=Saturn= 
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**Posted by:** Ann Carais, Astrobiologist, Titan Autonomous University <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
The ﬁrst thing you need to know about the Saturn system is that it’s big, not just in size. Saturn is massive in terms of industry, population, and habitable space. I mean, yeah, [[Jupiter]] is bigger, but rating second on the scale ain’t too shabby either, and Saturn has a lot of positives going for it that its big brother lacks. Its atmosphere is easier to mine than Jupiter’s hellish magnetic ﬁelds and the vast ring system is rich with volatiles and capable of sustaining the impressive number of people that call the system home. Plus, the rings are gorgeous eye candy on an astronomical scale, beating out any old red spots any day of the week.
With a population in excess of 80 million, Saturn’s neighborhood is the second most populous area of the solar system. Many of the habitats around Saturn are actively expanding and there is incredible potential for future growth. It is the cultural center of the outer system and perhaps the most diverse assortment of egos, cultures, and beliefs to be found anywhere in the universe. Technosocialists rub shoulders with [[scum]], corporate raiders, [[Extropians]], [[anarchists]], [[uplifts|uplifts,]] and infomorphs. All of these people somehow manage to not just live together, but to do so considerably more peacefully than either the [[Mars|Martians]] or the [[Jovian Republic|Jovians]]. That’s not to say that conﬂict doesn’t exist among the rings, but for the most part it’s a game of shadows, with only occasional ﬂare-ups.
Part of this is due to the space. Saturn is about nine times the diameter of [[Earth]] and ninety-ﬁve times as massive, and the rings make it even bigger. They start some 7,000 klicks above the surface of the planet and stretch to 80,000 klicks out. Add in to this the sixty-odd moons and hundreds of moonlets, most of which are nestled in the life-giving rings, and you’ve got a lot of space for a lot of people. And it’s pretty. You can say all you want about the clouds of [[Venus]], the canyons of Mars, or the views of old Earth from [[Luna]], but living among the rings, seeing the sparkling jewels of the other moons and the massive serene presence of Saturn always in the background, this is a sight every transhuman should see at least once in their life.
=The Turbulent Giant= 
**Posted by:** Byth Swearingen, Commonwealth Investment News <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
For those of us that live in the shadow of Saturn, the massive gas giant is, literally, an everyday facet of our lives. But most of us think little about what actually goes on below the clouds. In fact, Saturn is ripe with opportunities for the savvy investor, if you know how to separate the gold from the dross that is. Saturn, like Jupiter, is a gas giant, though that is a bit of a misnomer. Like it’s larger brother, Saturn also has a rocky core way down in the crushing depths, a core that’s covered with an ocean of liquid hydrogen and helium. All of this is deep, far too deep and too pressurized for even the most advanced mining operations to reach. Instead, we skim the gases at the top of the atmosphere, the stuff that’s easy to get to. Below the methane haze and ammonia ice clouds is a lot of hydrogen and helium, making it an excellent source for volatiles, deuterium, and helium-3.
The ﬁrst thing any novice investor looking to break in to the clouds of Saturn should know is that most investment is steady but low yield. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. This means the old tried-and-true mining operations are your best bet. For the most part, these are operated by Titanian microcorps, a few wide-ranging inner system hypercorps, and a handful of other local competing players, notably Volkov and iZulu. Of the two, Volkov typically sees larger proﬁt margins for investors and operates in typical, respectable hypercorp fashion, even if they are local to the Saturnian system. Though iZulu does not pay dividends in the traditional sense, they amply reward investors who desire to bank some goodwill with many of the autonomist factions that populate the rimward expanse.
Most of these mining concerns operate in one of two ways. They either use automated ﬂeets of skimmers that harvest and process elements in the thick soup of the Saturnian atmosphere or they ﬂoat aerostats equipped with tanks and gas separation equipment in the upper atmosphere and collect the tanks when full. These operations also typically collect scientific data for various studies; Volkov keeps its data proprietary, marketing it to researchers, whereas iZulu and the Titanian microcorps share theirs via the argonauts and open source channels.
