DropTeam™ takes place on the barely settled fringes of the explored galaxy, in a region of space called “The Rim.” In The Rim, intact settlements on planets are few and far between, beyond the influence of the civilized forces of The Mu Arae Entente, mankind’s central governing body that spans hundreds of star systems. The Rim was settled by and flourished under free-minded separatists from the Entente, but eventually Mu Arae fleets and marines attempted to “reintegrate” the worlds of The Rim by force, leading to hundreds of years of conflict which left all of the worlds of The Rim largely destroyed and abandoned. The Entente has since become embroiled in its own civil war, leaving the scattered remnants of the once great cities and colonies of The Rim to their own devices in the remote emptiness of rim space.

Civilization crumbles slowly in these isolated places as technology and higher knowledge gradually erode, leaving the surviving settlements vulnerable to incursions from predators who hunt The Rim for loot: a new brand of Viking who pillages from the rubble for survival, who has honed the military tactics of planetary assault to a fine art.

Some in The Rim look into the distant heart of the galaxy, toward the stars of The Entente from whence their ancestors came, where civil war still rages with weapons of incredible technology, so advanced that the colonist-descendants of The Rim would perceive it as magic.

Some of them wait for the return of Integration fleets, bringing the law, order, and technology that past generations knew. But for most of them such things are the stuff of ancient legend, and they long only to survive the next raid by plundering Vikings from the stars.

A few of the locations featured and referenced in the game are outlined below.

 

Landis III

Primary Star Name: Landis
Position: (3.3,-0.6,-3.6)
Class: M1V
Radius: 1.09 sol
Luminosity: 10.202 sol
Number of Planets: 11
Solar System Population: 250,000
Planets: Landis I, Landis II, Landis III, Zato Major, Landis IV, Landis V, Uendane, Zato Minor, Gozta Alde, Landis VI, Zato

Planetary Info (Landis III)
Distance from Star: 117,284,745 km
Radius: 8275 km
Density: 1.3
Gravity: 1.69G
Orbit Period: 253.38 days
Rotation: 26 hrs
Mean Temp: 574K/301C
Atmosphere: 0.75 atm (N2 37%,CO2 32%,O2 13%,Ar 5%)
Water/Ice Index: 100
Habitable
Population: 250,000

Landis was the economic and social center of The Rim, to the extent that such fiercely independent systems had any center at all. At its peak, Landis III flourished with a population of almost one billion. The world was already habitable in its virgin state, though prolonged exposure to its atmosphere without breathing filters would eventually cause lung damage. The citizens of Landis III therefore never undertook the great expense and effort of terraforming, instead adapting their lifestyles to accommodate lightweight and even fashionable breathing gear. Many advances in medical nanotechnology were made here to augment the human lung's durability. The people of Landis excelled in all matters of culture from science to art, living a new Golden Age of freedom from the growing tyranny of the old Mu Arae Entente. They were the most outspoken agitators against Mu Arae, not only living their own isolated lives of freedom as did most of The Rim worlds, but also openly recruiting new settlers from within The Entente and disseminating separatist propaganda within the old systems around Mu Arae.

This is probably one of the reasons that The Mad Admiral Stannis decided to make an example of Landis when his 39th Integrator Fleet razed the planet. Cities were obliterated, all traces of surface water on the planet's surface were vaporized with such ferocity that much of the atmosphere escaped the planet's orbit, and billions of people were ruthlessly murdered.

Now Landis III is a radioactive Hell. Some tenacious forms of life that somehow managed to survive the apocalypse on its surface have begun to mutate into gnarled perversions of their previous forms and grow anew amid the ashes. A few remote outposts and underground bunkers remain on Landis III - caches of the highest technology that The Rim ever knew and scattered supplies of contained antimatter - prime trappings for anyone brave enough to fight in the Hell that was once The Rim's crown jewel.

