Heaven's Gate

First charted approximately three hundred and sixty years before the outbreak of the Great Hyperspace War, Heaven's Gate is a backwater planet in a thoroughly unimportant star system. So named by it's discoverers because of the interplay of the system's primary with an asteroid field comprised primarily of metallic ore, causing a system-scale aurora effect that dazzled the exploration team.

Over the next decade two additional survey teams would be dispatched to the system at five year intervals, where they successfully identified Heaven's Gate's second planet as habitable, albeit somewhat meteorologically unstable. Nonetheless, a colonization project was begun. At the same time, a leading Republic University proposed using the verdant, but uninhabited world as a planetary scale research ground for a long term study of the development of several large carnivorous species. Litigation between the two groups would continue for nearly a decade before a settlement was reached. As long as the research groups kept their work concentrated on the northern reaches of the planet, and provided financial support to the colonization project, both groups were willing to move forward together.

Landing without incident, the colonists, along with a small contingent of Jedi from the ExploroCorps, began to tame their new home while the science teams began their work in earnest, bringing several dozen mating pairs of Nexu and Rancors to the new environment. The calm would be short lived however...

Unbeknownst to the original explorers, the followup survey teams and the colonists, Heaven's Gate's primary's higher than normal EM output was no simple fluke of stellar dynamics, but a precursor of something far more dangerous. The star undergoes a six year cycle, six months of relative calm, followed by five and a half years of extremely high electromagnetic output. Output strong enough to overload unshielded electronics in a matter of minutes, and fry even the most hardened systems in hours.

In the space of one day the planet and its inhabitants were reduced to a pre-industrial state.

Technical Information

 * Region: Outer Rim
 * Galactic Coordinates: O-4
 * Climate: Humid Jungle, Swamp
 * Gravity: 1.25G
 * Length of Day: 26.5 Hours
 * Orbital Period: 620.5 Days
 * Moons: Seven
 * Affiliation: None
 * Population: Less than 1 Million (25% Human, 20% Twi'lek, 15% Kel'Dor, 14% Mirialan, 12% Omwati, 14% Other Species)
 * Native Species: Rancor, Nexu, Varactyl subspecies
 * Leadership: None
 * Capital: None
 * Major Cities: None
 * Major Exports: None
 * Major Imports: None