The Beyond Subsector C: Die Weltbund

The Beyond Subsector C: Die Weltbund

System Data

Hex  Name                 UWP       Remarks                  {Ix}   (Ex)    [Cx]   N B  Z PBG W  A    Stellar                

---- -------------------- --------- ------------------------ ------ ------- ------ - -- - --- -- ---- ----------

1701 Quatsch              B444686-B Ag Ni                    { 2 }  (757+2) [6859] - -  - 612 11 DiWb M2 V M3 V              

1709 Thule                C543434-A Ni Po Co                 { 0 }  (D36+2) [643F] - -  - 321 11 DiWb M2 V                   

1802 Spandau              B456579-A Ag Ni Sa                 { 2 }  (845-1) [775B] - -  - 712 6  DiWb F7 V D                 

1810 Tartakover           A560895-B De Ri Pz Ph Asla2 Varg1  { 3 }  (A7D+1) [6B39] - S  A 900 12 CsIm G2 V                   

1901 Saarland             A876856-B Ph Pa Pi                 { 2 }  (774-2) [6A3A] - K  - 812 11 DiWb K4 V M6 V              

1904 Ley                  E310000-0 Ba                       { -3 } (600+3) [0000] - -  - 020 15 DiWb M1 V M1 V              

1907 Djend                C645565-9 Ag Ni O:1908             { 0 }  (745+2) [85A6] - -  - 613 13 NaHu K7 V                   

1908 Yangikent            B955687-A (Gmina)1 Ag Ni Tz        { 2 }  (A54+1) [B86B] - M  - 802 7  NaHu M3 V                   

2004 Gauss                D100212-B Lo Va                    { -1 } (811-1) [5199] - -  - 312 12 DiWb M1 V                   

2102 Hessen               BA86799-C Ag Ri Ht                 { 4 }  (968-4) [2B78] - -  - 512 10 DiWb G3 V                   

2103 Bayern               B667698-9 Ag Ga Ni Ri              { 2 }  (953+1) [786B] - -  - 701 7  DiWb M1 V M1 V              

2107 Zeben                B221312-A Lo Po                    { 1 }  (821+1) [346D] - K  - 322 14 DiWb K7 V M2 V              

2108 Diversion            E301000-0 Ba Ic Va Fz              { -3 } (700+4) [0000] - -  - 010 6  NaXX G9 IV                  

2201 Sachsen              A876898-C Ph Pa Pi                 { 2 }  (B75+2) [AA79] - K  - 633 15 DiWb K0 V BD                

2203 Pfalz                B654598-B Ag Ni Ho Tr              { 2 }  (843+3) [674A] - -  - 920 12 DiWb K3 V                   

2207 Ilse                 C100310-A Lo Va                    { 0 }  (A21-4) [737C] - -  - 412 12 DiWb M2 V M2 V              

2301 Westfalen            B645599-A Ag Ni                    { 2 }  (943+2) [873A] - -  - 212 13 DiWb G7 V M9 V              

2305 Morphy               B7536BE-8 Ni Po Da                 { -1 } (954-5) [8547] - -  A 621 14 NaHu K6 V                   

2308 Queen Maud's Land    B213211-A Lo Ic Co Sa              { 1 }  (C11-1) [1379] - -  - 302 11 NaHu M2 V                   

2309 Tyren                E400000-0 Ba Va Tz                 { -3 } (500+1) [0000] - -  - 001 9  NaXX M1 V M8 V              

2402 Alekhine             BB85497-B Ni Pa                    { 1 }  (636-1) [455C] - -  - 820 8  NaHu K7 V                   

2403 Tupac                C556799-9 Ag Tz                    { 1 }  (A6C+2) [484B] - -  - 731 8  NaHu M1 V                   

The Die Weltbund subsector consists of 22 systems with a total population of 2.45 billion sentients, with only the Aslan and Vargr populations of Tartakover comprising a significant non-human element. With the exceptions of Yangikent and Tartakover, the trailing region of Die Weltbund was mostly settled during the seventh century as Die Weltbund began a centuries-long affiliation with the Third Imperium as a reliable client state. Once that relationship ended and contact with the Imperium became more antagonist, the region became a bulwark against aggression, both from nearby corsairs and from Imperial Navy commerce raiders during the Third and Fourth Frontier Wars.

