Gravity: 0.79g
Atmosphere: extremely thin
Population: about 45; human, avian, centaur (1)
Governing Body: Dominion of Tiiliit, Jovia
A barren rocky planet known as Shikaviil to the Tiiliitian avian government, Ixion-3 to the Jovian human government, and Dirtball to the local residents. It used to be a bustling Tiiliitian avian outpost, but after stripping it of most of its easily accessible rare metals and heavy water icecap, it got handed over to Jovians as a location for a ground-based spacecraft recycling operation. Talita does outdoors work in the junkyard and maintains the vehicles and partial vacuum suits that are required to do so.
Dirtball isn’t as big as Earth and barely has any atmosphere, so getting spacecraft in and out of orbit is a little less of a struggle. The skyhook and launch loop work in tandem: incoming payloads give some of their kinetic energy to the skyhook, which slows them down enough to be safely transferred to the loop’s rail, and the skyhook uses that lent kinetic energy to fling outgoing payloads to higher orbit. Outgoing payloads use the spindly monorail of the launch loop, held many kilometers above the ground by the momentum of an internal circulating belt, to accelerate to the speed of the passing skyhook attachment point. They’re not drawn completely to scale here.
Shikaviil Port is a co-species FIFO (fly-in-fly-out) work town located in a crater near the sunset line of the tidally-locked Dirtball. Since it was originally designed for avians, the habitat had to be modified to accommodate human residents.
A major result of this is separate housing and agriculture blocks; avians have to be on a different water treatment loop than humans because they are full of cobalt. Talita is the only centaur living on Dirtball and she has her own tiny corner carved out of the dry storage area. The other apartments are not big enough to fit her. :’) Electrical power is supplied by solar arrays on the light side of the planet, comms are on top of the central spire. Shikaviil Port has more housing capacity than its current resident population, so most of the time it’s super empty. There is no community center or real gathering place other than the trade center… it’s kind of like living in an airport lobby.
