The Prisonous Barony of Hausu (Traveller)

Thank you, as always, to my patrons Darius, Ferny, Jaina Bee, Dave, Casey, and Todd.  They saw this post a week before anyone else did, and if that or the mere prospect of helping support my RPG streaming and writing efforts excites you, please become a patron on my Patreon.

(I use Wikipedia's Random Article link to name the many things I have to name when making an entire planet; I have provided links to the Wikipedia articles where useful, in case they might provide inspiration for the locations and people they named)

This planet of the Scimecan system seems appropriate for this month, as the random Wikipedia article that gave it its name is a 1977 Japanese "incomprehensible" horror comedy film.  I tried to base the planet on the film as much as possible, and am curious if I succeeded.

E64523L-3

System Nature:  Solo (Scimeca, K7 V/orange dwarf star)
Stellar Mass:  1.069x10³⁰ kg (0.5376 sol; 179,020.8 Earths)
Stellar Luminosity:  1.096x10²⁶ W, 1.8675x10²⁸ lm (0.498 Lₛₒₗ)
System Population:  355,791 Scimecan sophonts
Planets:  

• Scimeca I, 0.2 AU (habitable zone):  Hatfield (D435544-7)
• Hatfield Α, 21,120 km:  Wrecking Ball (X00024L-6, 1280 km, population 936, Nexus, Liberal)
• Scimeca II, 0.4 AU (outer zone):  Nomia (C000271-E) 
• Scimeca III 0.7 AU (outer zone):  The Planetary Barony of Hausu (described in this post), population 381, )
• Scimeca IV, 1 AU (outer zone):  Vidara, (X677000-0, population 0)
• Vidara Α:  Arthur's Missing Moon, (X000000-0, population 0)
• Scimeca V, 1.6 AU (outer zone):  Sprinters' Commonwealth, (D45021L-6, population 617, Deceptive)
• Scimeca VI, 2.8 AU (outer zone):  Julian Priestley, (X331000-0, population 0)
• Scimeca VII, 5.2 AU (outer zone):  The Planetary Barony of Morgan-Beavis, (D56044L-5, population 83,208, Fashion)
• Morgan-Beavis Α:  Weatherby Belt (XR00000-0, population 0)
• Morgan-Beavis Β:  Cover (X000000-0, population 0)
• Morgan-Beavis Γ:  Stadium (X000000-0, population 0)
• Scimeca VIII, 10 AU (outer zone):  The Baronet World of Goat's Rue (E63627L-6, population 171, Unusual Custom: Media, Unusual Custom: Technology)
• Scimeca IX, 19.6 AU (outer zone):  Robenhymer (the marquesal seat, B76733L-B, population 7459, Unusual Customs: Eating)
• Scimeca X, 38.8 AU (outer zone):  Beyond Counting (X54223L-0, population 703, Honourable, Barbaric)
• Beyond Counting Α:  Ghost Moon (X000000-0, population 0)
• Beyond Counting Β:  John Griffith (X000000-0, population 0)
• Beyond Counting Γ:  Solariella (X100000-0, population 0)

Mean Radius:  5120 kilometers (0.8036 Earth)
Approximate Surface Area:  3.29x10^8 square kilometers (0.645 Earth)
Planet Density:  3.7495 g/cm³ (0.68 standard; rocky body)
World Mass:  1.7135x10^24 kg (0.2869 standard)
World Gravity:  5.0014 m/s² (0.51 g)
Orbital Period:  291 days 17 hours 56 minutes 53.6802 seconds
Rotational Period:  29 hours 46 minutes 4.8 seconds
Axial Tilt:  25 degrees
Orbital Eccentricity:  0.025
Seismic Stress Factor:  -1.232
Atmospheric Composition:  standard oxygen-nitrogen mix, with pollutant taint
Surface Atmospheric Pressure:  48.636 kPa (0.48 atm)
Mean Surface Temperature:  -98.3814 degrees Celsius (-145.0865 degrees Faherenheit; 174.6186 Kelvins)
Hydrographic Percentage:  53% (174,370,000 km²)
Hydrographic Composition:  Normal ice
Tectonic Plates:  1
Continents:  Adieu Islands (archipelago; contains the E-class starport and 17 Hausulings to run it), Armstrong Island (major island), Babbacombe (minor; contains 66 prisoners), Battle Range (major), Chambers (major), Combined Transport (major), Control (archipelago; contains 12 Hausuling felicia-class parahumans who operate the planet, as well as the baron's planetary home), Dragon Knight (minor), Festival Number 6 (major), Greenhow (major island), Jessen (major island), Leguizamón (minor), Lundberg (major), Madigan (minor), Manta (major island), Shiqi (major), Shyamdev (major), Sleep No More (major; contains 286 captives), Spathulata Islands (archipelago), Yinon (minor)