 

Juda's Reach

Primary Star Name: Wolf 9773
Position: (3.7,10.4,-8.5)
Class: M3
Radius: .73 sol
Luminosity: 11.286 sol
Number of Planets: 8
Solar System Population: 9,845
Planets: Wolf 9773 I, Wolf 9773 II, Chadles, Juda's Reach, Wolf 9773 V, Suislmen Upsilon, Wolf 9773 VII, Wolf 9773 VIII

Planetary Info (Juda's Reach)
Distance from star: 566,228,013 km
Radius: 9498 km
Density: 0.6
Gravity: 0.89G
Orbit Period: 7.36 years
Rotation: 33 hrs
Mean Temp: 243K/-30C
Plantary Ring Distance: 89,652 km
Atmosphere: 0.79 atm (N2 69%,O2 25%,Ar 3%)
Water/Ice Index: 1.38
Hospitable
Population: 9,240
Moons: Small Bodies, Onutem

Wolf 9773 is the most isolated system in The Rim. It was settled by one of the original colonial expeditions directly from Mu Arae, a journey that took fifty years to complete. It was the largest single expedition ever to depart Mu Arae because it included the massive atmosphere reprocessing stations that would be needed for Terraforming. This expedition nearly failed to reach Wolf 9773 because of a mutiny by the crew in the journey's ninth year.

The expedition commander, Lord Juda Kevin, violently suppressed the mutiny, "spacing" more than half of his crew along with thousands of colonists who were still in cryogenic sleep. The remaining crew, including loyalists who had fought beside him during the mutiny, were forced into cryogenic sleep for the remainder of the journey at gunpoint. When the surviving colonists and crew were revived automatically by autonomous systems upon reaching Wolf 9773, they bore witness to the grisly life that Juda Kevin had led aboard the massive colony ship during the journey. Based on recordings that he left during his forty years of isolation, and the stains of his blood and torn fingernails along walls of the ship, it was evident that he had gone raving mad. In his maniacal paranoia, he had even attempted to kill all of the colonists and remaining crew in their cry-sleep chambers because he was convinced that they were all conspiring to torture him. In all of his years of struggle, he had never succeeded in breaching the security systems of the cryogenic chambers (systems which protected the sleepers from both physical and electronic attack.)

When the expedition settled the fourth planet of Wolf 9773 and began terraforming operations there, they named the planet Juda's Reach.

Terraforming continued for almost a thousand years. The atmosphere of Juda's Reach was made more hospitable year by year as the colonies grew into towns and the towns into cities. The fauna injected into its ecosystem by the terraformers began to blend with the native, toxic, plants that already lived there, giving birth to new species on this vibrant, growing world. The people of Juda's Reach thrived in their life of new found freedom from the Mu Arae Entente.

Terraforming was only a few hundred years from completion when Mu Arae marines attacked. The people of Juda's Reach were herded into "Integration Camps", mass executions were performed and the terraforming stations themselves were destroyed with massive artillery bombardments from orbit. Eventually, systematic cleansing and evacuation left Juda's Reach an abandoned Fool's Paradise.

 

 

Primary Star Name: Sol
Position: (0.11,0,-0.01)
Class: G2V
Radius: 1 sol
Luminosity: 4.85 sol
Number of Planets: 2
Solar System Population: 5,000,000
Planets: Arpinum, Sol Ex Mortus (Asteroid Belt)

Planetary Info (Sol Ex Mortus)
Distance: 10,000,000 km
Asteroid Belt

The Ex Mortus asteroid belt is all that remains of the original nine planets of the Sol system. It is actually a massive disc of debris spanning 2.5 AU's at its widest point.

The Arpinum mega structure orbits at a distance of 0.7 AU's. Arpinum served as the departure point for The Exodus, marking the beginning of mankind's colonization of the stars and the end of his first historical Epoch in the Sol system. Arpinum was home to millions of refugees from Earth during the violent days of The Exodus, and nearly one thousand years later was home to the first Rim settlers returning from the heart of the Mu Arae Entente into the unknown wilderness, back in the direction of their species' original birthplace.

Now Arpinum is a gutted hulk, having been thoroughly used and pillaged by generations of colonists, traders, pirates, and fleets. Its cavernous innards, exposed to vacuum and long abandoned, now hold only the ghosts of the thousands who perished there.