Lone Star

This article is undergoing revision as part of Project: Planets, a collaborative effort to improve BattleTechWiki's coverage of planets and systems. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can add your name to the list of volunteers.

This article has completed Phase 2 of the Overhaul effort.

Lone Star

Lone Star
← 3135 3151
Lone Star nearby systems (Map Legend)
System Information
X:Y Coordinates	-4.656 : 50.416
Spectral class	M1V
Recharge time	202 hours
Recharge station(s)	Zenith, Nadir (before 2780) None (after 2780)
Planet(s)	12

Note: X and Y are coordinates (light years on XY plane) relative to Terra at (0, 0)

System Description

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

System Description

Lone Star is located near the Atria and Sabik systems.

System History

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.

Lone Star V

Template:InfoBoxPlanetStandard 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.

Planetary History

Early History

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. Although the asteroid Vespa was steered into orbit in 2450, the planet wasn't declared open for colonization until 2533.

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-based 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.

Star League Era

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 sub-components 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.

Amaris Civil War

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 the 27th of December 2766. Amaris had detailed a substantial force of Rim Worlds Republic assets to subdue Lone Star, but the initial attacks on the 27th of December 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. 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.

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.

With the planetary government largely absent, private companies and troops from the Great Houses stepped in to re-establish security and some basic services, but a lack of government regulation led to rampant corruption and price-gouging, and the re-established 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.

Succession Wars

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; seeding 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.

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 offworld.

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 re-establish 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.

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.

Political Affiliation

• 2271 - No record
• 2341 - No record
• 2571 - Terran Hegemony
• 2596 - Terran Hegemony
• 2750 - Terran Hegemony
• 2765 - Terran Hegemony
• 2767 - Amaris Empire
• 2771 - Amaris Empire
• 2772 - Terran Hegemony (from September)
• 2786 - Terran Hegemony
• 2789 - Draconis Combine
• 2822 - No record
• 2864 - No record
• 3025 - No record
• 3030 - No record
• 3040 - No record
• 3050 - No record
• 3052 - No record
• 3057 - No record
• 3063 - No record
• 3067 - No record
• 3130 - No record
• 3135 - No record
• 3145 - No record

Military Deployment

2821

• Paul Bunyon Regiment

Geography

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 Springway Islands in the norther 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.

Planetary Locations

• Antediluvia: one of the eight Pond Cities, located on the western coast of Other Pond, and north of the equator.
• 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. One of four Pond Cities located on natural or man-made 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.
• Hunlare: a settlement of less than one million located on the northern edge of a large lake that fed into the Garner Sea.
• Ice Station Antelope: one of two Ice Stations located on Lone Star, Ice Station Antelope was located in the far northern arctic region of the planet.
• Ice Station Zebra: one of two Ice Stations located on Lone Star, Ice Station Zebra was located in the far southern arctic region of the planet.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 to the west of the city.
• Stiltsville: one of the eight Pond Cities, located on the coast of Other Pond, Stiltsville was one of three Pond Cities on Lone Star V to have opted for being built on columns and pilings as a way of dealing with the high tides. What made Stiltsville distinctive from the other two Pond Cities to use this construction method was that rather than hiding these features as parts of the foundations, Stiltsville embraced them, incorporating the massive pilings into the appearance of the city. This brutalist approach inspired an architectural approach known as "Big Iron" that would become popular for a time in the mid-twenty-seventh century.
• Swartzhof: a settlement with a DropPort located to its northwest, close to the inland lake that birthed the Autre River. Named by a majority of the population after an internationally famous movie star from the local area named Amelia Swartzhof, at its peak Swartzhof was a city of 75,000 people and an extremely productive mining industry. The unusual volcanic history of the region gave easy access to significant deposits of metals such as chromium, manganese, gold, platinum and related metals, and the historically low levels of free oxygen on Lone Star meant that the deposits were only lightly weathered, allowing easy processing. Swartzhof was a mining and industrial hub, but strategically unimportant, and was chosen as the initial beachhead for by the SLDF when the campaign to liberate Lone Star began in 2772. The Amaris Empire garrison on Swartzhof felt no need for restraint in attacking the SLDF forces, and Swartzhof was destroyed in the fighting.
• 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.
• Treadwater: one of the eight Pond Cities, located on the southeastern shore of Other Pond, just north of the southern arctic tundra.
• 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 water-borne transport. The canals were a casualty of the Civil War, and wouldn't be rebuilt until 2783.
• 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.

Image Gallery

• Lone Star flag.jpg

  Lone Star flag

Nearby Systems

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

Bibliography

• Era Report: 3052
• Era Report: 3062
• Era Report: 3145
• First Succession War
• Handbook: House Marik
• Handbook: House Steiner
• Handbook: Major Periphery States
• Historical: Liberation of Terra Volume 1
• Historical: Reunification War
• Map of the Inner Sphere 3130
• Touring the Stars: Lone Star