0305
Name: The Park (official name HP501-944)
UPP: B626884A
Planetary details:
Starport class B, Good quality installation. Refined fuel available. Annual maintenance overhaul available. Shipyard capable of constructing non-starships present.
Medium sized world. Surface gravity of .84 G. World diameter is 6000 miles (9600 km).
Very thin, tainted atmosphere. Combination mask needed.
60 percent water. Cloud cover is 20 percent.
Hundreds of millions of inhabitants.
Civil Service Bureaucracy. Government by agencies employing individuals
selected for their expertise.
Law Level 4: Light assault weapons (sub-machine guns) prohibited.
Tech Level A: Interstellar community.
Trade Classifications: None.
The Park, a megacorporate hydropetrochemical extraction hub named 'HP501-944' before the Crash, is an ironically-titled world indeed.
What once was a thriving, entrepreneurial workforce serving a lonely, toxic landscape of industrial megastructures is now little more than a subjugated and disspirited culture clinging to a bleak, broken and hazy planet - its thin and tainted atmosphere mirrored by the corrupt, ineffective bureaucracy in control. The Park's government consists of and is dominated by what remains of a number of major megacorporations and commercial entities, 'nationalized' into a civil bureaucracy in the aftermath of the Crash.
With a priority towards shareholders as their constituency, the government of the world's hundred-plus-million inhabitants is often impersonal and thoughtless - any decisions on global policy matters are only reached after endless cycles of defiance and consensus-seeking, deception and compromise, often well after the urgency has passed. In this way, a sort of status-quo is maintained and the inhabitants learn to accept what they are given and to avoid 'rocking the boat'.
While many of the planet's inhabitants (company workers of every stripe) live in various sprawling artificial-atmosphere residential platform complexes scattered across the scarred and fetid planet, the leaders of the executive boards of these groups act in 'healthy competition' to administer and allocate a workforce of approximately 100 million workers. These 'Executive Bureaucrats' live in opulence in horizon-splitting megastructures like the Koblis Tower.
An additional 10-30 million that make up the remainder of the world's population are not employed by the corporations, and so are not administered by, nor formally entitled to the benefits and services of the employed class. Many of them inhabit the cities, but colonies have been reported throughout the now-deserted petrochemical processing facilities that stretch for miles across, above and below the acrid shorelines.
The abject poverty of the 'unemployed', especially when contrasted with the technological luxuries available to the wealthy, has created a very strong impetus for most of the population to remain gainfully (if not always equitably) employed. Everything from transportation to medical services to information are only available to those possessing a 'business card'.
In addition, employees in good standing are able to 'increase their slice of the pie', being eligible to try for a single-point increase in their SOC during yearly corporate evaluations (roll 12 on 2d6). Employees are rarely able to receive more than 2 or 3 point increases over the course of their tenure - and any such SOC increases are immediately forfeit if their employment should be voluntarily or involuntarily terminated.
Increasing violence in the past few years has been of great global concern. Among the most spectacular of these violent incidents were a number of raids by armed attackers, some ending in death, aimed primarily at recreational and residential platforms in the easternmost part of one of the planet's primary continents. In one series of brutal attacks the atmospheric integrity facilities of a major recordkeeping complex (and the adjacent corporate housing structure) were sabotaged and nearly 600 Siiriani employees were killed.
In the wake of the attacks Kashdukan Metalworks CEO Irthas Maliu, who had been personally identified as sponsoring a radical 'unemployment rights' faction named as responsible, has stepped down to stand trial. Kashdukan's stock price has plummeted nearly 600% in the months since his resignation. Maliu's former rival, Siiriani CEO-Imperatore Count Rax Arbanthus of Larissa, has ignored mounting evidence that Maliu was in fact framed - and has militarized the company's holdings and activities in response to the attacks. Siiriani declared in their last earnings report that they have dedicated an unprecedented 10% of their yearly profits to development of a new corporate mercenary organization. Siiriani hopes to have this 'for-hire' military force online within the year, with contracts to provide defense for belters and mining initiatives planned elsewhere in the subsector. If Arbanthus is successful in his ongoing negotiations with representatives of the Larissan Polity (some of whom are in fact relatives of the Count), Siiriani would be poised to become the dominant corporate power on the planet, and Arbanthus could ascend to become a significant figure in subsector politics.
(how's that?)
