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Altair
Altair
Image from Steve Bowers
Altair rotates so rapidly that it appears distinctly non-spherical
Fast-rotating A7V star, originally part of the Diamond Belt, in the constellation Aquila (the eagle), 16.5 light years from Sol. The name Altair means "flying eagle" in Old Earth Arabic.

The system was occupied in about 550AT by a solipsist ai replicator probe, that converted the available resources into a number of primitive megastructures.

When First Federation explorer neumanns arrived they found that all of the smaller asteroids, planetoids, and Oort bodies had been deconstructed, and the remaining planetoids covered with huge structures (possibly primitive computronium banks) protected by aggressive khaki goo. This goo was eventually defeated by powerful assembler-diassembler swarms, but the computronium banks were mostly degraded and data-free by the time they could be examined. The Altair Solipsist AI is believed to have departed towards the Taurus Nexus volume at some point.

During the Age of Emergence the Altair system held the headquarters of Altair Knowledge Designs, a sentience development megacorp which produced the first independently-evolved hypersentient a-life species, the AKD.

During the Integration, a mysterious wandering entity known as the Merged Humanoid appeared near Ascension. This entity is believed by some historians to have originated from the Altair region during the Diamond Belt era, although this is a matter of some dispute.
 
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Development Notes
Text by M. Alan Kazlev
Steve Bowers
Initially published on 10 September 2001.

 
 
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