Forum:Titania (system)

Titania is a Super-HydroJovian world in the Taishibeth system, erroneously classed as a double-system. It was discovered by the Argus array twenty years after the Second Collapse.

Local star
Titania orbits a white dwarf star named Taishibeth. No other planetary bodies have been detected. A major ring system of Hadaen, Cerean, and Vestian planetoids numbering in the upper billions orbits out at between four to five astronomical units and spans an AU in relative size.

Orbital position
It orbits its primary at a distance of eight hundred astronomical units, 120 billion kilometers at its greatest major semi-axis. It has an eccentricity of 0.7, an inclination of 35°, and an argument of periastron of 150°. It has an orbital period of between 10000 and 20000 Terran years and a rotational period of 72 hours. It is the only major planetary body of the Taishibethi system.

Planetary system
It features an extensive ring-system stretching approximately four hundred million kilometers (2.673 AU) in diameter. Gaps in the ring system indicate the orbits of numerous satellites, over two hundred of which rival, or are double, the size of Mars; the rest average from between several dozens of kilometers to mere centimeters.

Two civilizations have arisen within the system, the Crystalien Hierarchy of Hierarchies within the depths of the Jovian itself, and the chthonic Hiver species upon Oberon. A refugee fleet made up of survivors from The Last City and The Reef has settled in orbit around the Obelisk.

Notable satellites

 * Oberon: the second largest and most closest of these satellites, measuring at 6000 kilometers in size, it is tectonically active and possesses a sulphurous atmosphere. It is especially rich in volatiles. It is approximately four hundred thousand kilometers from Titania.
 * Peasblossom: similar in composition to Oberon, it is another world just shy of 5,000 km. It possesses no atmosphere but features active cryovolcanoes shooting volatiles from the subglacial ocean. It has great quantities of organic compounds and material. It is approximately sixteen million kilometers from Titania.
 * Cobweb: a tiny world of barely 2,000 km, it is locked in a Trojan orbit with Moth. It has little significance apart from a subglacial ocean system and groups of methane lakes on the surface. It is approximately fifty million kilometers from Titania.
 * Moth: the smallest of the five moons, it is in a Trojan orbit with Cobweb. It is rich in minerals and useful material for orbital construction. It possesses no atmosphere and is approximately fifty million kilometers from Titania.
 * Mustardseed: originally misclassed as a rocky world due to its great distance, further expeditions showed that it is in fact a MicroJovian (or a Gas dwarf) of almost 14000 kilometers in diameter, or a third of Titania's observed size, and has cleared a gap of nearly two hundred thousand kilometers in the rings, the largest yet, and is approximately seventy five million kilometers from Titania. There are no signs of life recorded anywhere on the planet. It possesses two moons.
 * Puck: a tiny orbital, measuring twenty-odd kilometers in size, and has the appearance of 67P/C-G.
 * Ghosh: another tiny orbital, measuring twelve kilometers, lumpy and pitted with craters.

Orbitals

 * The Obelisk: an ancient artifact of xenosophont origin, believed to have been left by the Traveler as a marker for a return visit. It is a lengthily object measuring twenty kilometers in size and is totally black, emitting nothing on the infrared or electromagnetic scales.
 * Sanctuary: a Terran space station in orbit around the Obelisk, the last known refuge for humanity.
 * Zavala's Crucible: a Terran space station outfitted for Guardian war games, dedicated to Zavala's memory.
 * Derelict Pyramid: discovered in the far reaches of the Titanian ring system, this seemingly disabled Pyramid is still potent.

Physical characteristics
Titania's atmosphere is predominantly hydrogen with trace elements of nitrogen, oxygen, methane, ammonia and argon making up less than five percent of the total. It has a relative Jovian mass averaging 12.5, suggesting that it is close to that of a Y-type, or ultra-cool, brown dwarf; its physical size is actually five times Earth's radii.

It has an average surface temperature of 300 Kelvin, or a warm summer’s day of approximately 80° Fahrenheit. It is colder towards the poles and warmer towards the equator, made possible by immense and violent windstorms that consume the planet. The planet’s physical coloration is a brilliant sky-blue from Rayleigh scattering and has an albedo of 0.12.

Internal characteristics
Titania can be divided, roughly, into three layers: the atmosphere, extensively hydrogen with pockets of trace gasses; the oceans, liquid water, ammonia, and methane; and the crust, rock in varying states and metallic hydrogen.

The atmosphere, when measured from the surface to the point where true space begins, is approximately 24000 kilometers thick. This keeps the surface, and the oceans below, warm, heated by the dual processes of the greenhouse effect and the immense pressures on the planetary core from its gravity. Despite violent storms wracking the planet on the super-continental scale there exists life aplenty drifting along the turbulent currents. Many of these are collective organisms, resembling enormous floating jellyfish. They feed on aerial colonies of plankton and algae. Others follow the lightning storms, feasting on the energy discharges. Others are massive winged entities, some of these reaching wingspans of ten kilometers or more, hunting the floaters. The most notable of these are a species of enormous bird-like creatures, tentatively termed “rocs”, apparently at the top of the food chain. Incredibly there exist floating continents, solidifed hydrogen and other gasses that have formed on the canopies of some of the most massive of the floaters, which can measure up to twenty kilometers around. Upon these alien continents live entirely unique ecosystems of wholly unique organisms similar to Terran species, not unlike the Galapagos Islands.