Failure rates in mining operations are small, but not insigniﬁcant. If you want no-risk mining, you should invest in a [[Main Belt]]or ring operation; they may be lower yield, but they are safer. Meteor showers and debris collisions are a regular hazard thanks to the rings. The nature of Saturn’s atmosphere means that electrical discharges are common among the clouds, direct strikes can take down the skimmers and balloons. Storms on Saturn are particularly vicious, with the high winds and lightning combining to create huge, often months-long storms. Usually the skimmer swarms and [[Aerostats|aerostat]] farms try to avoid these turbulent weather patterns, but every so often they get caught unawares, resulting in significant losses.
Opportunities also exist in orbital infrastructure to service the gas collection industry. Large reﬁnery projects are always trying to improve efficiency and are in need of capital to ﬁnance these projects. Recently, Volkov has been taking bids to build the ﬁrst in a new generation of skyhooks that will make transportation of the collected gas much easier. If Volkov is successful, expect many other players in the gas mining industry to follow suit. Many of the microcorps are already seeking ﬁnancing for such a project, hoping to get ahead of the curve. We at CIN, however, consider this an extremely risky investment since there is no guarantee that Volkov will be able to engineer the skyhooks to do what they want or that this will be a proﬁtable venture since, if reports are to be believed, they are already massively over budget on the project and actual construction has only recently commenced.
Finally, there are those investment opportunities that should be avoided. Anyone who tells you they have an excellent plan for habitable aerostats in the upper atmosphere is either dangerously deranged or trying to bilk you out of your hard-earned kroner. This isn’t to say there haven’t been legitimate attempts to build habs on Saturn—there have been, but so far all have failed, some quite spectacularly. The most well-known example of this is probably the Cloud Holm project by Chronos Ventures. You may remember this, the failure of Cloud Holm was big news a few years ago and still ranks as the one of the largest losses of transhuman life since the Fall. This has led most reputable ﬁnancial advisors, including CIN, to caution clients away from investment in these sorts of enterprises. While rumors persist that new metamaterials will allow potential builders to deal with the inclement weather on Saturn, for now we would advise that anyone who wants to invest in aerostats remain in the Venusian market, and that the opportunities for proﬁt on Saturn are mostly constrained to gas mining operations.
===Solarchive Search: Cloud Holm Project=== 
Cloud Holm was a widely trumpeted project, initiated by Chronos Ventures, a [[Titanian Commonwealth|Titanian]] microcorp, to construct an aerostat in Saturn’s upper atmosphere. The initial plan was for a large aerostat that could house a population of up to 250,000. The project was plagued with delays and minor disasters throughout the construction process, however, and only remained ﬁnancially viable due to also functioning as a gas mining operation. Powerful and highly variable winds posed stability problems, combining with other issues to make the original design unworkable. Instead, Chronos Ventures created a revised design that was far more stable, but also much smaller. This new version of the aerostat could support a population of 100,000.
When major construction finally completed, Chronos invited numerous VIPs and investors to a gala opening event; nearly 6,000 people attended. The Commonwealth’s courts are still settling exactly what happened and who is at fault, but what is indisputable is that Cloud Holm drifted into one Saturn’s megastorms. The resulting high winds began to literally tear the habitat apart and electrical discharges overloaded many of the core systems, including the farcasting facilities. Trapped on a doomed station, only a small fraction of those on board were able to escape on shuttles, lifeboats, and other craft. Nearby skimmers recorded the demise of Cloud Holm as it lost altitude and sank deeper and deeper into the clouds. The incident has served as a cautionary tale for other parties that had hoped to follow in Chronos’s footsteps.
===Sidebar: Recovery Operation=== 
[Incoming Message. Source: Anonymous]
[Public Key Decryption Complete]
Per your request, we sent several probes reinforced for high pressure deep into the Saturnian atmosphere, near where the Cloud Holm went down. We were unable to locate any wreckage, but three of the probes were able to detect some anomalous emissions coming from deeper in than we were prepared to go. At this point, the ball is back in your court. I know there’s potentially a lot of money from private insurers in recovering the stacks of some of the luminaries on board, plus the prototype technology that Chronos was using on the habitat. Going deeper in, however, perhaps as far down as the liquid layer, is an expensive proposition. There’s also something about the emissions we picked up that I don’t like the look of. If you squint really hard and really want to believe, sure, maybe they could be coming off a downed habitat, assuming that hab wasn’t torn apart by the weather or crushed by the pressure. If it’s not Cloud Holm that’s down there, though, then something else is making emissions, something transhuman—or, perhaps worse, non-transhuman. We know the TITANs were unusually active in this system, and my preference is not to go digging too far. You never know what you might dig up.
