Vargis Tau
An overview of the Vargis Tau system.
Vargis Tau is an orange sun in the prime of its steller life located in the Outer Rom. It’s slightly cooler than the Earth’s Sun, but also slightly larger.
The system’s inner most planet is a rocky, terrestrial world, rich in metals but all-but-inaccessible becuse of its extreme proximity to its star. Designated Vargis Tau I (VT-1), the planet orbits its primary every seven days.
Zebulon (VT-2) is a rare binary planet in the provincial Vargis Tau system in the Outer Rim. Zebulon Beta, the home of nearly the entirety of Vargis Tau’s population is, in technical terms, actually a moon of its larger sister, Zebulon Prime. Their orbits are so intertwined, however, that the pair swing around the orange sun of Vargis Tau in precise synchronization. The Vargis Tau system is also home to three unremarkable gas giants, designated VT-3, VT-4 and VT-5. The system has no inner asteroid field, but does have a small, under-populated Kuiper Belt
Zebulon Prime: Globe View
Zebulon Prime
- Distance: 150,000,000 km
- Radius: 6402 km Density: 1.17 Gravity: 1.17G
- Orbit Period: 355.08 days Rotation: 30 hrs Mean Temp: 308K/35C
- Atmosphere: 1.03 atm (N2 78.1%, O2 20.09%, Ar 0.09%, CO2 0.03%)
- Water/Ice Index: 30
- Habitable
- Population: 1,000
Zebulon Prime is a large world of hot oceans and steaming, oppressive jungle. The notoriously ferocious wildlife and flora, coupled with a dangerously hot climate, make any habitation or industry on The Prime dangerous and highly problematic. Some resource-gathering enterprises subsist, reaping benefits from the substantial risk, but barring infrequent scientific exploration, few Zebulites ever visit its verdant surface.
Zebulon Beta (Globe View)
Zebulon Beta
- Distance: 700,000 km (from Zebulon Prime)
- Radius: 5811 km Density: 1 Gravity: 0.91G
- Orbit Period: 61.62 days Rotation: 24 hrs Mean Temp: 302K/29C
- Atmosphere: 0.83 atm (N2 78.1%, O2 20.09%, Ar 0.09%, CO2 0.03%)
- Water/Ice Index: 53.6
- Habitable
- Population: 20,000
Due to its slow orbit around “the Prime”, “Zeb Beta” loses one day of sunlight every two months, dropping the temperature of the planet 50 degrees and treating the inhabitants to 75 hours of darkness and snowy chill – a fact of life that Beta denizens have always called simply, the Darkness.
Zebulon Beta is otherwise a temperate, fertile, and rather resource-rich world, similar in climate to Dantooine. Due to their ecological foresight, this colonized world enjoys an unusually pure fresh water supply. Moreover, the world is also rich in mineral content. Even though most of the minerals are highly dispersed and difficult to harvest, the side effect is atypically rich soil and a booming agricultural industry.
History
Dawn on Zebulon Beta. It's sister planet, Zebulon Prime, is not in frame. Photo credit: Bioware
An ancient civilization once called Zebulon home, but it rose and fell thousands of years before the humans discovered and then colonized the binary world.
Except for a handful of stone temples and fortresses, little remains of the Zebulians. It is believed that they were multi-armed humanoids (as most of the primate-equivelents on the world have four arms, and most mammals have six limbs) and that they acheived space flight, as ruins were found on both planets.
Some of these ruins are built on intense nexuses of the force, leading many in Zebulon’s Jedi enclave to believe that the aliens were ruled by powerful Force adepts. The enclave has sponsored a number of expeditions to Zebulon Prime in search of new ruins, believing that the Zebulians originated from the larger world.
The Zebulon system was first discovered 300 years ago by human explorers, and colonized not long after. Drawn by rumors surrounding the binary planet’s ruins, the Jedi began exploring the system soon after. After finding the ruins known as the Great Citadel on Zeb Beta, the Jedi established their academy 150 years ago.
When exploration reports reached the Core Worlds, settlers noted Zebulon Beta’s potentially rich sil, and began travelling there intent on homesteading. Over the last 200 or so years a thriving agriculture community has emerged on the planet.
Life in Jolus
A handful of settlements were scattered around the Zebulon Beta, but eventually its first town, but it has only one large enough to be considered a city: Jolus. It’s home to a number of warehouses for storing agricultural goods, the planet’s largest markets, and its only starport.
There are no permanent settlements on Zebulon Prime, but there are a number of temporary base camps used for exploration, mining, and resource gathering. There are three corporations currently operating on Zeb Prime:
- Starrior Exploration Corporation: A small concern focused on exploring frontier worlds, identifying new resources, and selling those reports to the highest bidder.
- AMF (Astro Mining and Freighting): A growing corporation that began as a mining company, but grew into freight to meet its own transportation needs. It is reportedly experimenting with a new form of field generator designed to protect mining operations on the inferno world of Zeb I.
- Czerka Corporation: A galaxy spanning corporation which has recently taken an interest in the unique mineral composition of Zeb Beta’s soil, as well as the biodiversity of Zeb Prime. It has established offices in Jolus, and is actively recruiting scouts, miners, and farmers interested in working with it.
The Jedi
The Unified Force Academy
The Unified Force Academy is one of the many small, independent Jedi academies dispersed across the galaxy. The Zebulon academy largely teaches a view of the Force which poses that there is no light or dark side to the Force – only the Unifying Force.
The Unified Force tenants maintain that the Force itself does not have sides or take sides. Moreover, the Force doesn’t flow from living beings, but rather through them. One of the hotly debated sticking points of this philosophy is, given this last position, whether the Force is created by life or the other way around.
Also, as a consequence of this flow-and-tide vision of the Force, Unified Force adherents tend to focus on the flow of time and the fulfillment of destiny, and visions of the future are treated with particular importance.