In this Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy, archivist Cherie Heiberg provides a tour of the Helios System.

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Hello, I’m Cherie Heiberg! Welcome to another edition of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you’ve never seen Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s a show we do here at Star Citizen where a member of the lore team, which is me and three other talented people who go over the lore and the science behind all the systems that we have created for you, the players.

This week we will be exploring the system Helios. So let’s go to it. You zoom out, and then you’re going to zoom back in. And your whole screen is going to be filled with a giant star. That is on purpose, this type of star is called a main sequence type-B star. It’s the second most massive main-sequence star that we know of. It burns blue-white, or you know, neon blue in this instance, with like crazy lines. And, it is the star at the center of Helius.

Helios System History

So this system here, it is four planets. The star at the center of the system is a little bit peculiar, and it has the honor of being the only

system to have been officially discovered by the advocacy. However, it was technically discovered by a band of outlaws who call themselves,

wait for it…The Daybreak Marauders. Wow! What a name.

They discovered the jump point themselves, and they kept a secret from discovery and they would use it as a way to escape from authorities after robbing convoys in the Ellis system. So what they would do is they would rob people in Ellis, and then they would jump into the Taranis system and then from there they would disappear into the point that they discovered, into Helios. And no one could track them, and no one knew where they were, because as far as anyone knew there was not a jump point to Helios, as no one knew it existed yet.

Now, the advocacy finally got involved in chasing down these bandits once they drove a shipping company to bankruptcy called Rose Shipping Concern. And, the name of the advocacy agents who were tasked with it, they were called Avon Doraville and Gia Trask.

They tracked the Mauraders for months until they were able to finally follow them into Taranis and then see them disappear into this jump point, which they then got the credit for discovering. And the Marauders were rewarded with jail because they were thieves.

That’s some general background on the system right there, a little bit of the history behind it.

Helios System Science

Now I want to get into the star. Like I said, it’s a type-B star, blue-white, very massive. They’re pretty rare stars, about 1 in 800 main-sequence stars are type-B. That would translate to a percentage of like 0.125%, let me double-check that. Yep, 0.125% which is incredibly rare. So this is one of the only type B’s we have in the game.

And this star is particularly special because it’s peculiar. It has bands of unusual elements in it, in this case, it has bands of helium, and because of the peculiarity, it also has incredibly high solar winds which messes with ships sensors when you go into the system.

This, of course, is one of the things that made it attractive to The Daybreak Marauders and has made it attractive in the long-term to the UEE military, who have a base here.

So let’s zoom out very far away from the star, and we’ll have a look at the first planet, Helius One. It’s a tiny when planetary, little terrestrial

planet. I guess I would compare it to Mercury. It’s small; it doesn’t have much going for it. It has a few mineral deposits, but other than that it’s a little bit uninteresting because it’s dangerous to do mining there. It’s so close to the Sun and so prevalent to the insane solar winds and all the radiation and whatever you would get from a star that is this massive and powerful in the middle of the system that it’s pretty dangerous to mine there.

That said it once came to fame because of scientific expedition crashed surface and the six surviving scientists had to be rescued in a very short period by the military garrison that’s established in the system. So they were able to retrofit their ships and get to the planet in record time and with all broadcast live on vids all over the UEE so it enjoyed its fifteen seconds of fame. After that point, they didn’t think too much of it anymore.

But really, the main attractive point and the system is going to be Helius two: Tangaroa. Located right near the beginning of the green zone, it’s got a little moon here, Hi little moon! We’ll want to look more closely at the planet.

Tangaroa is an ocean planet; it has very few landmasses partially because the tectonic activity on the planet is so, well, active. Islands form and dissolve in very, very short periods of time. This is partially because the planet’s got low density and it’s got a moon that orbits very closely, very dense, and very quickly. So lots of tectonic activity, landmasses that form and go away, and a very, very big and interesting ocean.

