.1 Historical: Liberation of Terra Volume 1, pp. 84–85
  11. Historical: Liberation of Terra Volume 1, p. 104
  12. 12.0 12.1 Historical: Liberation of Terra Volume 1, p. 138
  13. First Succession War, p. 25
  14. Handbook: House Steiner, p. 36
  15. First Succession War, p. 112
  16. Handbook: House Steiner, p. 40
  17. Handbook: House Steiner, p. 47
  18. Handbook: House Steiner, p. 56
  19. Handbook: House Steiner, p. 59
  20. Era Report: 3052, p. 11
  21. Handbook: House Steiner, p. 61
  22. Era Report: 3052, p. 23
  23. Era Report: 3062, p. 11
  24. Era Report: 3062, p. 29
  25. Handbook: House Steiner, p. 70
  26. Era Report: 3145, p. 11
  27. Era Report: 3145, p. 39
  28. 28.00 28.01 28.02 28.03 28.04 28.05 28.06 28.07 28.08 28.09 28.10 28.11 28.12 28.13 Touring the Stars: Lone Star, p. 14: "Lone Star"
  29. First Succession War, p. 137: "First Succession War Deployment Table - DCMS"

Bibliography[edit]