Admor

Admor is the second planet from Audras and the second largest presently known terrestrial planet, at twelve terrestrial masses. Its tremendous atmosphere prevents practical exploration of the planetary surface and its extreme mass makes cloudtop habitats largely untenable for the majority of species in the Vernarcan Federation, but the atmosphere does possess enough nitrogen to make it valuable to local terraforming efforts.

Physical Characteristics

Admor is the largest terrestrial planet in the entire Verda System, at over 12 terrestrial masses. This enormous mass results in a very high surface gravity, making even cloudtop habitats untenable for the vast majority of species even if the atmosphere was not well past the point of crushing even modern landers. Due to this extreme difficulty in surface exploration, very little is known about it beyond low-resolution orbital scans befuddled by the inability to account for surface conditions and no plans exist to terraform it. The atmospheric pressure is calculated to be at least 1,347 atmospheres, which is believed to make the existence of carbon dioxide in a supercritical fluid possible even several kilometers above the nominal surface.

Due to its crushing atmosphere and the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide which makes up a majority of its composition, Admor's surface has been calculated at over 1,000 K, making its surface hotter than even Horos. Its surface is believed to be periodically resurfaced by volcanism.

Atmosphere

Admor's atmosphere is the thickest atmosphere of any known planet that is not a gas giant. Because of this, no expedition has ever reached the surface. The pressure in the lowlands of the planet is so high that carbon dioxide is crushed into a supercritical state, a phenomenon found on no other worlds within the Verda Stellar Neighborhood. Its composition consists of primarily Carbon Dioxide, alongside roughly 7% diatomic Nitrogen. This may not sound like much, but it adds up to roughly 40 Terallan atmospheres worth of the stuff and is Admor's only notable planetary export. This nitrogen was most notably exported to its large moon of Anamol during the project to terraform it. Most of it is still there after the Void attack on the planet, but this export barely made a dent in Admor's nitrogen concentration.

When Admor was younger, its atmosphere may have been similar to Teralla's, and may have even had an ecosystem, which died out as the atmosphere thickened to extremes due to a runaway greenhouse effect. Others believe that the primordial atmosphere transitioned directly to the modern one.

History

Prehistory

A planet of Admor's size cannot form on its own, so most scientists agree that it formed from the collision of multiple large terrestrial planets which formed in the inner Audras System. This also explains the complete lack of other terrestrial planets with the exception of the miniscule Iltaki/Tiraki, as well as the perennial failure of the Tantrica Belt to coalesce into anything despite its mass and position in the inner system. Its enormous mass pulled great amounts of material into its disk, which formed a collection of moons. Most of these likely crashed back to the planet or into each other, leaving one large moon behind to become Anamol. Due to the impossibility of exploring its surface, it is impossible to determine much about the rest of the planet's prehistory, but most agree that the crust has likely been resurfaced multiple times and that there are probably no craters on its surface.

Exploration and Colonization

Due to its enormous size and proximity to Audras, Admor was the fourth planet discovered in the system after the three gas giants. Very little could be determined about it, as even the size was not entirely clear due to Audras' extreme distance and its abnormally high albedo.

Idromar 1, the first probe the fly across the gulf between Verda and Audras, made several flybys of Admor and its largest moon, recording the highest resolution images of their surfaces yet, but functionally nothing was learned of the surface due to the opaque clouds of the planet. Its successor dropped a selection of atmospheric probes into the clouds, which were all summarily crushed by the pressure long before reaching the surface.

Most future explorations of Audras' system of planets cared little for Admor beyond a convenient gravity assist hook or the place Anamol lives. Even the establishment of Anamol Base Camp 1 only brought with it a basic telescope to observe the weather patterns. The planet's importance lessened further with the invention of the first torch drives, rendering "most efficient transfers" and "gravity assists" largely irrelevant to future travel and exploration.

This fade into obscurity was partially reversed however by the realization that any terraforming efforts would require Nitrogen, which Admor had a lot of in its atmosphere. To add on to this, the now quite populous Anamol was the prime terraforming candidate in the Audras System. Harvesting installations were assembled in the upper atmosphere of the planet, held up by a variety of methods. The beginning of trade with other civilizations meant that the knowledge to efficiently assemble megastructures was much more prevalent, allowing many collectors to simply hang from orbital ring structures.

For the most part, this went off without a hitch, mostly going on in the background as more important and flashy historical events went on across the stars, but international focus returned to Admor in 2 BC when the Teralla Prime terrorist organization staged a bombing on the primary coupling holding the largest hanging collector to the orbital ring structure. This crippled the terraforming project, and it would have led to the dissolution of the almost-born Vernarcan Federation. However, Captain Sa Sro Reyma and their crew managed to uncover a connection between this bombing and similar attacks on the Erdathian moon of Verto, the Delnar power collection structure, a large city on Gasbol, and other smaller events, discrediting the stated goals of the Teralla Prime organization by showing their hypocrisy to the universe.

After the foundation of the Vernarcan Federation, Teralla Prime largely dissolved, although some true believers still exist with no power to act on those beliefs. Admor's infrastructure was swiftly repaired, and the terraforming of Anamol continued apace. Due to the confluence of its position in the core of Federation space and its comparative unimportance compared to its surroundings, Admor was largely unaffected by both the Tyran War and the Falacian Cold War, as well as the number of smaller conflicts and incidents which occurred across history until the War of the Broken Bow.

Anamol was nearly destroyed by the Void in its final offensive through the Szalana Wormhole at the close of the war, and much of the aerial infrastructure was similarly wrecked by its forces. Much of the territory affected by the offensive, including the sphere of influence of Admor, was afflicted by Kessler syndrome, as habitats and other orbital structures were smashed to pieces by the Void's warships. Today, the cleanup is still ongoing, and the death toll remains uncertain.

Moons

Admor has two moons, one of which is being terraformed.

Anamol

Anamol is a massive, dead moon which was until very recently a thriving, newly terraformed population center. Its population of 41 billion people had barely peeled the plastic off their new appliances when the final offensive of the Void reached the moon and destroyed its surface. Due to the sheer amount of effort being put into rebuilding all the regions of space devastated by the War of the Broken Bow, Anamol still stands empty.

Aeolo

A miniscule asteroid orbiting beneath the orbit of Anamol, Aeolo is a comparatively unimportant compared to its much larger sibling. However it is still relevant as an easy resource extraction point in Anamol's history.

Life

Due to its crushing atmospheric pressure and extremely high gravity, life even vaguely similar to that found elsewhere in the Vernarcan Federation is considered impossible at the surface. During initial explorations, the cloudtops were equally sterile, but recent atmospheric deployments have accidentally introduced several species of airborne photosynthetic bacteria. These bacteria are slowly beginning to break apart the infinities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the first molecular oxygen the planet has seen is coming into existence.

Surface Geography

Admor is a very large planet, with a correspondingly varied surface. Despite the lack of surface exploration, a surprising amount of differentiation can be observed via orbital scanning. Large portions of the surface are covered in "oceans" of supercritical carbon dioxide, rendering them undifferentiated fuzz to space-based probes, but elsewhere there are all manner of landforms from enormous volcanoes (some of which are active), lava flows, and enormous rifts spanning thousands of kilometers across the surface.

Trivia

Admor is the largest terrestrial planet in the Verda System and the second largest in known space
- The only larger one, Kreka, was discovered deep in the Astros Sector by the unplanned trans-galactic voyage of the FSS Kareland, so terrestrial planets of this size are clearly extremely rare.
Admor has the thickest atmosphere of any planet with a detectable surface.