Planet: Jexen
Purpose: Salvage planet
Temperature: –20 degrees Celsius
Gravity: 4.5 standard
Communication: Class 0
Society: Class 0
Transport: Class 7-9
Weapons: Class 0

Description: The sole planet orbiting a small blue star, Jexen is large, cold, and almost entirely lifeless. Because it consists almost entirely of metallic elements, it has an incredibly powerful gravity, but the strong interference from its highly ionized star conceal its pull from most ship sensors. Several ships caught by the planet’s pull have crashed here, and many of them have yet to be salvaged.

With only minimal atmosphere, surface temperatures well below most species’ tolerance, and the crushing force of the planet’s gravity, the planet has never been settled, and any efforts to terraform it would be prohibitively expensive. It supports only bacterial and fungal life forms, and its surface is pitted with asteroid scars and canyons created from ancient tectonic plate shifts.

Jexen’s gravity claimed at least three Peacekeeper battle cruisers, and the retrieval beacon for the PKS Paranon, lost fifty cycles ago, is still functioning and sending out signals from the planet. Reports of Delvian and Luxan losses in the area go back for two hundred cycles, and various other species have standing warnings to steer clear of the system. Jexen has a reputation as a “spaceship graveyard,” and even species which tolerate high gravities are reluctant to visit the place, since escape from the planet’s surface has been nearly impossible until very recently.

With the development of new technology at the Yinaran shipyards (see page 143 of the Farscape main rulebook), visits to the area have increased. A powerful short-range shuttle engine, developed at the shipyards, is now capable of escaping the powerful gravitational influence using a series of rapid, fuel-depleting bursts. Though expensive to use, the shuttle can facilitate multiple trips to the planet’s surface without adverse effect. Additionally, engineers at the shipyards invented a protective exoskeleton, which allows species adapted for standard gravity to explore shipwrecks for limited periods of time. Neither the exoskeleton nor the adapted engine is available to the public yet, and the exoskeleton has yet to advance beyond experimental stages.

Without a protective suit or the ability to escape the planet’s gravity, scavengers need to seize a piece of wreckage with an energy-based towing web, drag the scrap chucks into space, and then examine the remains for useful technology, information, and weapons once safely away from the planet. Many types of docking and towing webs can perform such tasks, and the Yinaran shipyards offers modifications (for a price) to accommodate towing heavy payloads against strong counter-forces.

Encounters: Jexen’s nearest inhabited system is controlled by the Sheyang, who consider themselves the owners of the planet’s spoils. With the development of new salvage technology, the Peacekeepers intend to retrieve their downed carriers as soon as they have the available manpower and ships – probably within the next cycle. Any species which has lost a ship in the region is also likely to investigate the wreckage on the planet, as well as scavengers like the Zenetans, Tavleks, and Yinarans. The Sheyang do not want anyone poking around in “their” junkyard, however, and will take steps to discourage any intruder.

In addition to simple salvage operations, if someone were to somehow counter the planet’s gravitational effects over a small surface area, a mining operation could prove most profitable.