In this INN Rewind Transcript, Cherie Heidberg takes us on a tour of Tamsa & Min in a Loremakers guide to the Galaxy, which was originally a segment in Around the Verse epiosode 2.32. This post is a transcript of Loremakers Guide to the Galaxy: Tamsa & Min, material that is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fansite and is not officially affiliated with CIG, but we reprint their materials with permission as a service to the community. INN edits our transcripts for the purpose of making the various show participants easier to understand in writing. Enjoy!

Loremakers Guide to the Galaxy: Tamsa & Min – Full Transcript

Cherie Heiberg (CH): Hi everyone, welcome to another segment of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you are unfamiliar with this, this is a look at the Star Citizen universe. A member of the lore team goes to a system, we discuss science and story ideas. We talk about the direction we want the systems to go, so that they will one day be available for you, the player, in exquisite space detail. Today we have Earth right here. There it is. Very shiny. We’re going to do Tamsa. Let’s go.

Tamsa is the only known system that has a black hole at the center. Now a black hole is a region of space-time that exhibits strong gravitational effects and nothing can escape from inside it. Which includes light, electromagnetic radiation, particles, Big Benny’s machines, potatoes, photons, that kind of thing. We got a little corona of captured light here that Turbulent created which I think looks pretty cool honestly.

Tamsa was discovered in 2943 by Banu explorer Cothi Bat-Thel-Ma, and they named the system after a math artist called Tamsa Wheel. Like that’s her art name that she picked for herself. Her art has been described as Mathematical poetry, it has also been described as a beautiful precision of… a beautiful nexus of precision and chaos, that’s what the critic said. Yeah. I think that’s pretty appropriate for a system with a black hole in the center.

Now back to black holes. I used to think that black holes were kinda of scary. I thought they were cosmic vacuums that would one day suck up the entire universe and it would all die crushed in really strong gravity and we would… That’s just not what. That’s not what black holes are and that’s not how they work.

You can sort of think of them as super dense zombie stars. They are no longer stars. They are remnants of a dead star, at least the stellar black holes are. They have very, very, very strong gravity but they are not going to suck up the whole universe. They have stable points at which celestial bodies can exist and can orbit in a, you know, regular manner just like planets orbit our sun. Unless you go passed the event horizon here, which is basically the point beyond which you can’t escape the black hole and you are doomed to get sucked in and just stay there and possibly view the birth and death of the universe through time dilatation. That’s pretty cool. I wouldn’t do it though.

Oh back… So black holes that are formed, in case you don’t know, they’re formed through the gravitational collapse of massive stars. This one was once a type-O star, which is a blue giant star. Once the mass of the star collapses, after it burns through its fuel and the star’s temperature isn’t high enough to prevent it from imploding under its own weight. The mass basically condenses into this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, thing that we’ve never seen really, but we know exists, and creates these gravitational time-space anomalies which are super cool. Black holes are way more complex than I can describe at this time. There’s a book that I’ve been thinking about reading called “Black Holes and Time Warps” by Kip Thorne that looks cool. I think that would satisfy my black hole knowledge seeking desires.

As I said, this is a planetary system. Tamsa I is way out here. It is a chthonian planet. I don’t think we’ve discussed chthonian yet. They are essentially the remains of the cores of gas giants. The atmosphere of the gas giant was stripped away through hydrodynamic escape and it left just this super dense core that was probably rich in metals and minerals and would be, you know, oh man so cool I wonder what we could mine there. However Tamsa is still off limits because it’s being assessed by the Fair Chance Act. It was discovered pretty recently, you know, 2943. So, you know, once the Fair Chance Act concludes that maybe life isn’t developing in a black hole system, maybe mining rights can be explored which I think would be pretty cool.

Alright. Now that’s not the only planet in the system. There is one more if we zoom way out, Tamsa II. Over here. It’s a gas giant. It’s about the size of Jupiter, as you… well, you can’t see because it’s not to scale. What I mean is it’s about the mass of Jupiter. Its got a thick atmosphere and a dense core. Like its planetary sibling over here, Tamsa I, it was a rogue planet. These are both rogue planet that were captured by the gravity of the black hole.

Now Tamsa I was probably ejected from its system in a nova-like event, which probably contributed to losing all its atmosphere. Tamsa II, however, was ejected from its system through means unknown because it still retains its atmosphere. We don’t know yet. Scientists in the Verse are still trying to figure out exactly why it still has its atmosphere, where it came from, and only time will tell. Figuring out what became of this planet’s system.

Now since Tamsa is so small, even though it’s super-super interesting, I think that we do have time today to do one more system, which is another really interesting system. It’s called Min. This one is a rogue planet, much like the rogue planets that were captured by Tamsa. It was ejected from its system through means unknown, and it’s just kind of tearing its way through space with four moons that it’s picked up in its journey.

It was discovered at 2473 in an unlikely nexus of jump points, which is… let’s see, how many jump points are in this system. We have one, two, we have two jump points, which is just wild because it’s a planet. Most jump points that we know of converge around stars. No one knows why this planet has picked up jump points. It’s a cool science mystery of the Star Citizen universe. Its Jupiter mass, same as Tamsa II. It generates its own heat, much like our planet, our gas giant Jupiter does through the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism; which means as the surface of the planet cools, the pressure on the planet drops and surface shrinks, which in turn heats the core of the planet. It’s like somewhere in the 600 K range. Science. Science.

Its first moon right here, Min 1A, is an uninhabited rocky moon that has been stripmined a long time ago. There aren’t any resources available. No one is sure whether it formed with the accretion disk that created Min I, or whether it was just picked up in Min’s journey through space. Could be an interesting question to answer.

Min 1B is one of the most interesting moons in space, in my opinion. It, against all odds, is somewhat inhabitable because it has an incredible amount of geothermal energy that makes liquid water available on its surface. Now it is still really cold, and it’s not ideal for Human habitation, but a couple of settlements have in fact been built up here. What’s putting those settlements into jeopardy is the recent discovery of bioluminescent bacteria on the bottom of the ocean that clusters around the hydrothermal vents that help heat the planet.

So there’s currently a debate going on about whether or not to apply the Fair Chance Act to this system. Cynics say that the reason that it hasn’t been done yet is that there really aren’t any valuable resources here, since the whole system was stripmined ages and ages ago. People like, “Ah, well, the Government’s not gonna wanna invest money in assessing this system, because why would they? What money do they stand to make?” Might be bad for the bacteria on Min B. However there are still some scientists there researching it, so they’ll find out more about it in time – one hopes.

Min 1C is very much like Min 1A. It is the smallest of Min’s moons. Uninhabited. Rocky. Totally stripmined. Very small. Where are you Min 1D? I know I saw you somewhere. There you are! This guy, is another tiny, baby, moon. It’s not as small as a lot of the others, it’s smaller than 1B, but it’s bigger than 1C. It’s pretty, it’s an alright place, it’s covered with impact craters. If anybody wanted to know much about the history of the system, they could probably do some digging into the impact craters and figure some stuff out geologically. Which I think would be awesome.

There we go! That’s Min. Unlikely nexus of two jump points. Rogue planet with moons tearing throughout the system. Just being interesting. In space. With its cool inhabitable, barely inhabitable, moon. That is it, for this week’s Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoyed this incredibly science-y tour of two of the most interesting small systems in the Verse! Goodbye.