BARD PAPER: OPAL8696 | Home | Traveller | BARD | OPAL |
BARD PAPER: OPAL8696 | Home | Traveller | BARD | OPAL |
Fessenden is the sole moon of Hamadan, a massive world covered in clouds of insidious hydrogen. The colonists inhabited it, and hired prospectors to collect gases and fluids of useful importance to be processed safely without venturing into the poisonous atmosphere. The world is extremely hot, and water boiled off of the local oceans left massive salt deposits in the coastal deserts, and formed an important chemical industry to supplement the gas refining.
The local government was an especially repressive regime. Cost fluctuations and cutthroat competition drove many of the local refiners out of business, and the government became indebted to SuSAG in the antebellum period. The megacorp invested heavily in the local economy, virtually building a monopoly, and appointed a dictatorial oligarchy of consisting of local elites indebted or tied into the company through stock ownership or employment. The preponderance of wealth, and the growing indebtedness of the world's professional classes, boiled over during the Representational Reforms. Though SuSAG was forced to abandon overt political support, enough of its former officers were emplaced to foil the successful transition to a democratic government. Guerilla fighting rages between reform and antebellum factions in the wilderness, and the cities are subject to bombings and assassinations.