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Selaga is the capital planet of the Dominion of Khela and the sixth planet of the blue giant star Khae, located in the Elerad Arm of Florathel. Formerly a near-uninhabitable planet inhabited by nothing more complex than moss, it is today a lush world. Selaga is the homeworld of the Selagans, a former human subspecies.
Selaga was named by the Hope Fleet before its crash after an ancient word for Hope. This would prove to be both very wrong and very accurate as after the crash only 150 people were left, but they managed to build back up to a galactic civilization millennia later.
Selaga is populated by a large amount of species scattered across the planet and its oceans. However, the vast majority of these are artificially engineered, with the only truly native land plant being the moss so common in the stories.
Selaga is a very important world in its region of the galaxy, as it is the capital world of the Dominion of Khela, and the most populous planet inhabited by Selagans. Many planets in its region have been terraformed to be more like it.
Astrography[]
Selaga is located on the edge of the Scora-Kenasa association, a cluster of massive stars of similar age moving in a similar direction. This is one of the most populous regions of the Dominion of Khela as well as the first region of space that the Selagans colonized.
Selaga orbits the blue giant star of Kesera, within the Khae system. This area of space has a notable dearth of inhabited worlds, with only Selaga being inhabited with any kind of complex life.
Moon System[]
Because of its monstrous size, Selaga has a large system of moons, each of which is unique. Selaga also has a small ring system caused by dust being knocked off of a small asteroid moon.
Ilo[]
Ilo is the smallest and innermost moon of Selaga. Before colonization, it was a small rock covered in incredibly dark dust. After colonization, it doesn't exist, as it was disassembled for resources.
Kerega[]
Kerega is by far the largest moon of Selaga and is sometimes considered to be the de facto capital of the Dominion of Khela. Most government services of the Dominion are run from a base within the crust of Kerega as opposed to on Selaga itself, due to Selaga's crushing gravity making it difficult for other species to operate there.
Kerega was terraformed early on in the Selagan Expansion, and today looks relatively similar to modern Selaga. For a time, it was even more populous than Selaga itself although this has since changed.
Before it was terraformed, Kerega was a large, gray, cratered moon pocked with canyons caused by the extreme tidal forces from Selaga. Today, these canyons are filled with water and are the sites of seaside resort towns.
Amanyin[]
Amanyin is the second largest moon of Selaga and is only just large enough to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium. As such, it was never terraformed and was simply used for resource extraction.
Amanyin has several notable physical features, all of which are caused by something else hitting it. It has a very large crater covering upwards of 1/4 of the area of the surface, although it today looks far less interesting than it used to. There were other features, but today they are all but gone.
Venetra[]
Venetra was the outermost and second smallest moon of Selaga. However, since the Selagan Expansion, it has ceased to exist as all the resources were extracted from it. Today, there is a station in the same orbit with the same name, in memory of this moon.
Space Infrastructure[]
Due to its huge size and the tremendous amount of energy required to ascend from the surface without support, there is a large amount of infrastructure surrounding Selaga dedicated to making this process easier.
The most notable among these are a large set of artificial Orbital Rings, positioned above the atmosphere and connected to the surface near population centers.
The orbital rings are also rigged to allow the rapid firing of a spacecraft into interplanetary space, allowing it to trigger its spike drive and leave the system, something which would require a large amount of fuel normally.
The space surrounding Selaga which is not occupied by lunar orbits is almost completely filled with various habitation structures as well.
Climate[]
The climate of Selaga has changed drastically since it was initially colonized. Initially, Selaga had little water and most of its surface was barren rock. Near the shores of its small seas, simple plant life grew, which was grazed upon by simple wormlike creatures.
However, after the crash of the Hope Fleet and the colonization of Selaga, the people who now lived on the planet used artificial selection and then directly modified the DNA of the species native to the planet, creating a lush, diverse ecosystem all across the planet. This resulted in a more varied climate, more humid air, and other such beneficial changes.
History[]
In 29,433 BCE, alongside several other large colony fleets, the Hope Fleet was launched from Aegyn towards the nearby Valtamir System. However, an RCS malfunction caused the fleet to move slightly off-course, and to enter a temporary wormhole leading far, far away from its intended destination.
The Hope Fleet came out in an unknown galaxy, heavily damaged by the passage through the uniquely unstable wormhole. They managed to limp their way across thirty light-years of space to the nearest even remotely habitable planet. However, the so-called "habitable" planet that they came across was more hostile than they anticipated. Selaga had very few life-forms growing on its surface, as well as relatively small oceans. Two other problems quickly became apparent, however. Selaga turned out to have incredibly high gravity compared to the human homeworld of Aegyn as well as an atmospheric pressure of roughly ten times that on Aegyn.
Due to this, almost 100 people had to hastily work to rearrange bits of spaceship hull to prevent all four ships burning up and everyone dying. However, they were accelerating so fast that the modified hull plating was stripped away in minutes, and the flagship, the Dragon, completely disintegrated in the atmosphere, killing all inside. The other three smaller spacecraft made it to the surface, only to be dashed to pieces on the craggy rocks. Only 150 out of the original 20,000 people made it to the surface of the planet.
Despite this, there was still hope for survival. The crash site of the three craft was positioned between a set of large mountains and an ocean, meaning that the region was much more lush than normal for the planet. Despite this, the only thing that grew there was thick moss beds, which only produced the bare minimum of nutrients when consumed. The seeds that had been brought with the Hope Fleet were unable to grow in the rock of Selaga, so this was their only food source.
As years passed eating nothing except the mosses and the small reptile-like beings that were their natural predator, the farmers who had survived the crash cultivated the mosses to artificially select for more nutritious varieties. In this way, they were able to actually expand their population, as the moss finally provided enough nutrients to allow for enough successful pregnancies to do so.
Generations passed in the same way, and their technology advanced by looking at the rubble left behind by the Hope Fleet crash, particularly from the most intact ship, the Verity. Roughly 30,000 years later, the descendants of the survivors of the crash were roughly at the same technological level as when Aegyn-born humans launched the first rocket.
Because of the massive size of Selaga, however, it would be over 100 years after this point that the first man-made object to breach the atmosphere of Selaga since the Hope Fleet itself was launched. After this point, they quickly began launching spacecrafts above the thick atmosphere of the planet, landing a man on the surface of Kerega less than ten years later.
By this point, the evolutionary divergence from the main body of humankind had not progressed enough to label the Selagans a separate species, but they had grown used to the hostile conditions of their new home planet. This did not mean they liked it, and the instant large-scale off-planet transportation became available, the population of the planet decreased by almost 11 percent.
This spike in planetary departures did not last for long, and a popular movement arose that encouraged people to make the planet better for living on, rather than abandoning it. This led to the genetic engineering of various nutritious plants suited for growth in the rocky soil of Selaga, and gradually the planet turned from a pale gray to a lush green.
After this point, the planet's population and living conditions continued to rise, and the moons of Ilo and Venetra were completely disassembled to build infrastructure in Selaga's sphere of influence.
Today, the planet has a population of over 11 trillion on its surface and hundreds of trillions in its orbit. Selaga is widely known in its region of space as a shining jewel.