Rukbat System

The Rukbat system. Otherwise known as Alpha Sagittarius. The star is a Spectral G class with five orbiting bodies and one Sedna-class object in a stray elliptical orbit.

The system was colonized by about 6,000 colonists from Earth following the war between the Federated Sentient Planet and the Nathi race. Leading the expedition was war hero Admiral Paul Benden. The world they colonized was the third of the system- designated P.E.R.N. (Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible) by the exploration team to visit the system centuries prior.

Fifty years later the system was visited by the Battlecruiser Amhurst, which had received a distress beacon from the colonies there. After rescuing a small group of survivors, the system was flagged as forbidden.

Those colonists left behind on Pern had to suffer through more centuries of "threadfall"- the periodic bombardment of the third planet by Oort-cloud objects dragged deeper into the system by the wandering planetoid called 'the red star' by the colonists of Pern.

The tales of such defenses are the stories told by Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series.

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Decided to do a doodle. A dear friend of mine got me into Pern, and after devouring the first three books in an omnibus (and the immediate chronological sequel in less than a day), I thought about doing a map of the system.

The names of the planets are in quotes because I have not been able to find any canonical names for them in all the online sources. I don't think they've been named in the books either, since the civilization there hasn't explored the sky yet (at least as of "All the Wyers of Pern", unless it was in a side-story). I'm not unknown in filling in the blanks at my own leisure, so here they are until someone corrects me.

Dragonriders of Pern = Anne McCaffrey

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Performed some minor updates. Now that I discovered the export function for Illustrator I don't have to port the image to photoshop for it to look good (Saving for web destroys the image).

A curiosity came up in my research though. One source (the Rukbat 3 site) claims that the three colony ships are modified warships. I always assumed they were colony ships since warships would have to be bigger, and any missing armaments would be much more obvious (warships are built to fight. They'd be completely other classes if they were removed from this purpose.) Any Pern fans out there can answer the question where this comes from? If they are, I guess I'll pull names out of the air and affix them to the colony ships :\