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Earth apollo17

Earth - in happier days.

The Earth System, also known as the Sol System, is the star system containing Earth.  It is currently ruled as a fiefdom of House Dane, the Imperial household itself. 

Astrography[]

The system's primary star, Sol, is a G2V yellow dwarf star of the main sequence.  It has four inner rocky planets, four outer gas giant planets, an asteroid belt between them, and several icy dwarf planets out in the Kuiper Belt

Mercury and Venus[]

Mercury is the innermost planet.  Rocky, airless, tidally locked, and intensely hot, it has never been fully settled, although a few mining and scientific outposts have, from time to time, been established on its dark side.  The Tech Infantry occasionally had outposts for training purposes there as well. 

Venus is the second planet.  A runaway greenouse effect and an atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide and clouds of sulfuric acid render it even hotter than mercury and intensely uninhabitable.  A few research and manufacturing platforms in orbit are all the infrastructure it ever had.   Mostly they focused on using cheap solar power to produce batteries and other components. 

Earth and Luna[]

Earth was the birthplace of all humanity. It served as the capital of the Earth Federation from 2005 to 2198, until it was made uninhabitable by a major Bug asteroid that hit the surface. That asteroid caused destructive tsunamis and a new ice age.  Nearly the entire surviving population was evacuated, leaving behind only a few caretaker crews maintaining surviving aspects of its infrastructure not safe to leave unattended, such as the few intact nuclear power plants, and cleanup squads trying to mitigate some of the ecological disasters caused by the destruction of industrial infrastructure.  It was later resettled by the Resistance and became their base of operations until 2244, when Erich Von Shrakenberg was responsible for destroying it by exploding the moon.  Much of the lunar material fell to Earth over the ensuing decades, boiling the oceans and rendering its land surface mostly molten and completely uninhabitable.  Earth now has a spectacular ring system that makes even orbital infrastructure impossible.  Since the rise of the Holy Terran Empire, major technological and magickal efforts have been made to render Earth itself habitable once more, but these efforts are likely to take a century or more to complete even the early stages. 

Luna was Earth's Moon, until it was destroyed in 2244.  At that time, it had been settled for over two centuries, and had three million people living there in underground and surface-dome cities.  Approximately a third of its previous mass has collapsed back under its own gravity to form a new, smaller moon, but this body is still mostly molten from the heat of its formation, and not yet suitable for resettlement. 

Mars and the Belt[]

Terraform

Before: The Red Planet. After: The Pus-colored Planet. Believe it or not, it's actually an improvement.

Mars is now the most populous world in the system, but efforts to get anyone to refer to it as the "Mars System" have been completely unsuccessful.  Mars has been partially terraformed, although the atmosphere at ground level is still very thin and barely breatheable.  An ocean covers much of the north polar basin and fills in the Valles Marineris, a giant canyon over a thousand miles long.  Cities dot its surface, and 400 million people now call it home.  Orbital infrastructure, much of it relocated from Earth since the destruction of Luna, makes Mars an industrial center.  The Utopia Planitia shipyards in Mars Orbit can handle all but the largest warships.  Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, are also settled, with Phobos being a long-time Tech Infantry military training reservation now in the hands of the Imperial Army

The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is also heavily industrialized, and is the site of the Ceres Main shipyards, one of the largest starship-building areas in the Empire.  Another 40 million people live and work in the asteroid belt, scattered over thousands of drift habitats and hollowed-out asteroids. 

The Gas Giants and Pluto[]

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are the four gas giant planets.  All of them have moons, several of which have settlements of one kind or another.  Europa and Ganymede around Jupiter have been partially terraformed, although they are still far too cold to venture out on the surface without serious protection.  Titan around Saturn is a major petrochemical processing center.  The digital gate connecting the Earth System to Avalon is actually in orbit around Io, one of Jupiter's moons.  This was originally a security precaution, to protect Earth from the threat of a fleet coming through the gate.  It remains there mostly due to bureaucratic inertia, despite the additional cost in time and money that it imposes on trade between the systems.  Mimas, around Saturn, was the site of Earth Fleet's starfighter flight-testing facility and pilot-training school, now inherited by the Imperial Navy

Pluto is the only dwarf planet with a significant settlement.  Aside from several scientific outposts and exotic-ice mining facilities, it was the site of a major Tech Infantry training base and, until the opening of the G2 System, was the site of the harshest and most secure prison in the Federation.  Today, it is mostly abandoned, the mines exhausted and the training and prison facilities moved elsewhere. 

History[]

Unique in all the universe, this system was originally home to at least three separate sentient species.  The original inhabitants of both Mars and Luna were wiped out by the Technocracy in the late 1800s, clearing the way for Humans from Earth to later colonize the system without any trouble.  The first Arachnid invasion of Earth was thwarted in 2001 by Bruce Von Eisenstein, who weaponized a massive Paradox backlash to destroy the Bug beachhead in Rio de Janerio.  Several other bug incursions were stopped in space before they could invade Earth or Mars, but a Bug asteroid forced the near-total evacuation of Earth in 2198.

Before that, for two centuries Earth was split between the Earth Federation, which ruled 3/4 of its surface, and the Eastern Bloc, which ruled East Asia.  Eventually, the Eastern Bloc agreed to relinquish its original territory on Earth in exchange for several planets on the rim and help with moving its entire populace and much of its industrial infrastructure out there.  This move was completed only two weeks before the Bug asteroid of 2198, and many of the transport vessels used in that evacuation were then also used to evacuate the Federation citizens  to Avalon as well (which became the new Federation capitol).  Earth was plunged into an ice age, but efforts were already underway to fix the climate using Magick and advanced technology when the Third Civil War broke out.  In the chaos of that struggle, the Resistance was able to rise up and take control of the Earth system, recolonizing Earth itself to be its new capital.  After a first Loyalist offensive to retake the system was thwarted in a space battle over Mars, Earth Fleet sent a survivor of that battle, Erich Von Shrakenberg, with a task force to destroy the Resistance once and for all.  He used a Gravitic Ram to dig a huge crater in the dark side of Earth's moon, and then rammed the moon with a battlecruiser moving at over half the speed of light.  The resulting explosion destroyed the moon, raining debris down onto Earth and rendering its surface uninhabitable.  With their fleet gone in the battle and their capital in ruins, the Resistance was forced to evacuate, and the Federation moved in to take control of the system.  The system was later inherited by the Holy Terran Empire, which made the resettlement of Earth a top priority, but cooling the crust and restoring the oceans, atmosphere, and ecology will take centuries. 

Behind the Scenes[]

Come on, really?  You live here!  (ahem)  Any sci-fi series that starts with destroying Earth always raises the coolness factor a couple notches - TI did it in Season 2.  The digital gate being on Io is a reference to the Io Jumpgate from Babylon 5.  The starfighter test base on Mimas is a reference to Red Dwarf. 

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