System: Zolfo

Zolfo is one of the success stories of Hanse Davion's recent push for increased economic activity in Outback areas of the Federated Suns. Before the present decade, Zolfo had been primarily an agricultural world unable to live up to its potential because it lacked skilled workers.

That changed in 3022 when a survey team from BP-Interstellar, a petroleum and steel firm, arrived on world. In the course of their survey, the team discovered major oil and coal deposits in the planets various mountain ranges. Since then, more than 30 corporations have bought land for new industries on Zolfo. The Duchess of Zolfo has already begun to use some of the profits from the land sales to build the planet's first schools and collages. Zolfo is no longer one of the Skid Row worlds, and promises to vindicate Prince Davion's economic development policies by becoming the core of a whole new sphere of economic growth.

[3049] The so-called “Great Stock Market Fire” on Zolfo occurred in 3049, where the whole financial district burned down due to the crash of a petroleum-carrying Mule DropShip. While the initial impact was bad enough in itself, it was the ensuing dense cloud of blackest smoke, combined with sudden shear winds from the heat and subsequent explosions that made a deployment of firefighting VTOLs impossible. However, some luck was present even in the midst of misfortune: the disaster had struck on a Sunday when few people were working, keeping the death toll in the low hundreds.

There are no functional factories located on this planet.