Anton
Star Type: M2V
Charge Time: 203 hours
Transit Time: 2.86 days
Position in System: 1st
Diameter: 8,000 km
Gravity: 0.73
Day Length: 58 Hours
Satellites: none
Atmospheric Pressure: Low
Atmospheric Composition: Breathable
Surface Water: 60%
Equatorial Temperature: 34 C
Highest Native Life: Mammals
Population: 1,040,000,000
Government: Limited Democracy
HPG Class: none
Recharge Stations: none
USILR Classification:
Technological Sophistication: B
Industrial Sophistication: B
Industrial Output: A
Agricultural Dependence: A
Raw Material Dependence: B
Passed over by early surveys, never given a second glance by explorers, merchants, or (most of) those looking for a new life out in the void, the world now known as Anton's claim to fame is founded in its history of avoiding any and all attention for so many centuries. So obscure was the world to early explorers that even today we can't be entirely sure how its first settlers even knew to go there. The only survey of the star on record was by the ECR project in 2195, whose telescopes were able to detect a single small star with no evidence of planets. There is no indication of any followup, nor would one be expected given the shear number of other more interesting stars to look at at the time.
Somehow or other, though, humans found their way to the system in 2327 and found a small planet, too small and too out of position to have been detected by the cursory survey of 2195, to settle on. Pro-Alliance separatists opposed to James McKenna's newly established Terran Hegemony, these settlers considered this new world a godsend, as it not only offered a reasonably agreeable climate, fertile soil, and rich resources, but it wasn't on anybody's charts, which they believed would spare them from the imperial ambitions of McKenna or the other "strongmen" gathering power in the Inner Sphere. While early leaders claimed that the planet, which they named Anton for a largely unknown "martyr" supposedly killed during McKenna's coup, had always been their planned destination, the world's modern scholars consider it more likely that finding the planet had been coincidental, with the expedition's original goal being another star system close by.
Though Anton was in many ways a very good world to set up a colony, the first settlement, named Strand Rock, still took time to adjust to their new environment. The planet's long day/night cycle and thin atmosphere made it difficult for most Terran crops to thrive and necessitated the settlers take cover during both the hottest part of the day and the coldest part of the night. Tidal stress due to such a close orbit to the star also results in heavy tectonic and volcanic activity, causing severe damage to many of the first structures the settlers put down. Still, the locals persevered, supplementing their limited output of Terran crops with hardy local flora and learning through sometimes painful trial and error how to adapt to their seismically active environment, producing sprawling settlements of large, squat structures designed to hold up to major earthquakes or remain standing under heavy ashfall, with plentiful climate controlled interior spaces to protect the population from the climate, excessive UV radiation, or volcanic gasses that might threaten them. Over the next five centuries, these efforts allowed the locals to build a thriving pre-fusion industrial civilization that spanned the entirety of one of the world's two large continents.
It was at this point when survey ships under the control of Comstar found the world. Having taken control of Terra only recently, the Order still considered its position in the Inner Sphere as tenuous at best and had begun efforts to find and establish suitable bases to retreat to in the event the Great Houses turned against them, and at first Anton had seemed an ideal candidate for the same reason the locals had chosen the world to settle. Contact between Comstar and the local population was first established in 2803 and went reasonably well after some initial tensions, during which time Comstar brought the locals a very abridged tale of goings on in the inner sphere, successfully casting the organization as a force fighting against the very corrupt imperialistic forces that the locals own ancestors had fled. More importantly, Comstar had a lot to offer the locals in the form of technology and protection from the chaos outside their world, and asked relatively little in return, simply the right to settle on Anton's second, uninhabited continent.
With a deal in hand, Comstar constructed a large base on the second continent, named Outpost Glory, when completed able to house tens of thousands of personnel and vast storehouses of equipment. For planetary defense, they also stationed the WarShip Guardian Angel at a small recieving station placed in orbit. By the time the outpost was completed, however, Comstar's focus had begun to turn inward, away from the periphery, and Anton's value as a bolt hole dropped dramatically. This resulted in the base being staffed by only a skeleton crew largely neglected and ignored by the rest of the organization. As the base's construction and staffing pre-dated Comstar's transition into a theocratic order, Outpost Glory's isolated staff did not fully adopt the religious teaching that would become so common among the rest of Comstar, though they and their descendants would develop their own sort of pragmatic fanaticism and dogma, with their leaders commonly known as the Anton Cabal among other members of the Order.
