Semaphore (Vahn’s World)

The Semaphore System
Centered on a yellow dwarf star slightly larger than the sun, the Semaphore system is jokingly referred to as the sol system, supersized. The innermost planet is, much like Venus, a tidally locked hell hole made even worse by the terminator winds that surge between the day and night sides of the planet. The second world, Vahn’s - named for the Captain of the first survey mission to the system - is quite earthlike, only larger and further out from the sun. The heavy gravity is strong enough to be uncomfortable for those not raised in its grip. Rather than a monochrome moon, Vahn’s World boasts a colorful ring system almost like a rainbow permanently etched into the sky. Spectacularly beautiful, the ring system has been the bane of many a potential colonist, creating a fatal hazard for any attempt to build a beanstalk - one of the mainstays of colonization since the beginning of humanity’s expansion into space.

Beyond Vahn’s World, there are two other rocky worlds that have failed to hold on to significant atmospheres. The fourth world, which is slightly larger than Mars, does support some simple life. Locked under ice topped seas, it is life at its faintest breath. Further out, there is a relatively dense asteroid belt. Three gas giants make up the outer system, each larger than Jupiter, and likely having consumed any material that would otherwise have formed into icy worlds beyond them. The last major orbit is actually occupied by a double planet system collectively known as the Fighters, and individually as Yeoman and Li-Clark after a pair of boxers with a notorious rivalry at the time of the survey mission. Yeoman, the primary world is a gas giant only slightly larger than Jupiter, while Li-Clark is a water/ice giant in a wide retrograde orbit around Yeoman. Although they are currently the only bodies in the orbit, scientists believe that a number of moons orbiting both worlds were ejected or consumed while Yeoman was capturing Li-Clark, and that one of these may explain the ring system around Vahn’s World today.

The ecosystem of Vahn’s World is fairly immature. In the oceans, life is experiencing its first bloom of complex multicellular life, not unlike the Cambrian Explosion on Earth. However, while the seas are home to all manner of strange and unique creatures, the land was relatively barren, with only sparse lichen analogues clinging to the rocks. For the early colonial effort, the blessing of a clean slate was somewhat tempered by the effort required to install entire ecosystems on top of barren rock and sand. Most of the effort has gone into seeding the great northern continent with Terrestrial life, along with a few equatorial islands that serve as resort destinations. Collectively this area is known as the Terrestrial Ecology Zone/Zona de Ecologia Terrestre (ZET) and much of the land outside of it remains the primordial wasteland it was before humanity first set foot on the planet. As a result, the population is faily centralized. Currently, approximately 97% of the planetary population lives within the metropolitan area of Conímbriga, nestled in a fertile valley deep within the ZET.