Ras Shamra

A World of Hard Contrast

Ras Shamra, the home of Harrison Armory, is a world of hard contrast. It has a severe beauty, one that Ras Shamrans take fierce pride in and seek to emulate in their architecture, style, and culture in general. It is also a cruel world suspended between extremes: scouring heat and petrifying cold create, in the middle, a temperate zone, always threatened with destruction by even the most subtle shift. Self-restraint – temperance – is the Ras Shamran ideal; one that some in the Armory fear is eroding to an unsalvageable point of entropy as diplomatic relations between Karrakis, Cradle, and Ras Shamra grow more and more tense.
Tidally locked, Ras Shamra is divided between a “hot” side, ever exposed to its sun, and a “cold” side, ever turned away from the light. The only temperate zone is a comparatively small strip of land and thawed sea where the two sides meet: the terminator line, bordered on one side by boiling desert, and on the other by frozen tundra. It is the largest world orbiting Ptah’s Star.
This terminator line is an oasis, a band of life-sustaining tropical jungles, warm river-oceans, and balmy valleys. It is in this stormy, humid equatorial region that colonists first made landfall. Now, the terminator line is a globe-circling arcology home to roughly 300 million permanent residents.

A Homeostatic Biome

The arcology – the eponymous Harrison Armory – is the only habitable space on Ras Shamra. Reaching from the planet’s surface to many thousands of meters below, the arcology combines natural and cultivated, organic and synthetic, blending world and building together into one homeostatic, cultivated biome. Its highest levels contain lush, varied climates that seamlessly integrate built habitats into the natural environment. If a building is exposed, it is meant to be exposed, serving a mechanical, technical, aesthetic, or another official purpose. The surface level is widely considered home to the finest domiciles, offices, and campuses. The Armory’s capitol is located there, at the heart of a botanical park that sprawls for hundreds of kilometers in each direction.
The lower levels of the arcology are where the bulk of the “clean” technical, mechanical, mercantile, political, and administrative work that sustains the Armory is performed. The underground is defined by 100- meter tall airlight wells that funnel light down from the surface, wide concourses packed with shop fronts and offices, and vast strips of cultivated biomes meant to emulate the surface. Underground maglev hyperloops ring the world, forming the backbone of Ras Shamra’s Global transport network. Here, in the arcology underground, one can find the finest of the Armory’s signature distant–classical architecture, marked by titanogeometric features, achromaticprimary/ primary-secondary color schemes, and a contrast between airy open spaces and the brutalist inclination toward the subterranean massive.

The Dirty Work

Outside the safety of the Armory, Ras Shamra’s day and night hemispheres house the Armory’s “dirty” work: research, development, and implementation of the corpro-state’s catalog. Each Research, Development, and Implementation (RDI) campus is a metropolis in its own right – an oasis in the midst of unrelenting desert or deep, perma-winter night where Armory personnel live and work on rotation. Thousands of technicians, engineers, scientists, and support personnel live and work in RDI campuses for the duration of their projects and, when they are done, are rotated out.
The day and night hemispheres and the RDI campuses that populate them serve as testing sites for the Armory’s massive catalog of field equipment – civilian and military. They also offer training grounds for the Armory’s colonial officers, providing opportunities for both infantry and mechanized cavalry to train and be tested in extreme environments.
The Armory is currently engaged in the massive endeavor of installing a new subterranean hyperloop ring to serve the entire network of scattered RDI campuses, running perpendicular to the Capital Loop – the primary maglev line that rings the world. The Perpendicular Loop is still at least a century from completion; in the meantime, regular shuttle flights provide transit between campuses.

Colonial Missions

Ras Shamra is also home to the Armory’s Special- Exception Persistent-Cultivation Legionspace Environment – better known as the Think Tank. Its location is classified, though expert observers suspect it is buried somewhere on the night side of the world.
In local Ras Shamran space, on-duty legions prepare and specialize for distant colonial missions on one of the Armory’s many lunar bases. Meanwhile, enormous orbital Stations process the wealth of empire that flows daily into Ras Shamra – tithes, tributes, and colonial taxes – through its local blink gate, Capitol Peak Station.

Type

Planet