Primary:
Aurora,
spectral class F7V. ICN S4G0203F7V. Mass 1.196 standard. Stellar diameter 1.252
standard. Luminosity 2.584 standard.
Planetary
System: Five
major bodies. One inhabited world (Firth, III). No gas giants in system. No
planetoid belts in system.
III
Firth: Mean orbital radius, 182.51 million kilometers (1.22 AU). Period
450.1 days. Two satellites. Diameter, 8267 kilometers. Density, 0.99 standard.
Mass, 0.242 standard. Mean surface gravity, 0.62G. Rotation period: 29 hours 24
minutes, 21 seconds. Axial inclination 14°58'35.9". Albedo, 0.30. Surface
atmospheric pressure, 0.15 atm. Composition, oxygen-nitrogen mix with taint
caused by oxygen imbalance. Filter-respirator combination required to breathe
atmosphere. Hydrographic percentage, 56%; composition, water and frozen
water-ice. Mean surface temperature 27°C.
Remarks:
Firth
is remarkable among the Caledonian worlds for its unusual governmental
structure, a government derived from difficulties experienced by early settlers
attempting too establish a viable colony on the world. The world was originally
colonized from Caledon (Reavers' Deep
1815) during the first flush of success of settlement of the
new area, only 15 years after the Caledonian colony was itself established.
Firth was discovered to have extensive mineral deposits deemed useful to the
fledgling settlement on Caledon.
However, Firth was never particularly self-sufficient; resources were simply too
scant to permit it. The decline of interstellar flight on Caledon following a
series of internal crises and natural disasters left the Firth colony high and
dry, the people unable to support themselves without drastic sacrifices. But
those sacrifices were made, and Firth survived.
Credit for the survival must go to DIRECTOR, an extensive computer system
originally used to coordinate mining operations on Firth. When it became clear
that the colony was cut off, the colonists agreed that power should be entrusted
to the complete impartiality of the DIRECTOR complex. Programs were devised by
which the computer could plan various aspects of food rationing, developmental
planning, and the like. DIRECTOR even became a judge, with the power of life and
death over the populace. With ruthless application of logic and concerted
planning, Firth survived, but at the cost of creating one of the most effective
tyrannies in human history. Moreover, across the generations of isolation in
Firth’s underground city complex, the populace came to accept their condition
as natural, and do not to this day understand the horror outsiders experience at
the vast, impersonal control DIRECTOR continues to exercise even now, when the
need for such direction of resources no longer exists.
Some sociologists believe that the elite caste of computer programmers on Firth
have used their position and power to manipulate the government and progress of
the world to their own ends, but no proof of these allegations has been
advanced.