BARD PAPER: OPAL8679 | Home | Traveller | BARD | OPAL |
BARD PAPER: OPAL8679 | Home | Traveller | BARD | OPAL |
Starn was a fortuitous beneficiary of astrography. Its location in the middle of the Sabinar Main, coupled with its abundant resources, made it an economic powerhouse from the very beginning of its habitation in the early 200s. The belt is actually something of an oddity: both of the systems' gas giants have highly eccentric and elliptical orbits. Their gravitational influence ejected whatever rocky worlds that formed in the inner and habitable zone into deep space, leaving little more than meteoritic flotsam and jetsam that clumped into the three belts. The distribution of material in the main belt is uneven, with larger rocks clustered in a manner similiar to trojan points, seperated by areas of pebbles and gravel.
Where the larger rocks cluster, the communities across several rocks have united to form large metropolitan areas. Because of their close proximity to each other, community identity is not focused in a particular rock, but rather across the adjoining gulf of space. Planetoid cities then are not built in the center of their rocks, but rather ring around them in exposed arcologies. Personal transport is therefore very cheap, and a large segment of the population has vacc suit and zero-g skills. Travellers arriving in one of the major cities will be confronted with planetoids that look more like disembodied city blocks, covered in titanic buildings and large holographic beacons and signs. Small craft and Personal Maneuver Kits buzz between these like swarms of angry wasps. The local population is about average in their reactions to offworlders, but their greater accesibility makes them seem more approachable.
Starn is a very important industrial system. Mining is mostly done in the two outer belts, leaving the main planetoid belt settlements to concentrate upon manufacturing. Its most prominent product is starships, and shipyard facilities owned by LSP were the largest in all of Deneb in Antebellum times. After the Rape of Trin, the economic slump hurting trailing Deneb was exaceberated by panic at the possibility of further attacks on that scale, and worlds like Starn and Ashasi were abandoned during the 1140s by billions of citizens fleeing for worlds further to spinward. During this period Starn lost a good portion of its population and its skilled workforce, nearly crippling its economy and ruining its chances to advance to TL-16. This demographic outflow has been reversed, but it has only been since 1190 that the world has returned to its antebellum technological and economic levels.
Fortunately enough skilled talent and ready hands remained on the world to maintain its TL-15 rating, and it became a major arsenal for the Regency during the Viral War years. The system is home to the Green Million, a huge complex of orbiting factories, which includes Plant 26, formerly known as LSP Alpha. The "million" in its name is reflective of the huge numbers of microplants that grew out of the myriad garage shops that Starn was famous for. Starn's population is very technically oriented, and most were in engaged before the Civil War in hobbies oriented towards amateur shipbuilding and electronics. During the desperate years of the early Collapse these same shops became the center for the manufacture for just about any kind of specialised military product imaginable.
Because of all this hands on access to technology, Starn has had to develop one of the most extensive engineering and scientific infrastructures ever seen in history. The system is home to prestigious engineering colleges like Mariner University and Zanter-McCord Polytechnic, and Ivy Curtain schools like Icaris University and St. Orange College. After recieving a few years of formal training, technical graduates spend several years apprenticing on the assembly lines of local factories, or in local labs. After years of struggle against history, Starn is once again poised to storm the TL-16 battlement.