Drinax

Drinax (A-43645A-E)

Few travellers visit Drinax today. According to the charts of the Imperial Scouts, the planet still has a Class-A Starport, but the charts are centuries out of date. Drinax is a dead world. There are no major settlements on its surface, only the scars left by the Aslan when they bombed the cities from orbit. The once-fertile grasslands were seared to deserts; the forests where the kings of old hunted are charred stumps. The seas bloom red with algae after they were boiled to death. People don’t live on Drinax anymore.

They live above it.

A sense of irony is shared by both Humaniti and Aslan. The invasion force spared the famous floating palace of the Kings of Drinax. They blasted the cities and laid waste to the countryside, but did not touch the golden grav-platform or any of the palace’s elegant domes or delicate towers. They exterminated millions of commoners, but let no harm come to the nobles, servants, sycophants and courtiers on the Floating Palace.

The survivors of the war, numbering a scant few thousand, had to adapt to survive. The glorious Hanging Gardens, said to be a wonder of the sector, were cleared of their exotic blooms from a hundred worlds and turned into hydroponics bays. Delicate nobles who had never worked an honest day in their lives suddenly found tools thrust into the hands. The early years were not easy. Blood stained the diamond tiles of the King’s Seraglio, and the ancient Scrolls of the Prophet Zaol were used for kindling. Still, the people of the Floating Palace survived. In the months before the invasion, the King had ordered the staff of the great university to transfer their best scientists and equipment to the Scholar’s Tower, so they were able to retain the bulk of their scientific knowledge. The Drinaxi still have Technology Level 14-era knowledge, although they lack the resources to put it to use. With most of the world below still radioactive, diseased or simply scorched beyond use, all the knowledge in the galaxy is useless when you have no copper or steel or rare earths with which to forge your wonders.

Behold, then, the Floating Palace – a flying city, an aerial pleasure-dome of surpassing beauty, of endless wonder... and of utter despair.

Below the Floating Palace, Drinax is a wasteland. The Aslan dropped rocks from space on much of the planet. Dust clouds choked the skies for years, plunging the whole planet into a long impact winter. Major population centres were blasted with plasma weapons and disease bombs; millions died at the claws of the conquerers.

A hundred years later, the planet is slowly healing. Green shoots cover the impact craters, and new forests are growing in the ashes of the old. It will be many years before the planet returns to its former vitality, and some wounds will never heal. The spores of the Aslan biological weapons still sleep in the overgrown ruins of the cities, so Drinax may never be entirely safe for human occupation but a few hardy pioneers carve a living out of the wasteland.

Vespexers

The Vespexers are those who continue to live on the surface of Drinax. Most are the descendants of survivors from the Aslan attack, but they also include exiles from the Floating Palace.

The Vexpexers are a hardy folk who subsist primarily by hunting and gathering in nomadic clans, although in recent years they have started to establish small permanent settlements near the richer salvage fields. They wear protective hazard suits made by the craftsmen of the Floating Palace to protect them from the dangers of Drinax. The Vexpexers are technically subjects of the King of Drinax, but obey no laws except those of the tribe. The Floating Palace trades hazard suits and other worked goods for food, raw materials and salvage reclaimed from the ruins.

A number of the more independant Vespexer clans blamed the inhabitants of the Floating Palace for their woes and have had nothing to do with them since the Fall. They solved the problem of surviving the temperature extremes of the weeks-long Drinaxi day without technological assistance by forming airborne convoys and constantly flying westward to stay in the more temperate zones of dawn or dusk. Needless to say this is a marginal existence at best, that is only made possible by making periodic resupply stops with their more sedentary cousins. 

As their available stock of advanced gravitic vehicles has dwindled over the years these 'sunchaser' clans have downgraded their convoys to TL3-5 piston-engined flyers and lifting-gas dirigibles. The loss of cruising speed with these lower tech vehicles means that they have restricted themselves to more forgiving, higher-latitude migration routes over the years.

Drinax System

Drinax Prime is an M1 V red dwarf, small and cool as stars go meaning that even though Drinax itself orbits close in to its sun at 0.31 AU (50 million km, which is about the same distance than Mercury is from the Sun) it barely lies inside the outer fringe of the habitable zone. There is one rocky world closer in, which is a tidally locked cinder – there used to be an extensive industrial infrastructure here but it was destroyed when the Aslan overthrew Drinax a hundred years ago.

The main world of Drinax is in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance with each local day lasting for over seven weeks while the local year is 73 days. The thin atmosphere and long day means that there is a large diurnal temperature swing (from as low as 210K at local midnight up to 320K at local noon) with a daily freeze/thaw cycle that gives rise to a highly eroded and fractured landscape. The local biosphere includes many fast-growing plants with corm analogues and animal species evolved to be either day-adapted or night-adapted and which hibernate/estivate for half of each local day. Needless to say most of the Terran species that were introduced during Drinax's heyday are extinct outside of climate-controlled habitats.

