T'andar II
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- Planet Name: T'andar II
- Location: Solerian Sector
- Class: M (Class K terraformed)
- System Data: T'andar II has no moon
- Gravity: 1.0 G
- Year and Day: 302/33
- Atmosphere: Nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere with ozone and carbon dioxide content, at Earth-normal pressure
- Hydrosphere: Moderate, with 74% surface water
- Climate: Warm and temperate
- Sapient Species: 200 million, mostly Caraadians
- Technological Classification: Rating N- on the Richter Scale
- Government: organized crime
- Culture: organized crime
- Affiliation: none
- Resources: contraband, dilanthium ore, precious stones
- Ship Facilities: T'andar II has one major land-based starport
Other Details: T'andar II was originally intended as a colony world, a meteor-scarred ball of rock that had been terraformed to suit the needs of an agricultural colony. Unfortunately, haphazard can careless procedures in the terraforming process have made the planet habitable, but unpleasant. The temperature is extremely warm, and a drizzling, misty rain constantly bathes the surface. The boggy terrain is unsuited for agriculture, and only extremely difficult engineering efforts made construction of the spaceport and surrounding city possible.
The planet did not have many assets, but it did make the most of what it had, mainly spectacular beaches and other scenic features, including an awe-inspiring field of volcanoes. This wasn't enough to build a proper tourist industry around, of course, since T'andar II is so far removed from galactic civilization, but savvy operators did manage to attract a certain clientele who found more conventional tourist locales to be too legally restrictive. T'andar II became, in other words, a gangster's resort.
A series of cantinas, museums and other entertainment facilities sprang up, attracting a more orderly criminal element, supplanting the unruly cutthroats and rough settlers that originally settled the area. The planet's corporate government was willing to look the other way while criminal acts like black marketeering and smuggling occurred, as long as the credits continued to pour into the economy. Over time, T'andar's law enforcement became well known for corruption and graft.
When Brol Peirs took control of the planet, it was used mostly as a mining outpost, exploiting the dilanthium deposits in the system's large asteroid field. The criminal tourist industry began to flag a bit under the new military presence, not unsurprisingly, and the industrial activity went a long way toward ruining T'andar II's beachfront property. The raw ore culled from the orbiting asteroids was processed on T'andar II and shipped down the Kaen'anti Bypass to the Freeworlds Region.
The T'andar system remains fairly corrupt under Peirs' rule; for reasons of his own, Peirs prefers to let the T'andar system remain on the shady side of the law. He finds it useful, for example, to have a pipeline into the underworld, and occasionally uses the region as a training ground to hone the skills of his troops and intelligence agents (though his "crackdowns" on the region are infrequent and far from all-encompassing). It is rumored that Peirs also has an uneasy alliance with Shadizaar, a criminal empire based mostly in the Par'tha Expanse.