BARD PAPER: OPAL8674 | Home | Traveller | BARD | OPAL |
BARD PAPER: OPAL8674 | Home | Traveller | BARD | OPAL |
Ishiri is the only free standing world in its diminutive system. The world's continents are locked up in a single large landmass that nearly divides the world into two halves. The two oceans are almost completely cut off from each save for the southern pole. This causes warm water currents to circulate heat through the chilly southern regions, helping to moderate the local climate. While deep inland regions can be blisteringly hot, coastal regions are very temperate. These cooler temperatures attracted farmer colonists in the 130s, who established massive grain farms on the well watered veldts just inland from their coastal communities.
Blessed with plentiful food and a comfortable standard of living, the world attracted a steady flow of offworld immigrants. Ishiri was very much a backwater world, and its simple industrial technology and lack of major social tensions were appealing to people fleeing the overly civilised Imperial Core. This sentiment became a quasireligious philosophy that emphasised the rejuvenative powers of nature and the land, and the population came to see their world as a redemptetory reliquary where communal simplicity was emphasised over more spectacular technology. Even as the population grew, rather than concede the utopian aspects of their society, the local government instead nationalised the land, dividing it among public collectives that would symbolically share it with the entire population and even the outside universe if necessary.
Even before the Collapse Ishiri had a population of 8.5 Billion people crammed into crowded coastal cities and offshore communities. After the Collapse, the world offered solace to a growing number of refugees displaced by the Abandonment. A large number of these came from high population worlds scattered across trailing Deneb, and even some worlds in Corridor. After the Panic of 1140, billions more came from Starn and Ashasi, lured by the promise of open skies and a simpler life unsullied by overreliance upon technology. This subsequent five fold rise in population soon overstrained local resources and living space, and the Regency government had to step in and add the world to the Industrial Development Program in an effort to reduce the strain. Despite this intervention, Ishiri's popu
lation has exploded to ridiculous levels. Even more than Askigaak, overpopulation on a small world has made life precarious. While the land is still held in common, the local agrarian socialism is in disrepute, and more and more squatters have settled in the interiors on previously working or fallow land. The coastlines are now two continous megapoli, each containing approximately 35-40 billion people that live in an unending strip of apartments and arcos. The reopening of the Outrim Frontier has created new hope for the locals, and a long waiting list now exists for potential emigrants to colonies promised by the planetary government.