Volcanoes:  None

Terraforming:  None
Weather Control?  No
Native Life?  Yes
Satellites:  0

Population: 381 Hausuling sophonts
Approximate Population Density: 0.000002464 sophonts per km²; 405,853.0184 km² per sophont
Exports:  Agricultural, agroproducts, ores, processed non-metals, radioactives
Cities:  None

Social Outlook:

• Progressiveness:  Radical attitude, enterprising action
• Aggressiveness:  Competitive attitude, neutral action
• Extensiveness:  Harmonious globally, aloof interstellarly

Cultural Differences:  Sexist, Barbaric

Local Customs:  Everyone lives in special locations, divorce and remarriage required for men

Government:  Self-perpetuating oligarchy

• Representative Authority:  The warden team, the products team, and the baronial project team (4 felicia parahumans each) all exert executive authority
• Baroness Geertruida Sachs with judicial authority, the coordinating council (one person from each team) with legislative authority

Known Factions or Revolutionary Groups:  

• Federation of the Improperly Detained and Enraged (FIDE), a minor anarchist group with some supporters
• Representative Authority:  None
• New Jonesville, an obscure representative democracy with no popular support of whom few have heard
• Representative Authority:  The Babbscombean team, the SNM team, and the exports team would exert executive and judicial authority if these ideologues got their way
• Other Authority:  Demos with legislative authority

Law Level:

• Overall:  3.4 (low)
• Weapons:  3 (low)
• Trade:  3 (low)
• Criminal Law:  3 (low)
• Civil Law:  5 (moderate)
• Personal Freedom:  3 (low)

Uniformity of Law:  Personal

Technology Level:

• High Common:  3 (18th & 19th centuries; Industrial Revolution, Napoleonic Era, and Colonial Era)
• Low Common:  3
• Energy:  3 (coal/steam)
• Computer/Robotics:  3 (calculus)
• Communications:  3 (telegraph, audio recording)
• Medical:  3 (surgery)
• Environment:  3 (cement structures)
• Land Transport:  3 (extensive road, high-speed stagecoaches)
• Water Transport:  3 (multi-mast sailing, navigation)
• Air Transport:  2
• Space Transport:  3
• Personal Military:  2 (early guns, jack armour)
• Heavy Military:  3 (cannons, wood armour, bronze armour, iron armour, crude steel armour)

Trade Codes:  Garden, Low Gravity, Low Population, Low Technology

Geertruida Sachs's husband flew away from the Scimecan planet of Robenhymer more than three decades ago to fight in the Great Imperial War Against the Pleiadians.  No matter how hard or how long she waited, he would never return.  All this reclusive loyalty earned her was the respect of the Marquessa of Scimeca, who after a dozen years or so granted her a baronial contract for the frozen garden world of Hausu in recognition of her loss.

Though the planet was chock full of valuable resources, the marquessa had mostly relied on the planet as a place to stick the criminals and dissidents of her system.  The prisoners were given isolated cement structures, simple things of four walls and a ceiling containing only what they needed to maintain their life and the tools to extract the resources of the planet.  Hausu's contributions to the Scimecan economy were invaluable, but it was not a good place to be.  The newly minted Baroness Sachs only made it less so.

She ruled her new fief from afar, continuing her life on Robenhymer in the marquesal court, watching the unmarried girls tittering and enjoying their carefree and trifling intrigues.  Bitterness grew in her heart.  Why should they be spared the heart-shaking sorrow of war's theft?  

