Carina

An Ocean World in the Argo Navis System

Carina, an ocean world in the Argo Navis system, is the jewel of IPS-N. It is also the site of the manufacturer’s largest corporate campus, Northstar, where its master shipbuilders live and work alongside the top corporate brass and Cosmopolitan scholars. Carina is ringed by ten moons, two thick with habitable atmospheres – Pyxis and Vela. All are given over to research and development of IPS-N’s Interstellar ships and chassis, support systems, and temporal acclimation facilities for retiring Cosmopolitan members of IPS-N’s anti-piracy Albatross teams.
With 90 percent of Carina covered by ocean water, its terrestrial population is far outnumbered by its orbital population. In the planet’s orbit, IPS-N’s vast shipyards produce the galaxy’s most ubiquitous freight, civilian, and military vessels. Carina’s localspace is a meshed network of slingshot gravitational shipping lanes, proving grounds, and ejecta-orbit racing courses, where the wealthiest IPS-N board members and officers enjoy easy access to the stars and the newest vessels that cross them.

Carina's Infrastructure and Local Space

Carina was settled soon after the opening of the blink, selected by IPS-N’s planners as the primary headquarters for the newly merged corpro-state. An ocean world ringed by rich terrestrial moons, Carina became the jewel of the reborn Cradle corporation.
The great project of relocating IPS-N’s physical infrastructure from Cradle to the Argo Navis system took centuries. Planners laid out a design for the world’s landmasses and work teams began converting the raw earth to a series of arcologies akin to Harrison Armory’s equatorial installation. Meanwhile, back in the Sol system, pilots and engineers set about the massive work of preparing IPS-N’s shipyards for flight. Section by section, they broke up the great manufactories and set them on a course to Argo Navis; their passage through the blink defined the calibrations that later became the galactic standard for interstellar travel.

Unique Features and Local Blink Gate

Carina is a world of campuses, unscarred by war or a long history of human occupation. Most of the time, it is a temperate, Mediterranean world with warm oceans and shallow, saline seas – typically no deeper than two to three meters.
One notable feature of Carina’s endless oceans is the presence of polar “wells”, underwater pits where the ocean floor suddenly drops to titanic depths of tens of thousands of meters. These wells render the planet’s poles uninhabitable; they pierce nearly to the core of the world and generate geysers, causing the sea to boil when underwater gases build up. Once a decade or so these trapped gases release in colossal gouts of steam, venting high into the atmosphere and plunging the world into a steamy, years-long wet season of hazy, circumglobal rain and elevated temperatures.
Apart from this phenomenon, Carina is often described as beautiful, if boring. To the mariner or the Cosmopolitan, however, boring isn’t necessarily a thing to be avoided.
Carina’s local blink gate is Galán Station.

Type

Planet