Cassandra
Role: Communications
Circumference: 19,060 miles
Population: 190,000
Orbital Path: Third
Rotational Period (days): 0.69
Orbital Period (days): 396
Primary Function: Communications, coreward relay point
Retention Index: 3
The people of Cassandra know better than anyone the problems that plague their colony and they know just how low they are in SICON’s estimation. This has made them rather jumpy and nervous and eager to prove their loyalty to SICON and the Federation.
It has also made the civilian populace of Cassandra rather meek and subdued, without any spark of assurance and confidence. This in turn has resulted in some of the lowest Federal Service enlistment numbers of any Federation colony, which in turn makes SICON suspicious all over again in a vicious cycle.
History
The history of Cassandra reads like an expanded version of Murphy’s Law – anything that can go wrong, will. From the date of its founding in 2284, when the civilian contractors putting up the first buildings of the settlement used the wrong materials resulting in the collapse of the Federal Building two years later, to last May when the coreward relay antenna began inserting a computer virus into every transmission passing through it, the colony has been the site of one problem after another – some petty, some calamitous.
Some blame the unnamed astrogation officer at SICON who assigned the planet the name Cassandra for these problems, other blame pure chance. More than once, SICON has come very close to blaming the populace.
Within five years of its founding, there had been several major mishaps on Cassandra, beginning with the collapse of the Federal Building and the death of five Mobile Infantry troopers in a hydrogen explosion and culminating in a failed processor within the coreward relay array for the Guilder wave that began scrambling astronomical coordinates and sending SICON ships on missions to empty regions of space. This last was almost too much for SICON to bear and only the impassioned intervention of the governor at the time, Pavel Glavnovich, prevented SICON from declaring the civilian population of Cassandra as potentially subversive and sending in the Mobile Infantry to clear it.
Such situations have risen again and again throughout Cassandra’s history. The planet is the site of the fi rst civilian owned relay array for a Guilder wave, the property of the Guilder Group, a corporation started by Hans Guilder’s two daughters. In order to keep SICON at bay and prove the loyalty of the colony, Cassandra (and the Guilder Group in particular) has had to barter away most of its profits just to keep from being labelled as a failed colony.
Laws and Government
The laws of Cassandra are rigidly enforced by an extraordinarily large police force that engages in frequent random questionings of civilians and regular home inspections. This gives rise to a large number of citations for small infractions, keeping Cassandra’s reported crime levels much higher than average for the size of its population.
Economy
Having bartered away most of its income from the Guilder wave array that was the colony’s whole reason for existing to begin with, the colonists have turned to other means of income they can scratch from the surface of their harsh planet. Farming, mining and quarrying are all viable industries here but the average civilian still lives below the level of the average Federation-subsidised civilian on Earth. Still, they do not complain.
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