🌌 • - Optima
Optima’s low gravity, a signature trait of its dwarf planet status, makes it a beloved retreat for those seeking to escape the relentless pull of Surface’s crushing mass.
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Luxar System Orbital Diagram
• - Optima (dwarf planet)
Little Optima has long held an outsized degree of status and importance in the Luxar System. Yet due to its proportions it’s classified as a “dwarf planet” and does not count as one of Lux’s six true planets. Instead, as the largest asteroid in the Styx Belt, it’s a big fish in a small river: Optima serves a key role as a trading hub and rest stop between the Core and Outer Planets.
Before the Interstellar War, during the age of fully-functional interplanetary transport gates, Optima’s residents understood the importance of carefully managing the export of resources (primarily water-ice). They’d learned a harsh lesson from the eager gluttony of old Mother Earth: their frozen haven could easily be stripped from underneath their feet, sucked dry of its long-term potential for immediate gains.
When the Earth-Loyalist Fleet destroyed Optima’s interplanetary gate, they struck in the beginning of the war to sever the Luxar System’s most vital transport node. But this has come with a faint silver lining… the citizens of Optima are now on the cusp of restoring their greatest treasure. Since the gate went down, Optimans mobilized to devote every spare ounce of time, determination, and willpower to reconstruction.
Some say Optima’s ubiquitous “Maintenance Battalion” started in secret, well before the Interstellar War, as a core group of vigilante saboteurs who targeted companies and individuals known to overstep the resource extraction restrictions set by the founding government of Understone, the dwarf planet’s first colony.
The Record does clearly show that the labor organization now known as the Maintenance Battalion officially formed as a workers’ union shortly after a string of boycotts, mass public protests, and unsolved industrial sabotage incidents crippled the businesses of several notorious exploiters, but without hard proof we can only speculate on the group’s true origins and identities.
What is known is that over the decades, the Battalion has brought about sweeping societal changes to the dwarf planet through its members’ unswerving, at times even militant, dedication to their mission of restoring interplanetary travel to the entire Luxar System. Given the gates’ functional requirement for a pair, Optima has already begun efforts to assist other planets in their repairs as the Core and the Outer Planets race to catch up.
May we all one day reap the benefits.
Understone’s Ice Tunnels
Optima's Cryovolcanoes
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