System: New Wessex

Lacking major resources, save a few common industrial metals and modest agricultural produce, New Wessex would likely have been spared the worst of the Age of War and the Succession Wars if it were not for its location on the border near the Lyran Commonwealth. In the First Succession War, Lyran troops attempting to seize the planet launched a blitzkrieg spearheaded by a small fleet of light WarShips.

Intending to launch a barrage at the major cities, in hopes of eliminating all opposition outright, the Lyran fleet was instead surprised by the arrival of a Combine naval force to intercept them. In the orbital battle that followed, one Lyran battleship, crippled by a devastating broadside attack, spun into the planet's atmosphere, where its fusion reactors lost containment and exploded before the safeguards could engage, spilling toxic levels of radiation into the sky and raining flaming debris across the western coastline of Jarichosia, New Wessex's northernmost continent.

Though no Lyran forces landed on New Wessex that day, the aftermath of the assault was profound, and even today incidence of lung and skin cancer on this planet remain higher than the local average. Through the following centuries, New Wessex was raided several times by Lyran forces, but the biggest engagement fought on New Wessex in the wars that followed the Star league's fall happened in 3021, when the famous Wolf's Dragoons mercenary unit spearheaded a Lyran attack against Combine troops massing here for an impending assault on the Commonwealth.

The massive battle, fought in and around Harlow's Wood and the capital city of Hallanan on the southern continent, Lancombe, lasted only a week, but the legends around it remain in the hearts and minds of the native "Wessexans" today, and a cottage industry has grown around tourism based on that famous battle.

New Wessex is sparsely inhabited, with most of the population living in towns and cities scattered on the coastlines of the Lancombe, Jarichosia, and Toridine continents, while the south polar continent of Thelios, covered completely by a glacial ice shelf that touches the southern reaches of Lancombe, has yet to be fully explored.

There are no functional factories located on this planet.