Worlds

Saarland (1901 A876856-B)

During the Imperial client-state era, Saarland was a major port and industrial nexus of Die Weltbund, second to Bundestag in population and productivity. Unfortunately, the world never fully recovered physically or psychologically from the devastation of its orbital infrastructure by an Imperial raiding task force in the Third Frontier War. Now burdened by monopolies and regulation, its industries are falling behind in technology, productivity, and quality. Saarland maintains its pride as host of the largest cargo terminal in the realm, mainly from the influence of the locally headquartered Sternhansa trade monopoly. Still, population growth has been negative for more than a century with the world suffering from emigration and a low birth rate.

Saschen (2201 A876898-C)

Bracketed by two rich planetoid belts, Saschen was settled in 617 to become a mining and industrial center. Presently Saschen is also the military bulwark of Die Weltbund, home of the realm's largest naval base, protecting against Vargr and Human corsairs from beyond the border and, if war comes again, from Third Imperium commerce raiders. A disproportionate number of Saschen citizens serve in the Grossesternmarine. In the past century, Saschen has become the second-most industrious world in Die Weltbund, overtaking Saarland in technology and productivity. Highly skilled workers labor within an efficient, if bureaucratic, economy. As long as one doesn't question the status quo, one does quite well on Saschen.

Tartakover (1810 A560895-B)

Within the Third Imperium, Tartakover is known as a motley lawless desert world at the end of the x-boat line. This is only somewhat accurate. The world hosts the furthest permanent Imperial Interstellar Scout Service base to maintain a courier office, and it is a thousand-year-old trading center with a rich multi-cultural history, including significant minorities of Aslan and Vargr citizens. But is not technically lawless, though levels of violence are high enough to designate the world an Amber Zone.

Physical Characteristics

Despite being theoretically located in the center of the habitable zone of a G2 V star, Tartakover is a desert world with nothing more than seasonal rivers and small lakes on the surface. At some earlier point in the system's history, a close encounter with another star disrupted the entire solar system, leaving twelve rocky worlds in eccentric orbits and no gas giants or significant planetoids. An occasional comet from a sparse and distorted Oort cloud traverses the system, but for fuel, a visitor has little choice but to visit Tartakover's sprawling orbital or surface starport facilities. The world's atmosphere is breathable, supported by an ecosystem of hardy microbes that coat the surfaces of rocky deserts and eroded mountain ranges. With an insignificant axial tilt, it is the rather eccentric orbit that carries the world to the extremes of the habitable zone that account for much of the seasonal variation in temperatures. Strong cyclonic storms cross vast deserts during the summer months, restricting most of the population to the parched land in the shadow of ancient mountain ranges. Water is mostly pulled from the air in large vaporator farms.

History

For the first five hundred years of its existence, Tartakover was known as Waypoint and was a member of the Corellan League. Originally settled in -104 as a forward trade post between the League and the Human colonies at Brandenburg and Yangikent, Waypoint soon attracted traders from Thoznaen, Floria, the Hierate, and even the I'Sred!Ni. In 420, the world took advantage of chaos within the League and the leader of the local Broker's Guild, Aaron Tartakover, convinced Alberto Rannvik, the solitary Third Imperium consular official on the planet, to accept the world as a client state. Within five years, the IISS had established an outpost, the planet had been re-named Tartakover, and the obscure consular officer, better known as the architect of the Peace of Kaiear, had been granted a barony and assigned as ambassador to an entire, albeit distant, sector. Over the subsequent centuries, an open immigration policy has significantly expanded a population that now includes hundreds of millions of Aslan and tens of millions of Vargr in addition to at least a dozen minor races and even an enclave of Hivers.

Social Characteristics

The government of Tartakover evolved from the guilds of Waypoint and the Starport Authority bureaucracy. The current "Operating Agreement" which serves as the constitution of Tartakover dates to 447, but has evolved through a series of amendments that have added powers and checks to many interest groups. The sixty-three member Coordinating Committee is the arbiter of executive and judicial affairs and consists of members appointed by various guilds, corporations, unions, clans, and municipal committees. Laws are not particularly strict, but they are often obscure and guilt can be determined more by influence than evidence. The citizens of Tartakover identify more with interest groups than the central government, and with a weak police force and a military concerned with external threats from space not internal threats on the ground, conflicts between special interests can sometimes take the form of low-level gang warfare. As a result, the Traveller's Aid Society has designed the world an Amber Zone.

