i'm working up a new second campaign based on the Matarishan subsector of the Ley Sector circa 993 era.
In the Gateway to Destiny Sourcebook it lists a system as:
Adigigi 1523 X200441-8 Ni Va 410
This is interesting to me because it says it's a no atmo, no water vacuum planet, no starport, has 40,000 citizens and law level 1. That sounds wild!
I'd have to assume the people live in some sort of dome(or other enclosed structure) or underground in some manner. However with no starport of any kind, how do they get water or supplies? Unless there's an underground source of water or ice caps? Why the law level of 1?
Please give me your thoughts! This planet seems neat to visit and I'd like to flesh it out a bit for the players.
In order:
There could be no main starport facility run by any formal authority; basic local landing pads might exist. Thus, there is no official starport, although there may still be places you can land a starship.
The population might be largely transient - perhaps a series of mining colonies with 10,000-50,000 population in total. Some of these would be miners working for corporations; some would be independent prospectors living in pressurised shelters in the middle of nowhere. Some could be working in service industries. Some of the corporate settlements might have facilities equivalent to a class D or E starport to service their operations, but none that are open to the public.
The population could be quite widely dispersed amongst several (largely ad-hoc) pressurised facilities servicing various mining, prospecting and refining operations. If you've ever seen Outland, this might make a good example of a corporate facility. Independent facilities might be little more than a series of portable pressurised shelter modules linked together with various other service modules.
A loose democratic council could be elected to carry out some basic functions of government, but the actual government function is minimal - as evidenced by the low local law level. Given the dispersed nature of the population and logistics of enforcement (no starport, no customs), legislation may only exist by mutual agreement, and is probably only enacted when something actually becomes a problem.
The dispersed nature of the population is reflected in the lack of a formal starport. The closest thing to starport facilities might be landing pads flattened by a bulldozer nearby the various settlements. As there is no central starport authority the system doesn't have one registered. The local ports may be or may not be keen on random adventurers turning up on their landing pad.
Water could be extracted from subterranean ice deposits or from chemical treatment of the local regolith. Food could consist of a mixture of overpriced imported luxuries and locally grown hydroponics or yeast vats. Some of the local support industry might grow or import food and may not be keen on competition with a free trader loaded with luxuries and mining equipment.
A world like this might also be a haven for smugglers, with stashes of contraband landed on the world to be hidden in ore shipments going offplanet. There also might be a pirate base hidden somewhere on the other side of the planet with rumors of people seeing unidentified ships.