Drinax was at one point highly terraformed, with orbital solettas to provide shade to the dayside and boost insolation for the night, an atmosphere bulked up by regular infusions of volatiles from outer system ice bodies and a network of shield stations to create an artificial magnetosphere. They still have the air and water (for the next million years or so) but the orbiting mirrors and shield stations are gone – destroyed by the Aslan. The marginal environment of the planet these days means that cold weather gear, stilsuits and radiation meds are some of the Floating Palace’s key trade goods to the Vespexer clans on the surface.

The planet’s low gravity (0.3G, roughly the same as Mars) means that Drinaxi tend towards an endomorphic ‘belter look’. In the heyday of the Kingdom of Drinax this was mitigated by widespread use of grav plates tuned to standard (a practice continued on the Floating Palace) but these days the Vespexers are low-G adapted and find living in standard gravity a challenge. The latest census counted approximately 70k people on the planet, 30k on the Floating Palace itself (up from 20k immediately after the Aslan attack) and 40k in the Vespexer clans. The latter number is a partial count however and is known to be too low by at least a factor of two.

Drinax orbits so close that it lies within the jump well of its primary, which extends out to 0.49 AU (75 million km) from the star. This means that it takes at least 30 hours for a free trader boosting at a standard gravity to transit from their jump emergence point to the planet and can take substantially longer (if the system they are coming from is masked by Drinax Prime’s gravity well). On the positive side it means that the Star Guard have ample warning when raiders threaten the planet, but it also means that tramp freighters are reluctant to incur the delays required to visit the system. 

There used to be a station out beyond the jump limit at the Rhizol L1 point which acted as a deep space highport for the system, but the Aslan fleet scuttled it when they left Drinax - it’s a debris field now. The only remaining space-based infrastructure in the system is an orbital platform at Drinax's L1 point which is used to beam power down to the Floating Palace and acts as a rudimentary high-port to supplement the landing pads on the palace.

The next planet out from Drinax is Rhizol, a sub-Jovian gas giant orbiting at 0.78 AU (117 million km) which can be used for wilderness refuelling, either by skimming the atmosphere of the gas giant directly or landing on one of the fourteen moons to crack ice. There are several dozen slightly radioactive impact craters scattered across the various moons of Rhizol – scars of the ortillery strikes that slagged the fuel processing stations which used to operate here.

Beyond Rhizol there is an asteroid belt plus three further gas giants and one other rocky planet at the outer fringe of the system. Wilderness refuelling is possible in the outer system as well but it requires a tricky bit of astrogation to jump in to these locations from out-system (or a conventional jump, followed by a tediously long in-system transit to get there the old-fashioned way). There is no asteroid mining in the outer system other than the occasional wildcat operation mounted by an out-system miner - these tend not last long however as they are extremely vulnerable to piracy.

Backstage

Like the previous post, the first few paragraphs started life as Gar Hanrahan's writing for Pirates Of Drinax. Props to him.

According to the Traveller Map Drinax Prime is an M1 red dwarf and, per GURPS Traveller, a planet in the 'goldilocks' zone for this type of star is going to be deep inside the 100 diameter jump shadow of the star. I liked the idea of ships needing to boost for a day or more before being able to jump - it would make Drinax that little bit more of a cut-off backwater. A lot of Traveller games don't worry too much about this sort of thing and realistically I won't be putting this effort into every system I work up for this game, but I'm happy to do it for the home system for this campaign.

The UWP for Drinax lists the atmo code as 3 for a 'Very Thin' atmosphere, which isn't survivable without a respirator. That's a step too far in terms of making the survival of the Vespexers believable in my opinion, so I've ruled that the atmo code refers to conditions found at the altitude that the Floating Palace typically operates. At the surface the atmo code is 5 for 'Thin'.

Drinax is half the diameter of Earth, so giving it low gravity seemed reasonable and making Vespexers low-G adapted followed from that. My ruling for character generation is that any Vespexer characters have to swap their lowest rolled attribute in to STR to reflect this, so I've ended up with a couple of very weedy PCs.

With Drinax being small and very close in, I also liked the idea of it being tidally locked or in a spin-orbit resonance. Tidally locked would have made the amount habitable real-estate extremely limited which didn't really fit with the established history of the Star Kingdom of Drinax so I went with a planet in a spin-orbit resonance that had lots of wrecked terraforming infrastructure. 

The weeks long days with the wild extremes in temperature followed from that and then I started to think about how survivors would cope and came up with the 'sunchasers' idea. If I was being a strict fun-ruiner the concept of a bunch of Mad Max-esque, post-apocalyptic barbarians maintaining flotillas of aircraft capable of a constant 12-20 kph pace for a hundred years isn't at all realistic. But it's a cool idea, so I'm going with it.