Young people of any gender always have reasons to wish escape from time spent with their parents and caregivers.  Geertruida began spreading word, quietly, subtly, intriguingly, that she would offer those continents of Hausu not inhabited by prisoners as a retreat world.  For parental ears, she spoke of its safety and its nearness and, for younger ears, of the freedom and luxuries which they might expect to find there.  Skiing and exciting companionship before a roaring fire were common images in the rumors she started.

Unmarried girls, bedecked in gifts of beauty or intelligence or musical talent or athletic/martial skill or the sweetness of their dispositions or simply of an active imagination, began to follow these rumors.  Baroness Sachs's agents began to receive surreptitious inquiries about the planet.  A select few of the askers were chosen, and flown at Geertruida's expense the 12.6 AUs towards the distant Scimeca sun.

Much like the baroness's husband, they never returned.  Nor, of course, did any of the others.

Soon, the Nomian robotics workshop Millgrove received an order for 30 autonomous drones in the form of giant floating heads with viciously biting mouths.  Baroness Sachs has been using these devices to ensure the smooth running of her operations ever since the order was fulfilled.  They enforce the isolation and work ethic she wishes to see among her subjects, as well as ferrying supplies to the girls and prisoners and collecting the results of their labors.

Over the years since, Millgrove and other Nomian workshops, as well as those on Robenhymer, have received a variety of secretive and unusual requests from Baroness Sachs.  Supplementing the 30 heads, she has hidden physical dangers and surveillance equipment in the mattresses, light fixtures, and rare musical instruments (almost always pianos) offered to her prisoners and girls.  Three teams of felicia parahumans hand-picked by Geertruida see to the day-to-day operations of the planet, one overseeing the prisoners, another overseeing the captives, and the final one concerned only with the quality of the products exported off the planet.  Seats on the three-person coordinating council cycle through the members of each team; during their term, they develop rules and plans both in the moment as necessary and for the foreseeable future.

As the whim strikes Baroness Sachs, occasional captives are sent to a Nomian Trapier Clinic for medical recruitment, realigning their way of thinking to serve as the Baroness's agents, amusements, or merely to increase their efficiency as workers.  Should the whim not strike her, recalcitrant captives and rebellious prisoners can easily provide biological components for the Scimecan system's small noetic drive manufacturing industry or sale beyond its planets, or raw materials for medical education and experimentation.

Hausuling captives are gifted small wardrobes of clothing befitting brides in a handful of cultures from across the Scimecan system.  They are not given more mundane clothing, reliant only on what they had on their back as they left their home.  Recognizing that marriage and reproduction provide economic benefits in the form of more workers, the products team has successfully lobbied for a marriage cycle to occur at a rhythm determined by the coordinating council.  Every so many years, a certain percentage of the prisoners are married to reproductively compatible captives by negotiation between the warden and baronial projects teams.  They are then allowed to be married (for fewer years than the time between marriages), living together in one building before being divorced and forcibly separated again.  This has allowed a certain amount of communication to occur among the scattered Hausulings, and a culture to form.

In recent years, two resistance movements have sprung up on Hausu.  The older and more popular of the two, anarchists who call themselves the Federation of the Improperly Detained and Enraged (or FIDE), advocates simply for the abolition of baronial control, leaving the Hausulings in charge of their own individual destiny and free to leave the frozen planet if they so desire.  Only a handful of Hausulings have gathered under the auspices of New Jonesville.  These rebels would make the three teams of felicia parahumans employees of the other residents of the planet, who would send an equal number of their own population to join each team.  Imported communications technology would then provide a means for the widely scattered populace to direct their efforts by means of regular voting; their recruitment efforts have been hindered by the fact that this sounds like a daydream to many Hausulings. 

Nonetheless, the tireless work of these two groups have stoked the flames of hope in the Hausuling heart, and a recognition of their unity in oppression.  Unnoticed by the baroness or her agents, revolution is seeming more and more possible, if only the rebels could solve the inherent logistical problems.  Like siezing weaponry and vehicles somehow, for example.

