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Walloo and the Bellerophon Archipelago

Partially terraformed world abandoned after Version War

Walloo
Image from Steve Bowers
The worldhouse roof of this colony moon was partially destroyed in the Version War, causing a societal collapse.

Walloo - Data Panel
Pegasus Prefecture - Solar Dominion. Partially terraformed world abandoned after Version War

StarYTS 543 8932C I, in the Bellerophon Archipelago
Stellar TypeK5V
Luminosity0.4 x Sol
Distance from Sol721 light years
Planetary typeParaterraformed moon of a Jovian gas giant
Diameter of moon6596 km

The Walloo Disaster

A line of three systems at 1200 ly from Sol in the Further Enif Prefecture, colonised by Solar Dominion linelayer Bellerophon in 4207 and lost when both legs of the wormhole link to Enif were detonated by Metasoft infiltration in 4578 during the Version War. The first system in the line was Idina, where all the population centres were in O'Neill habitats near the wormhole epicentre and were sterilised by the blast. This dead system was discovered by a Dominion relativist ship in 4893, and led to the abandoning of the archipelago as lost for two thousand years.

In Jabez system the Shabtis survived, and began to self evolve in order to throw off their conditioning of subservience. A civilisation of miniature Shabtis serving and worshipping a large immobile solipsist hyperintelligence (housed in a mighty Pyramid) was found in 6930 by Deeper Covenanters, raising hopes that the last colony, Walloo, might have survived in some form.

The last colony had a partially paraterraformed moon, Walloo, as its main population centre, but unfortunately the system transapient was located near the wormhole throat, leaving the nearbaseline human colonists to colonise the rest of the system using modosophont-level tech. Most of their technology was not shielded and was destroyed by the blast of gamma-rays emitted when the wormhole was destroyed by Metasoft.

Half the population of Walloo were killed outright, and the chemical integrity of half of the worldhouse roof was destroyed and the environment started to depressurise.

Efforts of the twenty thousand survivors to repair the roof failed, as most nano recipes and forges had been lost. A desperate effort to produce replacement oxygen and nitrogen from the moon's crust allowed the atmosphere to stabilise temporarily, until the air pressure outside the world roof built up and the damaged portions were no longer supported by atmospheric pressure and began to settle over the landscape.

Sulphur build-up in the atmosphere from the moon's few tidal volcanoes also caused a problem, as the ecological management no longer existed to deal with the acid rain and food and biomass fuel production began to fail.

Attempts to reverse engineer nano and artificial intelligence failed, as the colonists did not have the resources to spare from dealing with the environmental disaster.

After three hundred years the three thousand now surviving crowded into the single surviving O'Neill Habitat, where they finally managed to bring their standard of living up to industrial age levels.

After the traumatic events of the Walloo collapse the colonists became inward looking and traditionalist, expending only enough energy to travel to the outer moons of Walloo's Jovian primary to collect volatiles for survival. After contact with the Covenanters in 8970 the population was diluted and lost through emigration until the eleventh millennium when a limited disaster site tourism trade has developed.

 
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Appears in Topics
4450 to 4650 AT: The Version War PeriodMiddle Regions/Hinter-regionsSolar Dominion
Systems & Worlds W - X
 
Development Notes
Text by Steve Bowers
Initially published on 04 September 2002.

 
 
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