Dustah

Dustah is a corporatist controlled world, named by the CEO of KoolTech Enterprises. The idea at the time was to resist the Workers and Pirates’ embrace of ancient gods in naming their worlds. No, Dustah would stand out and it would be the place to be because it stood out.

Kooltech and its allies chose Dustah out of all the system’s planets for its abundant raw materials. The planets surface is one massive expanse of dust, but under that dust are extensive deposits of lithium, titanium, and other precious minerals.

Geography

The planet’s surface is a vast desert of sand, hills, valleys, and mountains. There are wind-carved rock features, deep impact craters, and occasionally a small body of molten minerals bubbling up from below the surface. There are polar caps where temperature-swings have gone low enough to form dry ice. There is some evidence of a ‘cool zone’ under the ground in that area that produces an unnatural local chilling effect as well. More data is needed to understand why.

In the southern hemisphere, there is a vast desert, it might’ve once been an ocean, and now has become a flat, dry ocean-bed. There are enormous boulders here with extremely high mineral concentrations on a per-boulder basis, but yet the region is highly varied. One boulder might contain almost pure nickel, while another is moreso tungsten. These differences have proven difficult to process, as each boulder is valuable - but needs individual processing.

The Colonization Effort

Dustah’s surface is an unforgivien environment. The world’s atmosphere is a caustic mix. Anyone who breathes it in would essentially feel their lungs liquifying from the inside. It is not immediately deadly to human skin but will eventually eat it after prolonged exposure. Likewise, eye damage is fast to set in.

During the early days, colonists would wear air masks, goggles, and rely on skin treatments to survive the harsh environment. The companies involved wouldn’t cover full protection for their lowest workers. Those who took on the work did so only because of their indentured servitude or financial desperation. They hoped to make their way in a new and better world than the one they’d fled.

In time, a series of cities were constructed. Domes on the world’s surface cater to the rich and powerful, while extensive tunnel-cities dug out below form the homes and workplaces of the employees. In many cases, former mines were converted to housing and factories. This allowed the companies to re-use what would otherwise be wasted space altogether.

Typical names for the cities are themed around digging or the dangers of living there. A popular, early neighborhood for example is Caustic Candy, while another is Breach Harvest.

Business Efforts

There are primarily three industries running on Dustah:

• Mining
• Refining & Processing
• Research & Development

The entire economy is built on extracting raw materials, making that into its purest form, and shipping it out as fast as possible. The elemental purity was a key part in settling Dustah: the minerals here are uncommonly pure. It’s as if someone processed and deposited these resources for later. There are some impurities, nickel mixed in with the lithium or iron sulfide instead of pure iron. The biggest take away is the refining is fast, cheap, and easy for very high-quality and high-value minerals.

Policing here is focused on mineral theft. A company must have extensive paperwork to extract or collect any raw materials here. Even a person wandering through an old mine and carrying off some rocks is highly criminalized. Other areas, such as property theft or violent crime are less heavily investigated.

Key Sites

The Platform

The Parthenon was contracted to build a one-of-a-kind space elevator. This is a connection running from the largest mine up to an orbiting cargo station around 1500 miles above the surface. Here, the same gravity manipulation tech used for the Parthenon’s artificial gravity was used to mitigate the extreme materials problems that’ve plagued other space elevators.

The station itself is pretty simple. It’s a massive docking station, with warehouses and some housing. Rotation allows for a weak 1/3rd G centrifugal gravity. A giant wheel spinning in space, with a tether running down to the planet’s surface.

Riding to and from the surface is done in a massive elevator cab, it’s a literal building rising and falling a dozen times a day. The whole elevator vehicle is 800’ tall and has a base of 1000’ x 1000’. It seems impossible that it could move up and down as it does. It’s used as a far more efficient means of transportation than any ship could ever provide.

The Bin

Often called The Dust Bin or ‘The Bin’, it’s the largest mining operation on the planet. They started atop a mountain and started digging down from the top. The interior is becoming more and more hollow over time. This combined with the planet’s dusty surface has caused the mine to become repeatedly filled with planetary dust. They named it the Dust Bin as a result.