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Aldebaran |
Aldebaran (Taurus Inner Sector, 68 LY Sol) is an giant, old, orange star (Spectral Type K5+III) with a surface temperature of less than 4,000 Kelvin. It is about 40 times the diameter of Sun. Aldebaran means "the Follower" in Arabic since (viewed from Old Earth) it seems to follow the stars in the Pleiades. It is is the 13th brightest star from Sol.
During the middle Federation period the resource-rich system was colonised and industrialised by K4H, and became a local center of heavy industry, autonomous R & D, an SI:1 hyperturing holiday sojourn, and a regional corporate fiefdom (Aldebaran Deep Space Development Industries) of some influence. The rise of the Conver Ambi was bad news for ADSP and the local corporate polity was undermined during the age of establishment by relativistic Conver Ambi colonisers (who originally posed as nomad clone-clade workers). The new leadership introduced many genuine reforms and proved locally popular, eventually developing a distinct culture and establishing ties and wormhole links with the Taurus Nexus during the early Empires period.
This age of prosperity was not to last and the so-called Munsky Transcension especially proved destabilising to many of the regional economies, flooding the market with first genuine, then fake clarketech and leading to a number of short-lived but bitter local artifact wars. The breakup of the Taurus Nexus in the aftermath of this destabilisation resulted in massive insystem subversion by a number of opportunistic second singularity transapients
During the middle Empires age the system entered a new period of prosperity, but became a staging post for Geminga forces during the Conver Wars, and suffered from terrible devastation in the later part of the war, with a four-way battle and shifting allegiances between Terran Federation, Metasoft, Neotanexus, and Dominion fleets in which the indigenous inhabitants came out worst. The system was eventually made uninhabitable due to roving goo replicators, and even the Metasoft Version Tree didn't want anything to do with it. Under the famous Aldebaran Act it became a test-case Second Federation Protectorate. After many centuries of getting nowhere the clean-out operation was eventually franchised out, and a number of nanoclades were to make a lot of money over the next few centuries, especially during the middle ComEmp period, when it was leased out to sun miners who converted an appreciable proportion of Aldebaran's mass into exotic matter for stargate construction.
The system is presently inhabited by a number of old clades and houses (mostly foglets and sun miners), and has settled down quite a lot since its wild early days. Thanks to the stargate infrastructure it is an important local Relay, and there is a lot of traffic to and from the Orion Federation and the Pleiades Sector. The local clades are honorable but reclusive; almost all of the in-system income is from wormhole and stargate tolls