A side effect of this growing collective sentiment is that wrongs committed by one Hausuling against another face two separate justices, that of the baroness's people and the bloodier version enacted by the Hausulings themselves.

Most of this is unknown to the system or Empire as a whole, except perhaps in shadowed rumors.  The face portrayed to the greater world by Baroness Sachs focuses heavily on its agricultural and agroproduct exports.  Geertruida has introduced a variant of the watermelon genetically modified to grow well in Hausu's frigid climates that she calls the icemelon to supplement the planet's indigenous crop species.  With its origins in the old Cream of Saskatchewan cultivar, its small, round fruits of less than a foot in diameter have a thin rind, striped in light and dark green, and sweet flesh of stark white with black seeds.  The freezing temperatures in which icemelon are grown make its sugars much more prominent than its watermelon ancestors, making it quite a bit sweeter; the seeds have a pleasingly crisp nutty flavor.  Many of the cement structures which house her subjects have a vine of them growing up one corner towards the roof.  Hausulings usually store these fruits in their wells to preserve them.

As the Baroness Hausu spends much of her time in the marquesal court on Robenhymer, marketing the products of her dismal planet, Hausuling recipes have become quite the trend across the system, often enjoyed by people with no idea of the bleak lives of the innovators of these recipes.  Bottles of Hausuling icemelon seed oil can be found on grocers' shelves, even a system or two away, beside plastic bags of roasted icemelon seeds, paper sacks of icemelon seed flour, jars of pickled icemelon rind, and bottles of icemelon juice and icemelon wine.

Icemelon rind stir-fry and icemelon rind stew are eminently affordable dinners enjoyed by poorer Scimecans, while those of all classes enjoy egushi soup.  Scimecan egushi soup often contains pumpkin leaf, spinach, tomatoes, okra, chili peppers, onions, beans, and some form of seafood or meat in a broth thickened with palm oil and icemelon seed flour.  Hatfielding egushi adds dumplings of pounded yam, while Robenhymi are known for cooking a less watery version of the soup down into a thick sauce served atop any number of dishes.  A jellied icemelon pudding known as jerudi muluni made of icemelon pulp, cinnamon, rosewater, and potato starch, with pistachios and candied fruits embedded in it is enjoyed after many a celebratory meal.  Icemelon agar jelly with cherries and vanilla powder fulfills the same role on a more day-to-day level.

Icemelon gazpacho with stale bread, onion, chili pepper, ginger, olive oil, wine vinegar, and garlic is a popular appetizer.  Slices of icemelon often have their intense flavors further concentrated by either grilling, pan frying, baking, or roasting.  Baked icemelon is prized for its raw-fish-like texture and slightly meaty flavor as its abundant sugars caramelize.

Refocusing on Ishee, which is more Black Rock-like than ever! (Traveller Tuesday #15)

We're gonna focus back on Ishee as we get into some of the more technical aspects of planetology, starting with determining the density of the planet. Well, before we do that, we have to determine what kind of planet it is. The planet's size and atmosphere pull in opposite directions in this determination, resulting in a roll of 2d6-1. That results in a 7, which means that it's a molten-core planet. We go on to roll 3d6 to determine it's actual density, which comes out to 98% of Earth's density. Ishee's really coming out as a rather nice place to live!

This allows us to then calculate the mass of the planet, using the formula M=K*(R/8)³. That's the quotient of Ishee's Size digit (2) divided by eight, cubed, multiplied by its density. That comes out to a mass of . . . 1.53125% of Earth's. Well, it is much smaller, even if its composition is similar. Ishee's gravity is then determined by another formula: G=M*(64/R²) (the quotient of 64 divided by the square of the Size digit multiplied by the mass). We figure out that Ishee's gravity is 0.245 g, about ¼ of Earth's.