At the insistence of the four major Aslan clans on the world, dueling is legal, and the less violent forms of Aslan warfare, including assassinations and limited wars staged in the desolate desert regions, are tolerated by the central government. While offworlders are not often directly targeted by local factions, they can be caught in the crossfire or become embroiled in the legal system as pawns in some greater struggle between groups.

Yangikent (1908 B955687-A)

A fiercely independent world on the border edge of Die Weltbund, Yangikent has been settled for two and a half millennia, since the fall of the Sindalian Empire. Its oppression of its native Gmina population has given the world and its people a negative reputation, but that, if anything, has made the "Yangi" more self-reliant and sensitive to slights.

Physical Characteristics

Yangikent is a large twilight world in tight orbit around a red dwarf star. The dense world has a gravity of 1.19 standard, but eons of stellar activity has eroded the atmosphere to the point where it is barely dense enough to be breathable. A perpetual storm covers the ocean of the Bright Face and all Yangi inhabit the Astana peninsula of the Dark Face continent that protrudes into the twilight zone. The native Gmina are restricted to three reservations in distant dry valleys and plateaus where the red sun barely lightens the horizon.

History

Sindalian refugees from the final days of the Empire settled Yangikent in -1408. Yangi legends claim the original colonists had sought to settle on Corella, but were rebuffed, but the Corellan League has no record of this. In any case, a battered converted troop transport set down on the twilight steppes of Yangikent even as its lifters began to fail. The remains of the ship still form part of the old town in the capital city of Astana.

It was a generation before the settler realized they were sharing the planet with the native Gmina. An expedition to found a new settlement in a fertile valley was attacked by tailless scorpion-like creatures armed with spears and bows. Thus began an antagonistic relations that saw the Gmina population decimated and reduced to reservations on marginal semi-arid lands within two centuries.

More cordial and better documented contact with the Corellan League grew after -1100, but distance limited trade. In the second century Tangikent reacquired gravitic and jump knowledge, not from Corella or Die Weltbund but from a captured corsair out of Thoznaen.

Never very populous but almost pathologically self-reliant, the Yangi established a colony on neighboring Djend in 455 and maintained good relations with the Third Imperium mainly to counter Die Weltbund influence. After Die Weltbund ended its client state relationship with the Third Imperium in 984, Yangikent spent the next hundred years in negotiations with the Third Imperium, but the world has not acquiesced to formal client state status, though it allows IISS couriers to traverse the Djend system on route to Tartakover.

Social Characteristics

The citizens of Yangikent are universally known as the Yangi. They are a law-abiding, traditional people, suspicious of outsiders and intolerant of criticism from those who have not experienced life on their world. Much of the population lives in agricultural regions, exposed to constant twilight and periodic rains from the ocean of the Bright Side. By law, all Yangi are entitled to enough agricultural land to sustain their families and large commercial agricultural concerns are discouraged. Local law enforcement is restricted to nonlethal weaponry and the only armed forces outside the Space Defense Force are the paramilitary Rangers, who keep the Gmina confined to their reservation with lethal force. Visitors to Yangikent are viewed with suspicion and criticism of the treatment the Gmina is met by at least verbal hostility and usually revocation of visas.

Articles

Gmina

The Gmina are a primitive tail-less scorpion-like race confined to reservations on their native world of Yangikent. The origin of their name is obscure and the gesture and whistle-based Gmina language does not directly translate into anything but "People".

Physical Characteristics

A Gmina's resemblance to a giant tail-less Terran scorpion is only superficial. An adult Gmina stands two meters tall, three meters long and masses 200kg. The Gmina sport soft slightly scaly skin and internal skeletons. The Gmina have ten limbs, the upper two sets manipulative limbs ending in four claw-like fingers, the lower three sets of locomotive limbs ending in broad padded paw-like digits. A Gmina's head has the general shape of a curved beak. It has two primary eyes set on lateral eyestalks and either two (male) or three (female) sets of smaller eyes behind the stalks. The head splits open like a beak to reveal a frilled throat passage that serves as mouth and olfactory sensor. Respiration and auditory functions are performed by two sets of gills located posterior of each manipulative limb pair. A half-meter-high fin runs the length of the back to provide cooling. The Gmina's vision is centered in the infrared, with only the major eyes capable of seeing visual light to 600 nanometers. A Gmina's skin coloration varies with age and gender with the males featuring a dull orange coloration while the females are a dark red bordering on infrared. Most adults cover their skins in geometric tattooing that indicates personal history and status.