=Ringers= 
**Posted by:** Sakti Wakashi, Firewall Proxy <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
If people can dream of living someplace, chances are someone is going to want to. The ringers are a perfect example of this. Ringers live within Saturn’s rings—on various moonlets and small rocks or simply out in space among the rings themselves—which is one of the craziest places for people to live, especially since they mostly ﬂy solo or in small group. They all have vacuum-tolerant morphs; the majority don’t even bother with a small pressurized hab. The capability to survive vacuum without a suit is essentially a prerequisite for being considered a ringer, at least to other ringers. Synthmorphs, exotic biomorphs, and pods are all common morphs out here, but anything that can survive for a long time in vacuum will do. Ring ﬂier morphs are especially popular, given the magnetic ﬁeld propulsion provides a nice, if slow, way of getting around.
If you’re the type to believe various mesh vids, ringers are all either insane, hiding from powerful enemies, fugitives from justice, or eccentric artists. Most of the ones that I’ve met, however, are perfectly ordinary engineers, product designers, and others who work via the mesh in places like the Twelve Commons or even on [[Titan]] but choose to live in the rings. It does take a bit of eccentricity to live here, and certainly none of them are the most social and outgoing individuals that you’re going to meet, but the most shocking thing about most ringers is how remarkably normal they are. Most simply like living by themselves, or are the type of person that can only deal with sporadic direct transhuman contact. They subsist mostly off the resources they scavenge from the rings and by trading favors for whatever services they can provide via the mesh.
Of course, even the most isolated individual feels the need, from time to time, for the company of others. Given the diversity of habitats located in the rings, they have plenty of ports of call from which choose. Some of the most interesting ringers are the ones who regularly stop by Prometheus. None of them advertise it, but it’s likely that some of them are Commonwealth citizens with positions of importance. At least a few are high-level scientists and engineers engaged in the kinds of top-secret projects for which Prometheus is known. From the Commonwealth’s perspective, storing your top-level research talent in Saturn’s rings isn’t a bad idea, since they’re going to be really hard for anyone else to ﬁnd. All you need are an entangled commlink and occasional check-ins, and you’ve got a very nice set up.
There are some ringers who choose the lifestyle because they’re hiding out from someone or something. An enterprising ego hunter would do well to monitor ringer stopovers at various habitats and pull the surveillance footage to see if they can spot their quarry. Just asking ringers who has secrets to hide is a dead end; ringer culture takes the fact that some of these people are either fugitives or exceedingly private very seriously. Most ringers keep their personal metadata locked down tight, no one asks about anyone’s past, and volunteering info about yourself or letting someone access your personal info is a major sign of trust. Except for the ultra-paranoid and the weirdest of the mystics, however, ringers help each other out, and almost every ringer has a circle of others with whom they keep in contact or even meet with physically every few weeks. This is partly a matter of survival; someone without people to help them out can easily end up dead out in the rings, and even the most isolationist know it pays to have a few people looking to make sure you’re alive every so often. If you’re there in a suit or a ship, they may help you out if you get in trouble, but they won’t trust you and most of them won’t talk to you—ringers don’t like tourists. If you want to get to know them, you’ll need to become one of them, at least for a few weeks.
=Moons and Habs= 
* [[Atlas]]
* [[Bright]]
* [[Dione]]
* [[Enceladus]]
* [[Iapetus]]
* [[Kiviuq]]
* [[Meathab]]
* [[Mimas]]
* [[Pan]]
* [[Pandora]]
* [[Phelan's Recourse]]
* [[Prometheus]]
* [[Rhea]]
* [[Salah]]
* [[Tethys]]
* [[Titan]]
* [[Twelve Commons]] (Epimetheus and Janus)

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