CorviVII

System: Corvi VIIHex Location: 1826

Star Type: Double G6 V, G0 V (distant)

Number of Worlds: 18 (8 around main star, 10 around distant star)

Gas Giants: 6 (4 around main star, 2 around second)

Planetoid Belt: Cometary belt around main star, Cometary and asteroid belt around distant star

Starport Type: C Routine star port

World Size: Earth-sized

Atmosphere Type: Earth-like

Surface Water: 20%

Population: Large (c. 3 billion)

Political Affiliation: Carthen Colony (Revanchist Republic)

Tags: Sealed cities, Forgotten, Persistent dangerous weather

Notes: Corvi VII was settled long ago by the very first wave of Marians and their cepheid allies who were associated with the Bern House, before he rose to become the king of the Monarchy and a replacement (of sorts) for the failed and fallen Marian Empire. And it was a prosperous enough colony, although it provided nothing that was in particular demand; as the Dark Age darkened, it was eventually forgotten and the colonists left to fend for themselves.

Corvi VII has a supercharged cloud layer that thrums with constant electrical discharge so powerful that it acts is periodic electromagnetic pulses and can shut down anything struck by this electrical discharge. This frustrated sensors and flights both, making approaching or leaving the surface rather tricky. The colonists sealed their cities, or built them without electrical power in some cases, to avoid having to deal with being lashed by constant storms that periodically shut down all electronic devices. In spite of this significant handicap to their technological base, the Corvians built a prosperous colony that thrived, showing significant innovation in using mechanical and chemical substitutes for what was elsewhere done with electronics—or learned to live without.

After many generations, many of the descendants of the original colonists started to doubt that their ancestors had really come from off-world, as their own ships, crashed or grounded by devastating electromagnetic pulses eventually cut them off from the rest of known space. More recently, brave pilots from the Carrick rediscovered Corvi VII, and met with some of the leaders of its various governments. Recognizing their dialect and their distant kinship, they were received in friendship, but those leaders feared what knowledge of what had happened to the old Empire of legend and myth would mean to the people. The brave Carrick pilots were themselves either downed by the hazardous weather, or declined to come back and risk flying through the cloud belt that could shut their ship down and fry its crew, so the local leaders judged that their decision was wise.

Later, the Revanchists decided that the system was a strategic one for them to control, so they established an orbital colony above the atmosphere (the C type starport), and developed technology that could withstand the EMP storms and travel to the surface as needed. They've declared their overlordship to the local leaders, but have so far done very little to enforce it, and their presence has been concealed from the general populace—although no doubt they wonder at the strange degree to which local tensions between various nations have eased and their leaders gather for secret summits, the subject of which they have not revealed.

The Corvi VII system is interesting. There are two widely separated yet gravitationally bound sun-like stars, each with their own systems of planets—although all but the main world detailed here are inhospitable to human life. Rumors of a pirate base located somewhere around the other sun-like star, some of which operate with letters of marque from the Carrick and disrupt revanchist traffic throughout Carthen persist, but if they do exist, the Republic officials have not yet managed to find definitive proof of them—just the circumstantial evidence of ships that go missing without a trace.