Sahlmeen

Purple haze, all in my brain

The Sahlmeen system is capital system of the Jurvain Commonality and the location of their homeworld.

Astrography

Sahlmeen is a star system of seven planets located to the galactic southwest of human space.  The outer four planets are gas giants, two of which have large moons that sport small mining and research settlements, and all four of them had at least small military presences at the height of Jurvain power.  The Inner three are rocky, terrestrial worlds.  The inmost one is a scorched and airless rock several times larger than Earth that orbits very close to the star.  The second planet is a large Venus-like world with a runaway greenhouse effect that makes the planet's average surface temperature even hotter than the inmost one.  The third planet, Sahlmeen itself, is a Mars-sized planet with a cool but pleasant temperature, a low gravity, and a thin but breatheable atmosphere.

History

The Jurvain evolved on Sahlmeen, their herbivorous ancestors being herd creatures who first evolved a limited sort of telepathy to better coordinate their migrations and lookouts for predators, and later became omnivores as this limited hivemind also made coordinating hunting parties extremely effective as well.  Although their hivemind does not appear to have originally been species-wide, very early in thier history as a civilized species a series of wars wiped out the smaller hivemind groups leaving only one as the dominant culture.  Thus the rapid technological development possible with a planet-wide collective consciousness was balanced throughout their history with few pressing incentives to innovate, so their pre-space history stretchd out a million years from the birth of agriculture to the first colonization of space.  But once they developed a new technology, it quickly became universal and standardized, and when they turn their collective efforts to a project, it gets done very quickly indeed.

Geography

One of their many wildlife preserves, with some imported green plants mixed with native purple ones

The planet is thus criss-crossed with impressive mega-engineering projects, the cities laid out with logical precision, and the system of wilderness preserves the envy of conservationists galaxy-wide.  There are three major continents in a globe-spanning ocean that covers about 65 percent of the planet's surface, and because the local equivalent of chlorphyll is purple in color, the planet is a beautiful purple and blue marble as seen from space, flecked with wispy white clouds.  Large polar ice caps restrict major settlements to the tropical and temperate lattitudes, resulting in a planetary population of only about 4 billion.  The planet is poor in heavy metals, but a large asteroid belt between the third and fourth planets of the system is heavily mined and industrialized, providing plenty of heavy metals for the Jurvain economy.

Behind the Scenes

The Jurvain are of course based on the Skinnies from Starship Troopers, so their homeworld is a low-gravity one.