Editing Tsaritsyn

== Tsaritsyn ==

=== Aquila 160 D 220 220 B Desert, Low Population, Poor ===


Tsaritsyn is a tiny rockball of a world, dry, cold, orbiting a brown dwarf which in turn orbits a class K9 star. It has an atmosphere though, and it has oxygen, making it a far better prospect for an outpost than any of the other similar rockballs in the system. It has extensive cave systems under its surface which harbour life, though of a very marginal type, barely cellular, using a peculiar kind of thermosynthesis to create oxygen from underground deposits of water.

The colonies are the Rosneft Interstellar Mining corporation (6), and a firm from Aquila's Onika Prefecture, Hokada Chemical (5). Both colonies are tiny, 87 in the Rosnef base, 73 in the Hokada.

The Rosneft base - Tsaritsyn - is dedicated to finding a useable reservoir of petrochemcials. Surveying teams trek across the surface and through the caves, a risky business aided by specially made tunneling machines, but there is little of use. Hokada use their facility as a manufacturing base far from the restrictive environmental regulations back home and import feedstock or skim it from the local gas giants. The chemical waste they pour into their caverns is having an effect on the local slime, it is multiplying in strange ways.

The two settlements are in a low level war, with frequent legal arguments over exploitation rights to the planet, sabotage of Hokada operations and the Rosneft crew accuse the Hokada crew of deliberately killing off their exploration crews with cave ins. The two settlements are a mere dozen miles apart, yet have separate landing fields and refuse to have anything to do with each other. The Hokada even have a different name for the world - Yokoana - though since the Russians were there first and there are more of them their name is on the star charts. The Hokada are trying to persuade the various state authorities on Aquila to start an embargo against Rosneft, but though Russians are light years away no one wants to rile them.