Gmina are omnivores, hunting small game and gathering or cultivating a variety of root-like vegetables.

Life Cycle

Gmina newborns are born live, usually singly after a 90 standard day gestation. The black newborn is genderless and unable to care for itself for the first two standard years of its life. Gmina traditionally reside in bands, small related groups of 10-20 individuals. These bands secrete hormones that determine the gender of the young Gmina at approximately four standard years. Usually, the gender selection balances the gender within a band. Males lose the third set of small eyes and grown a brighter coloration within a year of selection. At this stage, a Gmina is reproductively adult, but only masses half of full size, filling out over the course of the next three standard years.

At eight standard years, a Gmina is considered a full adult. Females remain with their birth band, but males wander alone into the wilderness until adopted by a new band.

An adult Gmina remains reproductively active for life, usually surviving for forty standard years, though actual full lifespan is twice that age.

Evolutionary Development

Gmina belong to the dominate taxa of fauna on Yangikent. Complex fauna has inhabited the twilight regions of Yangikent for at least 400 million years. The route to sentience is unclear and not well-studied, but geological evidence of a period massive flares from the world's red dwarf sun followed by shifts in rainfall patterns on the Astana Peninsula are likely contributors. Fossils of essentially modern Gmina date back at least 3 million years.

History and Society

The Gmina have never progressed past TL 0. At time of contact, the Gmina numbered in the millions, with loose tribes divided into clans and further into many small family bands of 10-20 adults that maintained a semi-nomadic existence. Though some tribes practiced agriculture, they did not maintain permanent dwellings, but lingered in camps around their fields. Gmina do not construct permanent shelters, though they do build fire pits and temporary cover against severe weather.

The arrival of Humans in -1408 had no immediate effect on Gmina society for the first twenty years, but then the fledgling human colony set out to establish a subsidiary settlement in a new river valley. Gmina tribesmen confronted the newcomers with spears and bows and were met with rifle fire. For the next two centuries Yangi settlers drove back Gmina tribes from the most fertile land, eventually establishing a set of reservations in marginal land in the libration zone, where the sun only rises above the horizon for parts of the year.

Currently less than a million Gmina survive in three tribal reservations. Their culture remains essentially intact, but their numbers have been in slow decline for two thousand years.

Interstellar Relations

The Gmina reservations are off-limits to Humans. The Yangi consider this a culturally protective measure, but offworld activists suspect the policy to be as much to prevent documentation of conditions on reservation land. Knowledge of Gmina society is limited to published studies by local sophontologists with no offworld peer review. Gmina who escape the reservation and survive the harsh wilderness between Gmina lands and settled regions are captured and returned to the reservation or killed if they resist.

Sternhansa Lübeck-class Trader

Die Weltbund's Sternhansa interstellar trading monopoly maintains a standardized fleet of 800-ton armed trading vessels. The Lübeck-class trader is a sturdy, rather utilitarian jump-2 starship. It is armed with four triple turrets, each usually equipped with two beam lasers and a sandcaster for self-defense, with deck hands doubling as gunners. The ships are able to defend themselves well from the lone pirate, but travel in convoys in more dangerous territory, often accompanied by a Grossesternmarine escort warship. Only partially streamlined, the Lübeck normally depends on its 90-ton Barkasse shuttle for cargo transfer and refueling. The ship's stated 405 ton cargo capacity includes 68 tons of shuttle cargo capacity that is unavailable during wilderness refueling operations. The Lübeck's powerplant can support maneuver or jump drives, but not both, requiring the ship to coast during final jump preparations. As a trading vessel, the ship is not designed to carry passengers, though two or three staterooms can be available if the junior crew doubles up. Two passenger variants sacrifice either 110 or 220 tons cargo capacity for 20 or 40 passenger staterooms and supporting space.

The Lübeck is designed to operate on established routes and is not well suited to exploratory trade missions, though some captains choose to disregard its limitations in search of greater profit. Nearly all losses to piracy, accident, or other misadventure have occurred outside established Sternhansa trade routes.