Geography and Ecosystem
Veira-X97 is a medium-sized planet, with a radius of roughly 5,000 km. It is covered in thousands of volcanoes, each ranging in size, with the largest volcanoes topping nearly 10,000 m each. These volcanoes are extremely active and consistently erupt, not a day going by without a few hundred of them going off. Each of these volcanoes when they erupt spews forth a vast amount of gas and debris, including; water vapour, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, and hydrogen sulphide.
This has made the planet nearly uninhabitable, despite a thin layer of atmosphere still holding on, and just enough composite air to sustain life with a little bit of assistance. Despite this, no fauna have evolved here due to the planet's overwhelming amount of carbon and sulphur dioxide, though some hardier, and rather vile plants have managed to take hold in some regions. One of which is the nasty
Demon's Breath plant, which has a habit of storing sulphur dioxide acid into the faces of those that approach it.
A common occurrence on the planet is when the volcanoes spew out larger than normal amounts of sulphur dioxide in large bursts that travel for kilometres. This has several side effects, one of which is the blocking of sunlight from the system's sun, causing temperatures on the planet to plummet, often for months at a time. The other, being common bouts of acid rain, making life on the planet even more difficult for those that eventually decided to lay roots there.
The planet is rich with ultramafic igneous rocks, primarily chromite and olivine making the planet a prime location to source the materials needed to smelt platinum, an important metal used in building space ships.
History and Development
It is unknown how old Veira-X97 is exactly, but carbon dating has put its age at roughly the 2 billion-year-old mark, making it a relatively young planet. This planet remained uninhabited for the majority of its history, minus a few hardy plant species that somehow managed to survive its harsh environments. Roughly a hundred and fifty years ago however the settlers that would become known as
The Miners of Veira-X97 arrived and began to settle the planet.
These miners would spend the next fifty years constructing infrastructure on the planet to allow for mining of the precious chromite and oxine ore found in large quantities underneath its surface. These first years were difficult for the miners, as they had to build incredible amounts of infrastructure on the planet to allow for safe living and work, including the development of atmospheric filtration masks that allowed for safer consumption of the planet's noxious air.
But within a generation's work, they had made enough money from the sale of the ore found in the planet that they would be able to build a nearby space station, to allow for rotating shifts on the planet below, greatly increasing the quality of life for residents of the planet. Most of whom nowadays do not live full-time on the planet and instead work three-month shifts before rotating off-planet for three months off before returning, and so on.
Nowadays the planet and the miners provide a large quantity of the metal platinum, which is used in the production of many space ships. The miners even constructed their own facilities both on and off-planet to smelt chromite and oxine into platinum themselves, thus bypassing the costly third-party manufactures and selling directly to wealthy ship-building corporations.
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