The surface, meanwhile, is hostile to all forms of known life in spite of the relatively balmy temperatures of 300 K prevalent upon it. Lighting storms frequently cover large swathes of the surface, pouring hydrogen and methane rain upon the scarred and pitted ground. Mountains are blasted into rounded mounds with no discernable features; caves exists on the leeward side, but are seldom protected for long. Cryovolcanoes and hydrothermal vents are common, adding their erupting plumes to join the stormy fray. Great canyons and vents honeycomb the "land", cutting across the shallow seas and join with vast underground cave systems which penetrate deep into the subglacial oceans below. The largest, and most stable, of these is called Cronus, providing a direct link between the blasted overworld and the peaceful underworld.

The subglacial oceans beneath, spanning a mere eighty kilometers deep at their most extreme, are largely walled off from the surface by shifting cave systems and crushing ice packs; seldom are these tunnels stable, the great tectonic currents of the mountains below pushing and squeezing any sort of escape. The seas are ice water mixed liberally with ammonia, methane, liquid hydrogen, and trace elements. Vast mountainous chains break up the ocean floor, anchoring the continents above; offshoots of the surface volcanoes are plentiful, and are host to vast and complex ecosystems that live near poisonous and concentrated salt oceans. Upside-down waterfalls are common sights. The spaces between the mountain ranges and volcanoes are perilous, full of supercritical fluids hostile to even chemoautotrophic life, the haunt of predators capable of surviving there.

At the very bottom is the ocean floor, a mixture of metallic hydrogen and superheated rock, provoked into searing heat by the crushing power of Titania's own gravity. Even here life has made a home. Most life native to Titania lives in the oceans. Chemotrophs make up the food web, their entire biosphere and global biodiversity built to live inside the ocean. Every species observed is bioluminescent.

Owing to lower genetic diversity around ninety percent of extant species exist in symbiotic relationships, forming the enormous forests of coral and seaweed that cover the slopes and hillsides of underground mountain ranges and vast drifting swarms of plankton and algaes. The other ten percent is estimated to be ordinary invertebrates, vertebrates, and other individual animals. These range from massive herbivorous beasts stretching almost a kilometer in size in their wingspan (from abyssal gigantism) to tiny predators less than a foot in size. They feed off of hydrocarbons for nourishment, such as acetylene, and either directly from other organisms or from the environment.

The Ancient Past
Millions upon millions of years ago, long before the Traveler visited Earth, the Taishibethi system was the home to an advanced starfaring power called the Hierarchy of Hierarchies. Made up of the enigmatic Crystaliens, originating from a Panthallassic superterrestial called Titania, and the insectoid Hivers, from a trio of worlds, the Hierarchy engaged itself in immense megascale engineering projects and stellar transformation. Their system was located in a portion of the galaxy where metallicity was low, with the only major concentration being located in their star, and so they had embarked upon a starlifting project designed to harvest their star of its resources. They had a defensive fleet that patrolled the outer reaches of their worlds.

Then one day their long-range sensors detected movement in the deepest parts of the Oort cloud, coming from the Traveler; it was moving at incredible speeds, almost 70% c, and the reason for this became readily apparent. Behind the sphere pursued an enormous fleet of mobile planetoids, an alien species' war moons and their escorts, ten thousand ships to a moon. Reaching consensus quickly the Hierarchy knew their fleet stood no chance against the alien forces, and instead mobilized their starlifter. Pointing its focusing arrays towards the Traveler, they directed a large quantity of starstuff in the path of the fleet and burned them away. The Traveler survived, yet damaged by previous clashes with the hostile aliens. It drifted idly into orbit of Titania and went dormant.

The Hierarchy's leadership—the Great Council—reached out to the sphere and tried to determine what lay within, a singular mind as they sensed, or a collective consciousness dissimilar yet almost kin to their own, as they also sensed. What they found was an all-consuming dream, and the Great Council went catatonic. The rest of the Hierarchy went into a panic, but could not retaliate due to the Traveler's close presence to their capital world. Months later, the Council awoke, and announced to the Hive Monarch that the Traveler was a god(dess) and must be healed if it was to repay them for their help.

The reconstruction of the Traveler's shell began. Isotope analysis determined it was made of neutronium, which confused their scientists greatly as there was no material that dense close by. Nonetheless they labored, extracting huge amounts of material from their home sun—which grew dimmer and dimmer as it lost more mass—and converted it via immense pressure into neutronium pieces to replace the Traveler's shell. As the construction demanded ever more material the inner system was demolished, the Hivers sacrificing their homeworlds for the project, and the outer system of all gas and ice taken, the Oort cloud depleted and the four Jovians drained dry. What was left was added to Titania, which slowly began to change as the light of their star left it, and it ceased to be an ocean world. Finally, after many centuries and centuries of careful work, the pristine surface of the Traveler was whole again—at the cost of Taishibeth becoming a white dwarf, the conversion of Titania into a SuperJovian with all remaining material and the collation of every remaining planetary body deemed unessential to construction in its orbit. The Council, or what was left of the original seven hundred who first contacted the Traveler, now immensely old, deemed the god(dess) was healed and whole.

The Traveler sent out a pulse of paracasual power. It washed through the entire system at a speed which defied physics—and time itself turned backwards. Taishibeth was restored to its youth, three more Jovians and their attendant satellite systems joined the rest in the outer system, and the Hivers' three homeworlds were reborn, free of all scarring and pollution. Titania was left as it was, for the Crystalien species had modified themselves to exist in this new world and most had forgotten how the old had been, but was gifted an enormous ring system and many satellites. Their starlifter was no more but in its place were metal rich planetoids and bodies in a new and gargantuan ring system that lay between the Hiver homeworlds and Titania. Last, but not least, was the fleet which had pursued the Traveler, empty and cleansed of all evil influence. The Hierarchy had enough material to last them endless millennia.

The Traveler then gestated a marker, a black obelisk that spoke with the voice of a woman, to remind the Taishibethi that one day it would return home; and then it left, moving out into the void for new adventures.

The Present Day
To be expanded