Name: Fezatha
Location: Segmentum Solar
Summary: "Terra-like" satellite of a gas giant, but a combination of astronomical factors creates exceptionally harsh surface conditions.
Astronomical setting:
Fezatha is a satellite of the gas giant Balchan. Balchan itself is a massive SuperJovian planet with approximately 4.8 Jupiter masses. Balchan orbits an unstable bright F-class subgiant star, in an elleptical orbit with a perigee at 1.08 AU and an apogee at 2.35 AU. Balchan has three satellites with masses comparable to terrestrial planets, and hundreds of smaller satellites ranging from very substantial bodies comparable to Luna to hundreds of asteroid-sized rocks. Fezatha is Balchan's middle big sattelite. The outer big satellite (Olvad) is a Mars-like desert world and the inner big satellite (Pradis) has a volcanically hyper-active surface completely covered by a two dozen kilometer deep global ocean stained by the witch's brew of chemicals belched out by its many volcanos.
Description:
Fezatha is a broadly "Terra-like" world. Gravity is similar to Terra. Fezatha is tide-locked to Balchan; its rotation period is approximately 77.5 hours, which creates sharp temperature contrasts between night and day. It has a single supercontinent that covers approximately 45% of its surface; the rest of the surface is ocean, with the exception of some small islands. This supercontinent is mostly desert, with wetter regions around the coast. The atmosphere is somewhat oxygen-poor, but is breathable by humans. For more details, see "hazards and difficulties":
Hazards and difficulties:
- Balchan moves around its bright F-class subgiant sun in a highly elliptical orbit with a perigee at 1.08 AU and a apogee at 2.35 AU (this means Balchan receives more than four times as much sunlight at perigee as it does at apogee). This creates extreme world-wide "seasons" on Balchan's satellites, including Fezatha. For more than half of Balchan's long year the entire globe of Fezatha is as deep frozen as Terra's Antarctica; even the equatorial regions are far below freezing for more than half the year, and in the coldest part of the year some regions of Fezatha become so cold that carbon dioxide frost may form. On the other hand, the burnsummer (as it is known on Fezatha) when Balchan passes closest to the sun is as lethally hot as the apogee winter is lethally cold. During the burnsummer temperatures in Fezatha's continental interior regularly exceed 80 C and temperatures in excess of 100 C are by no means uncommon. Coastal regions with temperatures moderated by the ocean are less scorched by the burnsummer, but even here the burnsummer is extremely hot, and in coastal regions extremely violent storms fueled by massive evaporation from the oceans is an added burnsummer hazard.
- Fezatha's long day/night cycle increases the difficulty of its climate; even during the "temperate" part of the year the temperature in many regions regularly falls below 0 C at night and exceeds 40 C during the day.
- Fezatha's dying sun is highly unstable, varying substantially in luminosity, producing extremely intense solar winds, and producing regular super-flares in which it releases torrents of charged particles and radiation and its luminosity may temporarily triple or quadruple or even increase by orders of magnitude. This variability adds to the unpredictability and extremity of Fezatha's climate; even during the "nice" part of the year Fezatha may be unpredictably exposed to short bursts of heat every bit as intense as the height of the burnsummer or even worse, and during the superflares Fezatha's dayside is bathed in intense ultraviolet light and other harmful radiation. The intense solar wind of Fezatha's sun interacts with Balchan's powerful magnetic field to create extremely intense "winds" of charged particles that Balchan's satellites orbit through, making space travel in the Balchan satellite system an interesting experience to say it charitably. The nights on Fezatha blaze with spectacular aurorae produced by the interaction of this charged particle environment with Fezatha's own magnetic field and upper atmosphere. This radiation environment erodes Fezatha's ozone layer, further flooding Fezatha's surface with lethal radiation.
- Although Fezatha is tide-locked to Balchan, gravitational interactions with Balchan's other satellites make its orbit mildly elliptical, which creates extreme tides. Fezatha's ocean tides are more than 100 meters high, and in many areas the oceans advance and retreat dozens or hundreds of kilometers over vast wastelands of sand and scoured rock every day. This makes the otherwise "nicer" parts of Fezatha much less habitable, and makes it much harder to maintain any sort of ocean port (and makes Fezatha's oceans quite turbulent and hazardous to sail on). The same gravitational forces also render Fezatha a very volcanically active world, with vast hazardous volcanic regions, vast lava barrens, and frequent volcanic eruptions.
- Fezatha's atmosphere is contaminated with various poisonous gasses (e.g. hydrogen sulfide) as a result of all the volcanic activity, interactions of the unstable sun's radiation with the atmosphere, and massive bacterial blooms that occur in the oceans in various parts of the year.
- Fezatha's native life is broadly biochemically similar to Terran life, but is toxic to Terran life at a low level (i.e. humans can eat Fezathan crops, but it is physiologically stressful for them to live on such a diet). More Terran-compatible species introduced from other worlds generally do not thrive; Fezatha's life is adapted to its cycles of extreme heat and cold, super-flares, etc., and life-forms without these adaptions rarely survive long on Fezatha.
Living conditions:
Fezatha has several hundred million inhabitants. They spend much of their time in subterranean cities, where the mass of rock above helps protect them from extreme temperatures and radiation. During the "temperate" parts of the year crops on the surface are tended during safe periods when the sun is relatively quiescent; the sun must be carefully watched at such times, and when it shows signs of imminent flare activity surface workers quickly retreat into subterranean shelters (it is death to be caught on the surface in a bad flare for more than a few minutes). Crops are grown in the relatively temperate "spring" and "fall" and harvested before burnsummer and apogee winter; burnsummer and apogee winter are the "dead" parts of Fezatha's agricultural year. Fezatha is controlled by an Imperial governor but divided into many semi-independent city states; it is a world of the Imperium, loyal as long as the city-states are mostly left to run their own affairs. Fezathans are a somewhat specialized subspecies of humanity, with various physiological adaptions to better tolerate heat and cold and various poisons and harmful radiations (the result of a mix of ancient genetic engineering and simple natural selection over millennia); as an adaptation to the high UV on Fezatha's surface they are very dark-skinned.
Recruitment attractions:
The inhabitants of Fezatha are well-disciplined, accustomed to danger, accustomed to relatively minimalistic living conditions, biologically unusually resistant to heat, cold, various forms of radiation, and various poisons, and skilled at survival in environments characterized by severe temperature extremes and solar flare hazards. Fezathans therefore make good recruits for Imperial Guard regiments specialized in fighting in various sorts of challenging environments. They also make fine mountain fighters due to physiological adaptations to the relatively low oxygen content of Fezatha's atmosphere. Fezatha's population has no more than the normal occurrence of psykers, pariahs, etc., and Fezatha has no pre-Imperium artifacts of any particular value.
