BARD PAPER: OPAL8688 | Home | Traveller | BARD | OPAL |
BARD PAPER: OPAL8688 | Home | Traveller | BARD | OPAL |
Despite its small size and limited land surface, Veldt is an agricultural powerhouse. Warm temperatures and ample moisture allow for the growing of several crops in a normal calendar year. Most of these crops are shipped to worlds like Lilad and Giranima, and the farmers make a good living in selling natural fruits and vegetables to worlds that otherwise depend upon manufactured or basic hydroponic crops for most of their foodstuffs. Nearly ninety percent of the worlds exports are food products, and the commerce this attracts requires the presence of an A-class starport.
To facilitate productivity, most of the population lives in in scattered communities, with few cities above a few hundred thousand people. The exception to this is Highport, which has a population of four million and a tech level of 13. Highport's population originally brokered food shipments for sale on the interstellar market, but most of the Post-Collapse trade between Deneb and worlds in Reft sector passes through Veldt, and Highport's population has become culturally distant from their cousins on the surface as a result of income from this trade, which is more lucrative than being the middleman for grain sales. In 1198 Highport's ruling council applied for home rule status, a move bitterly opposed by the planetary government.
The scout base is built on top of the local Ancient ruins. The site consists of a giant maze of twisting paths carved out of the sandstone bedrock of a large valley. The paths are open to the sky and range in width from allowing two-lane vehicle traffic, down to smaller than any known sentient lifeform. The paths are ruler straight, without curves of any kind, changing course through sharp corners set at right angles. The pattern they form is intricate and goes for hundreds of miles. The paths do not intersect, twisting around one another, and eventually dead ending at the edges of the valley. The purpose of this maze is still unknown. And technology that precisely cut them is more advanced than anything created by Imperial science. Equally mysterious is the lack of any deformation or faulting of the bedrock by normal earth movements in the last 300,000 years, despite several major earthquakes nearby in that time frame.