I’m trying to start swirling around a little bit. Most of the population are contained in the ice caps. That’s where the permanent settlements are because, you know, besides not going to really go anywhere, as long as they don’t overly destroy the environment. The oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere is maintained by a healthy population of plankton all over the planet. There are a few settlements that are mainly consisting like engineers and scientists who do work with the military outpost in the system, which we’ll get to in a minute.

It is kind of like a trend among the rich population in the UEE to build elaborate homes on the quickly dissolving islands, and you know, “look at me! I’m so rich I can afford to build this amazing home that I know is going to be destroyed, but that doesn’t matter. Ha ha ha!” Who understands them? I don’t.

The other settlements [Unintelligible] [Laughter] on Tangaroa are going to be under, like not underground, but underwater. There are some permanent underwater settlements but most of the settlements on the planet are on the poles.

And I forgot to mention that Tangaroa is also a major tourist attraction because the tectonic activity and the moon all come together to create volcanoes and earthquakes and incredible waves, that can be up to a thousand feet. Some surfers go there to try out their craft. It’s not recommended that you actually surf the waves on a real surfboard

without, you know, protection. But some people do it anyway because, with people, that’s what we do.

So let’s zoom out again here and go on to…Ooh, actually I almost forgot this. I don’t want to forget Hefesta Station which is located all the way over here. Hello!

It’s a little military outpost, the main security checkpoint for the system. They work closely with the base on Helius Four and if you’re a merchant, if you want to sell luxury goods, this is a good place to start. The people who are stationed here always hungry for something different they get most of their supplies from the surface of Tangaroa, which is fine, but I mean, who doesn’t want some good Terra beef no and then, right?

All right, so let’s move over here and see if we can find it, there we go, there’s Helios Three. Lovely.

Now Helios Three is a gas giant. It is, in fact, one of the most massive gas giants that have been discovered so far in the known galaxy. It is about three times as big as Jupiter radius-wise. Let me just double-check something here, yes. It is a very friendly location if you want to harvest hydrogen. It doesn’t have a particularly interesting atmosphere. It’s very solidly colored. I mean if you like stripes you’re not going to like Helios Three, but if you like solid, calming colors, Helios Three is the place for thee. And anyway, now that I’ve gotten that bad joke out of my system.

Because the planet is so massive, because it’s on the outer edge of the size of gas giants discovered, it does attract a lot of scientific interest. And so you’ll have little scientific expedition’s coming to Helios Three to study it and figure out how it got so big, why it formed in the first place, history, all that.

I think I remember seeing Helius Four over here. Here we go.

Now Helios Four is an ice planet. Kind of like Pluto, except that it’s a actually a planet. It’s mostly rock and ice it hasn’t been terraformed because that would be more or less impossible but it does have a lot of settlements on the surface and the form of environmentally controlled domes that were put there by the UEE. So it’s a military base planet more or less.

The reason that this was done is, because of the solar winds in the system, a lot of ships sensors are scrambled. So it’s a really good place to do, like, any kind of activity that you don’t necessarily want to be widely broadcast. So, in the military’s eyes this is a pretty good place to be.

Now, that said, it is considered a dumping ground for people who make trouble. It’s kind of like, where you go if the end of your career is here and they don’t really know what to do with you, but they definitely want you out, not causing trouble for anybody. Which doesn’t really make too much sense, considering why these bases were formed in the first place. So, publicly as I said, a dumping ground. Public opinion, however, seems to think it’s the place for any number of things. Like a secret black ops space or place for biological warfare experimentation or a place for, like, covert espionage activities. The list goes on. But only the UEE truly knows.

That’s it for Helios. I think it’s a pretty interesting system. A peculiar system, if you will, just like a star. Remember if you go there, pay attention to your ship’s sensors because the solar winds can and will mess with them and if you don’t pay too close attention you may be ambushed by, perhaps, a marauder.

Thank you so much for your time, I hope you enjoyed it, and I

will see you next time.