With little to no support coming in from the rest of Comstar, the Anton Cabal would work with what it had on hand to expand its own influence. They began by generously supporting Anton's indigenous population, providing technical support to rapidly accelerate them into the fusion era, in the process creating a grateful ally and valuable trading parter. They also worked to populate Outpost Glory by taking in refugees from the early Succession Wars and also "liberating" many of those caught up in the slave trade on nearby Antallos. For new arrivals, they offered safety, security, and a chance to build new lives. Cabal members also insisted that any who wished to leave were free to do so, however in order to preserve the safety of the world, they could never return to Anton. Many, particularly those who had been taken as captives in various pirate raids, would take this option.
The dark truth of this generosity was that the Cabal had in fact been sponsoring many of the pirates that had claimed these people as captives in the first place, and rather than actually returning them to their homeworlds, those who chose to leave were instead taken into deep space and disposed of, in order to preserve the planet's anonymity. The death toll from these operations cannot be accurately determined, but is estimated to be in excess of one hundred thousand for the two and a half centuries before the practice was finally stopped. These atrocities were conducted without the knowledge or consent of either Anton's indigenous population or the growing civilian population around Outpost Glory, easily concealed due to the lack of spaceborn infrastructure outside of Comstar's control.
Anton's indigenous population would also become an unwitting supporter of the Jihad. With the Anton Cabal called to arms to support the rest of the Word of Blake, they turned to the world's civilian manufacturers, establishing several lucrative contracts to produce weapons and supplies for the Word of Blake and its allies (purely for "defensive purposes", of course). Though some of this material would be sent to the Inner Sphere to support combat operations there, the majority of it would be used for offensive actions against nearby worlds such as Man'yoshu and Port Sur, with the long term goal of establishing a stable base of operations for offensives against the neighboring powers such as the Draconis Combine and the Snow Ravens in the Outworlds Alliance. Tens of thousands of tons of munitions, weapons, spare parts, and combat vehicles would flow from Anton to battlefields on other worlds, resulting in widespread damage and drawing out the conflict in the region for years, even without the rest of the Word of Blake's support.
For the locals on Anton, the war being fought beyond their world was at best a footnote to their day to day lives and at worst largely unknown. Their only information about the conflict came from the Anton Cabal itself, and painted a picture of valiant forces fighting off implacable hordes of barbarians bent on universal extinction of their enemies (the Cabal notably even supplied true accounts of Blakist atrocities, recast as enemy actions, to the government at Strand Rock to keep their support). As such, the streets of cities filled with panic when missiles began to rain down from the skys and unfamiliar dropships began descending to disgorge invading battlemechs.
Having fought Blakist backed enemies for several years, the nearby tiny state of Man'yoshu had somehow managed to identify the location of Anton and its role as a major supply point, and mounted an audacious assault in 3074, sending their single WarShip, the majority of their space capable fleet, and their best troops to secure the world. The defending WarShip Guardian Angel was quickly overwhelmed and the Man'Yoshu WarShip moved into position to provide supporting fire as their troops landed, taking out airfields and military strongpoints with naval missile fire. Anton's population had been long content to depend on their allies to protect their world, and thus possessed only police and a small airforce to protect themselves. However, spurred on by tales of the "atrocities" their Blakist allies had faced, they threw themselves into a vigorous and creative defense, relying heavily on guerrilla tactics. The locals' tiny VSTOL capable Fire Wasp fighters were able to operate out of some of the roughest country imaginable, while local scouts were able to track the invaders movements to identify gaps in their defenses and air cover, allowing for quick strikes launched from unexpected directions. In air combat, while Man'yoshu's fighters were big, powerful, and unbelievably tough, the smaller Fire Wasps could often swarm and out maneuver them, if not actually downing the enemy, then at least inflicting considerable damage that might force them to retire from the field or abort an airstrike.
Bloody conflict would continue for a month, and while Anton might have simply outlasted their more heavily armed but much less numerous enemy, Man'yoshu had an ultimately unbeatable weapon, they had the truth. From the beginning, Anton's government had noticed their enemy's restraint. Man'yoshu had a WarShip in orbit, and continued to demonstrate its capabilities against military targets as they popped up, but it was clear they could simply devastate the planet from orbit if they so desired, and they chose not to. Also, their ground and air forces took great pains in avoiding significant civilian casualties, something that gave the guerrillas a considerable edge in their ability to operate, but even further cemented the notion that these invaders were the murderous barbarians Anton's allies had been spinning stories about. And so, as an alternative to continued bloodshed, Anton's government chose to talk. Within days, a cease fire was in place. Days later testimony from not only those who had fought the Blakists, but also a former member of the Anton Cabal, were being broadcast worldwide. Every atrocity of the Word of Blake, including some not even known to the Inner Sphere at the time, filled every nightly news cycle, and the planet was gripped by a new outrage over what they had been tricked into being a part of. Angry mobs descended on Outpost Glory, attempting to storm the Cabal's headquarters building before police and Man'yoshu's military forces could get organized. Thousands of civilians would subsequently be killed in an instant when the building and the entire city block around it was destroyed by a low yield nuclear warhead, detonated by the Blakist personnel within.
