Ashensand

Template:InfoboxPlanetAshensand is the second planet around Borodin A, one of the three stars in the Borodin system. It is held by the Alech Dominion and a mixture of a fortress world and an agri world. Its populace mainly live in bunker cities beneath the surface, but due to terraforming projects life has emerged on the surface. Colonists mainly avoid it due to high heat and tradition.

History

Ashensand, with a temperature of 1090 degrees Celsius, 700 from greenhouse effect, with no breathable atmosphere and tidally locked, was not an easy place to live. Even today it is blisteringly hot, and temperature is not the only reason Ashensand was such a difficult world to tame. Ashensand, as the name implies, has very fine, small, irritating sand and dust particles that are kicked up by any motion and can cause many problems in simpler technology, and sensor arrays in general. The atmosphere was 47.9% water vapor, 25.1% carbon dioxide, and 24% nitrogen. Because of the planet's thick atmosphere, it would have enough nitrogen to create an earthlike atmosphere and enough water vapor to make seas. The real issue would be oxygen. There were less than 1 ppm of oxygen in the planet's atmosphere. So how did the Dominion solve these problems?

The first stage was balancing the atmosphere. By siphoning trace amounts of oxygen from gas giants while slowly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the planetary temperature went from over 1000 degrees Celsius down to around 300. However, this first stage lasted over fifty years, from 9997 to 10049. By the end, the atmosphere was suitable for plant life, but there were still problems. For one, how to turn down the heat further?

The planet was still far too hot for liquid water, necessary to get the water vapor out of the atmosphere to make the air breathable for humans and begin growing plants. The solution the Dominion ultimately came to was... unconventional. Like their later project on The Scolded Son, they built a thin semicircular dome in between the sun and the planet. However, it was not a mirror or solar panel, but tinted glass, sourced from the planet's dwarf moons and sandy soil. This array, completed in 10455, allowed light to the planetary surface in a way that would allow plants who could survive within the right light frequencies to grow while still cooling the planet by reducing the impact of the sun's rays.

After both of these projects, the planet was finally cooled to an average temperature of 93 degrees. With this, seas began to form on the planet, and rain began to fall. Hardier flora like cacti were brought in, and the sand, through contact with the oceans and chemical treatments, began to form into more tightly packed soil. For a few centuries, colonists built their cities dug deep into the crust, to escape the heat and choking dust, but by the year 10767, the sunny side of the planet was mostly green. The dark side remained a dustbowl until 11453. In 11424, the populace of Ashensand funded an initiative to place a static mirror array in space off behind the plaet to illuminate the dark side, to maximize its growing potential.

Despite this, most of Ashensand's populace still live in subsurface bunker cities. The farmers live on the surface, in plain view, not showing what's hidden beneath. In a way, this is part of the Dominion's defensive strategy for the planet. On the surface, the planet looks like a lush agri world with a fair hoard of food, tech, and prisoners to be taken for a relatively low cost. Any who would make such a mistake would very soon come to regret it. Not unlike the ambush hatches of The Scolded Son's cities, there are hidden entrances to the subsurface complex everywhere. Describing the city as a complex is not an oversight- rather, over time, all the cities beneath the soil have merged into one beautiful, glowing subterranean maze. It serves its purpose well, for both tourists and the enemy could easily lose themselves here.

Geography

Ashensand's surface.

Ashensand since terraformation has developed it's own network of seas and oceans around the planet's continents. The northern Great Sandy Ocean wraps around the entire planet. To the south, the largest inland sea on the planet, the Shallowsea, provides the planet's grandest tourist destinations, with it's long coast, beautiful water, and many remote islands ripe for resorts. Off of the Shallowsea runs the largest river on the planet, the Shallowsea Salient.

Color coded map of Ashensand, black is land, white is water, and red are the largest cities.

The Salient has some of the best fishing on the planet and is a grand natural defensive feature in the event of invasion. It flows through part of the deepest divot on the planet's surface. A portion of it also sits under the lakes that cross from the continent's northwest to southeast. What formed this depression is unknown, as the planet's temperature when it was found would go against the idea of previous liquid water on the planet. Conversely, the atmospheric content before terraforming means it can't be ruled out. But most other explanations make little sense either. The rift is too shallow for tectonic plate motion, and there have been no signs of previous life on the planet that could have created it. The leading theory is that an alien species attempted to add CO2 to the planetary atmosphere long ago, when the world could have had liquid water, to make it breathable for them, not realizing the rampant greenhouse effect it would cause, and, seeing the fallout, abandoned the colonization effort.

Famous Landmarks

The Ashen Preserve- a roughly 40,000 km piece of desert on the planet's sunny side that has no plant life or soil, only the planet's natural dunes, caves, and sedimentary rock canyons. One of the most famous canyons, Widow's Crevasse, was the location of a crashed alien starship, similar to another that was found buried in The Scolded Son's atmosphere.

The Crescent Coast- situated on the Shallowsea, it is one of the most popular resort destinations on the planet for its beautiful beaches and crystal clear water. With no dangerous wildlife and being so far away from active conflict, it's one of the closest places to paradise in the galaxy.

The Ancients' Home- A cave encampment made by one hundred Dominion survivors after their commercial starship exploded in orbit of Ashensand. When colonists came down a century later they found the ruins of a city. The most curious part is that the ruins seem to indicate there were at least four hundred people here at some point, but when the city was found none still lived. These people should not have had nearly enough food to survive this long, and yet they did, by constructing rudimentary hydroponics out of ship debris. The question, then, is what happened to them. Some bodies have wounds, other appear to have starved, but some of the hydroponics were still operable when found decades after the calamity. Even if there was a food shortage, what lead to the deaths of every single colonist? Our best guess is that their society collapsed completely into warring factions over a leader's death or food shortages, with nobody realizing how bad the problem had gotten until it was too late to fix it. In the end, we may never know.

The Lady of Lament- a monument to the civil war that took place in Bunker-City Kerali from 18766 to 18774. It is one of the few documented instances of civil war in the Dominion's history, and a site of national mourning. Anyone there is strongly encouraged to take a solemn moment to remember the fallen, their names listed on the statue's base, and the necessity of a unified purpose and goal for mankind.