System: Corridan IV

When first settled, Corridan IV promised colonists an abundance of raw materials and fertile lands, but posed just one small problem: the entire planet's water table was tainted by heavy metals and infested with native bacteria that rendered every living thing on the planet, from plants to animals, toxic for human consumption. Faced with starvation and the failure of their colony, the first settlers initially relied on ice ships, such as those of the Ryan Cartel.

Eventually Gabriel Tal, a resident part-time chemical engineer, stumbled upon a means to purify over ninety-five percent of the toxic agents from small quantities of Corridani water in a safe and economical fashion using an innovative fusion filtration system. Tal's invention ultimately became the basis for Water Pure Industries, which would become the largest of the Lyran Commonwealth's five water purifier manufacturers.

Though publicly traded, Water Pure remained mostly in Tal family hands throughout its history, expanding to add manufacturing sites on Freedom and Ryde, and distribution sites on over a dozen worlds in the Federation of Skye. The main plant on Corridan IV has been destroyed five times during the Succession Wars, only to be rebuilt slightly bigger and better each time.

The value of clean, drinkable water obviously made Corridan IV a prime target during the Succession Wars, and for centuries its cities and the landscape on all three of its primary continents - Alorran and Cederban in the northern hemisphere, Fayrun in the southern - bore the scars of repeated raids and planetary assaults.

Today, Corridan's greatest exports, after water purifiers, are agricultural and ranching produce, which range from native fruits and vegetables to the beeflike meat of the Corridani grazer, a dim-witted beast roughly half again the size of a Terran buffalo. For this reason, many travelers expect a world of mainly rural plains.

In fact, close to half the planetary population lives in big cities, mostly concentrated on Feyrun and Cederban. The largest of these, Rio Grande, is home to Water Pure Industries, much of the Tal family fortune, and the largest planetary spaceport. The planetary capital, New Austin, is over seventy kilometers north of Rio Grande, and boasts the planet's largest shipping concern, Corridani Forward, which uses its own starport.

There are no functional factories located on this planet.