α Bishop Sheumack being a K7 V star, it has a stellar mass 40.8% of Sol's, so rather a bit smaller. This is likely balanced out, however, by Ishee's extreme closeness to its sun; it's only 0.2 AU away. Putting this together like so, P = √(D³/M) (the square root of the quotient of the distance cubed divided by the star's mass, we determine its orbital period (a.k.a., its year) to be 51 Earth-days, 3 hours, 29 minutes, and about 7.888 seconds. We return to the dice to determine if and how many satellites orbit Ishee ~ 1d6-3 comes out with 3 moons! Their size is a 2-1d6 roll, which comes out less than 0 in all cases, leaving them all Size 0 (if the roll had come out 0 exactly, the satellite would have been a ring). We roll 2d6 twice for each to determine their orbits. Two 9s place one satellite 50 radii from the planet (76,000 km), while another moon is placed at 65 radii (98,800 km) by a 9 and a 12 and the last rolls a 5 and a 10, putting it 11 radii (16,720 km) from Ishee.

Now we can roll the dWikipedia to help us name them. In order, we'll call them Amon Assemon (Ishee-A), Fantome (Ishee-B), and New Malta (Ishee-C).

We also determine Ishee itself's rotational period (a.k.a., day) by using the formula P = (A*4) + 5 + M/D, the sum of 2d6-2 quadrupled, 5, and the quotient of the sun's mass divided by the planet's distance from it. A roll of 3 means that Ishee's day is 19 Earth-days, 57 minutes, and 36 seconds, which is approximately three-eighths of the year. An Isheean year is, very roughly, 2½ Isheean days. We roll a 6 to see what kind of axial tilt (and therefore, seasons) Ishee experiences. A follow-up 2d6-2 roll gives us a final tilt of 21º (2½ degrees more vertical then Earth's. Not shabby. And it brings up an image of α Bishop Sheumack not only loop-de-looping across the sky, but actually running a literal circle around its companion star every so often (after all, they'd move differently across the Isheean sky).

We roll 7 on 2d6 to find out that there is no eccentricity to Ishee's orbit, which will also have an effect on things like seasons and whatnot. This brings us to determining the planet's seismic stress factor, measuring how much tension and force is involved in the movements of its tectonic plates and such. The formula is F=X+P+M+S (which looks simple, but is a bit difficult to turn into a verbal description, as the latter two factors involve some math as well). We roll 1d6-3 twice, resulting in 2 and 3. We also need to determine the exact diameters of Ishee's three moons, using the method described for the planets in an earlier post. Amon Assemon comes out as 1280 km in diameter, Fantome as 480 km, and New Malta 1440 km. The final result is a seismic stress factor of about 9.354.

Ishee's Atmosphere of 6 means that its atmosphere is a standard nitrogen-oxygen mix, with only very minor differences from Earth's, and a 4 on 2d6 tells us that its pressure at the surface is 85% of Earth's ~ thin enough to be felt, I'd imagine! We also determine that α Bishop Sheumack is just less than half as bright as Sol (49.8%). This is then modified by β Bishop Sheumack on the other side of Ishee's orbit, which adds about 0.008 to α Bishop Sheumack's for an effective luminosity of 0.506. Ishee's orbit factor (a variable used in temperature calculations based on the planet's distance from its sun) is 836.345. A roll of 2d6-5 lets us approximate Ishee's surface water: a 1 means that between 6% and 15% of the world's surface is covered in water. This is the first crack in Ishee's seemingly perfect environment ~ it's a very, very dry world. It does strengthen Ishee's resonances with Black Rock City, though! This gives Ishee an energy absorption of 0.9, and its atmosphere alone gives it a greenhouse effect of 1.1. We can now determine the base temperature on Ishee, a starting point for (and thus, a vague idea of) the temperature on the planet. Many more factors effect it, such as latitude and time of day and season, obviously. To work it out, we just multiply the effective luminosity, orbit factor, energy absorption, and greenhouse effect all together. The result comes out to 418.959º K. That works out to 145.959º C, or 294.7262º F. I'm not gonna try to work out the details of Ishee's temperature right now, but I doubt there will be many long strolls in a T-shirt and skirt here on Ishee, sadly. It's just too hot.

Ishee's bUWP is now α-3D-0704-α0 (α Greve-Eau Pleine-α Bishop Scheumack-Ishee)/E261774-?/X/LG-Ri/Em