Denied their chance at revenge, rioting would continue for several days in the streets of Outpost Glory, with local administrators, businesses that had worked with the Blakists, those who did not immediately denounce the Blakists, or even those who were descended from people brought to the world by the Blakist, regardless of their actual origin, targeted. Hundreds more would die and thousands more would be injured in the violence before local police and troops provided by Man'yoshu managed to restore order, though flare ups would occur with terrible regularity. With the police forces unable or unwilling to control the situation, the government at Strand Rock agreed to allow Man'yoshu to occupy Outpost Glory and its surrounding territory as peacekeepers, a situation that lasted into 3088, when the territory was formally integrated into the rest of the planetary government and rechristened with the less inflammatory name of Sanctuary. Today, relations between the Sanctuary district and the rest of Anton's population are still strained, though this is as much due to the distance between the district and the rest of Anton's populated areas as it is to lingering prejudices. Possibly as a way to atone for their unknowing misdeeds, Sanctuary began hosting refugees from other worlds affected by the Jihad in 3079, while still under Man'yoshu's occupation, and its population has heavily funded the establishment of a messenger service, relying on both courier jumpships and a Black Box system tied to Man'yoshu's existing network to ensure refugees can keep in contact with loved ones on other worlds.
Though the Messenger Service served as the beginning of Anton's ties to other worlds, the planet still remains largely isolated. Its spaceborn assets consist entirely of two small Explorer class jumpships hired from offworld, and its closest friend, the nation of Man'yoshu, is largely tied up in managing a humanitarian crisis on nearby Port Sur, limiting their ability to conduct trade beyond very small high value cargoes. The local economy, briefly geared towards feeding the Blakist war machine, faced a prolonged recession in the post war era, gradually recovering into its present sedate state. In the short term, the Messenger Service aside, Anton has turned back inward, though the ties that have been built between it, Man'yoshu, and nearby Port Sur could see that change in another generation, with some analysts predicting that these three star systems, each uniquely gifted in resources and technology, may soon form the nucleus of a new interstellar nation.
Gamemaster's section:
Characters from Anton may be generated as standard Independent: Generic characters, save that they may not recieve mechwarrior or battle armor training unless they first leave Anton, as these technologies never made it to the world.
Due to social backlash following the Jihad, Anton dismantled almost all of its military industries, which placed them in a bad position when they realized that as an independent world with plenty of shiny things to steal, they would need something to protect them. As a consequence, the world operates an infantry heavy militia based loosely on Man'Yoshu's model. Infantry formations are organized into ten man squads and forty man platoons, and can be foot, motorized, or mechanized. These are supported by all flavors of APC in both transport and weapon carrier configurations, and a vast air force composed of very small Fire Wasp class conventional fighters.
The Anton Cabal was a small sub-faction of Comstar that, despite its name, operated all across the Inner Sphere. This merry band of amoral gray men lacked the religious outlook of the rest of the Order, but retained its fanaticism, adopting a very pragmatic, long term outlook to further their goals in accordance with directives from their leaders, "The Old Men". For the most part, the Anton Cabal's members tended to work behind the scenes in very unsexy operations that didn't result in a lot of bloodshed, but for those with more exciting ideas in mind, they did have their own division, the Fili Dei, and a small fleet of WarShips (Star League and earlier relics).
Both before and during the Jihad, the Fili Dei would be used as a covert raiding force, targeting obscure objectives or targets considered vital to the Old Men's inscrutable plans at locations all across the Inner Sphere. The majority of the division used older equipment common to the great houses during the succession wars (but upgraded with modern technology), with only a few Word of Blake or Manei Domini designs, and only when the division was acting openly. Their forces would gradually be worn down by attrition during the Jihad, and were believed destroyed on Terra in battles in the Pacific Northwest and Arabia. The Cabal's fleet was likewise committed to the jihad, with the majority of it destroyed, though reports of a single Baron class destroyer escaping alongside a fleet of jummpships persist. The Guardian Angel (a Riga class Frigate) was their largest ship, and was crippled by Man'yoshu's own WarShip (some reports claim Man'yoshu had two warships at the battle) and taken back to Man'yoshu, where it serves as a source of spare parts for their own ship.
The Cabal's leadership is believed largely accounted for, either killed or considered no longer a threat. Notably absent from this list is the Old Men themselves, who were never actually identified and are believed to have slipped away.
