Mercury
Description
Mercury is an extreme planet, the closest to the sun and buffeted constantly by its heat and by powerful solar flares. Mercury is an extremely hostile environment and one ill suited to colonisation efforts by any but the most foolhardy or desperate of people. In spite of all this Mercury still has a great deal of value in terms of mineral resources and the possible bounty of energy such a location, close to the power source of the sun, can have. As such Mercury does maintain a small number of research and industrial stations, mining installations and expansive solar farms that gather immense amounts of energy. At present no good logistical means exists to transfer this massive amount of power back to the rest of the solar system for use by civilisation but the power can be used by the scientific and industrial stations to support some extremely high powered scientific experiments and to allow the mineral wealth of Mercury to be exploited relatively cheaply. All of these settlements reside within the freezing permanent twilight of Mercury’s asteroid craters, the cold easier to deal with than the unrelenting heat of the surface. The small bases are mostly linked via small pneumatic railways dug by robotic tunnelling machines that were also used to create accelerator rings and to dig mine shafts for more specialist mining and boring machines. For a community of people that lives so close to the sun the citizens of Mercury spend the greater majority of their time in the dark and cool of the tunnels, something of an irony.
Government
Mercury has no overall governing body. Each settlement is the sovereign territory of the corporation or government which claims ownership. The transit system between the various sub bases is considered to be collectively owned by all of the involved entities, not that this causes a problem as they are largely self maintaining. There is some paranoia about industrial espionage which leads each community to employ one, two, or a handful of security personnel though each of these normally pulls double duty due to the small populations of the bases and their requirement not to be wasteful. While energy is plentiful and the high quality ore dug from Mercury pays for a great deal it is still expensive to support the bases and the populations that exist on the planet and any expense – even security personnel – must be justified.
Geography
Despite its hothouse conditions Mercury is not a volcanic world, it is in fact geologically largely inactive and covered with the evidence of past meteor strikes, relatively unaffected by erosion or surface turnover, other than the occasional melting and re-setting of certain surface features. Despite the surface temperature ranging up to a staggering 800 Kelvin there are cold areas in deep craters, particularly at the poles where water ice can be found, deposited by comets and outgassing from beneath the surface. This water is what truly makes the existence of the scientific and industrial stations possible.
Starport quality
C, Research, Scout
Size
3
Atmosphere Type
E
Hydrographic Percentage
1
Population
4
Government Type
-
Law Level
1
Tech Level
F
Price Multiplier
2.5
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