Star Citizen: Loremaker's Guide to the Galaxy - Cathcart System

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:06

   [Music] w hello I'm David hatk uh lead writer and of Star Citizen and welcome to another episode of L makers Guide to the Galaxy where we uh the lore team examine one of the many systems that you will find in the Star Citizen universe and give you some detailed info about the system itself some fun fictional facts as well

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   as some behind the scenes insight into the thought process behind the conception of the system so uh let's get started we're going to head to our super pretty and award-winning congratulations everyone uh starm map uh so here we are on earth right now so we'll zoom out so go out to our bathroom and today we are going to go to Cath cart uh that's right the infamous Outlaw even though it's technically unclaimed uh system so this was actually one of our oldest systems let's bring it up real quick how was that for okay all right so we'll start start high level and get you a bit of a just

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   kind of see where it lies in the grand scheme of things so this is cathart uh right here you can see uh it's sort of on the Western or Eastern side of of the known universe uh terra's over here uh Earth is there so it's pretty it's pretty close um so again this was actually one of our oldest systems uh not in the game sense but in sort of the project development one uh during the initial crowdfunding campaign we had a point where uh we generated uh basically 10 systems uh to help push us from $3 million to $4 million and the idea being that each one was going to be unlocked at the each 100,000 Mark uh so cathart was one of them uh I had written up a the initial blurb for the 10 systems

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   sent them to Chris and then Ben created a post around them and Forest worked up a picture for us to use uh so I thought it would be kind of fun uh trip down memory lane uh here's the original description uh dredged up from a Word document from November 6 2012 uh Cathcart system pirate system Galactic junkyard one Sun there is uh there for light and a massive garbage disposal it's literally a dumping grass on the side of a highway the only official rule is that the route between jump points has to be clear at all times uh although it still falls under uee jurisdiction it's become a conveniently located meeting spot for pirates and Smugglers no planets natural ones anyhow squatters lat together wreckage of massive ships orbital platforms and whatever happened to be drifting around

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   pressurized them and created man-made planets most visitors tend to keep their suits on during their stay as it's not unusual for the shoty construction to give out and lose pressure so that was the original pitch uh for the system and I mean since then we've stayed pretty close to it uh but uh we'll get into that in a little bit but let's just dive right into the fiction of the system and I'll throw in whatever weird rambling insights I can uh so again uh cathart system here uh was appropriately enough uh the system was uh officially discovered in 2438 by a wanted fugitive named Adelaide Loris uh there had been speculation basically that Loris might have been using the system as like a a private Hideout uh and might have gotten nervous when she

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   saw uh explorers scanning for jump points nearby and decided to cash in rather than risk one of them discovering it so uh in an ironic turn uh she named the system after winon Cathcart who was a marshall at the time uh who was effectively her Nemesis sort of in law enforcement the alpacino to her Robert daero if we're going to go with a heat metaphor uh but anyway her new found wealth didn't last long and uh Loris would end up returning to a life of crime and in another Twist of irony Cathcart was the one who shot her in 2464 so yeah uh anyway system itself as you can see is let me go to 3D is pretty empty you have at the center a whoa

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   yeah uh big uh basically it's a a a dwarf star I think it's a type a uh which is apparently gives off like a bluish white color but yeah pretty much the place is dead uh there are no planets to speak of uh there's just basically a very large uh asteroid belt that uh encircles it and uh so needless to say at the time it was passed off to the un uh they were not tremendously impressed uh so uh actually this is kind of a fun term of events uh let's see if we can go wider here you can see that basically uh it was discovered from Daven system and uh the idea was that the uh after the discovery of Cathcart

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   it basically caused a bunch of people to float into the system in 2438 to start looking for other jump points because it's that sort of thing where it's like oh you found one maybe there's there's more around and uh so one of those kind of want to be explorers uh turned out to be a guy named Vernon tar who ended up shooting at a passing ship because he was afraid that they were going to try and start scanning in their area and that passing ship turned out to be a Banu so he inadvertently discovered or made first Contact uh with an alien species and so that was sort of in the wake of of the cathar so anyway getting back to cathart uh since there weren't any planets in cathart the UN didn't really know what to do with it so uh um they sort of toyed with the idea of making this like a location of like deep space com experiments and stuff like

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   that but nothing ever came to fruition and they ultimately scrapped it uh so the government started using the system as a junkyard basically kind of breaking down ships and storing them here because they could just kind of do it and you know leave it and if they wanted to come back to the stuff they could if they didn't if they wanted to just throw it in the sun they could uh there was no basically there were no local residents to annoy uh with trash so over the years basically as kind of surrounding systems were discovered card became more of a throughway uh in junkyard uh the une and then what became the up never officially claimed the system because there wasn't really anything to claim uh but in the meantime uh in sort of the depths of the piles of trash and stuff like that uh some interesting things were happening uh far away from the traveled shipping lanes uh industrial squatters uh began

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    to lash together abandoned pieces and repressurizing them and cing creating basically like improvised space stations uh and one in particular began to expand sort of over the years and became known as sort of the pirate City uh known as Spider uh and the origin of the name was was I think it was kicked around in an early uh design art meeting but there was a sort of idea that it would be sort of have this kind of webik appearance of all of these different pieces of ships kind of lashed together and and stuff so uh I don't know if that that aesthetic is going to stick anymore but that was sort of the idea at the time um but basically spiders become sort of like the biggest most concentrated Haven of Outlaws uh sort of in the known known universe uh their Capital if you want to

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    call it that um and we'd also toed with the idea originally of having multiple Landing zones so you could kind of you know uh land in different sections of it and each of them would be controlled by a different gang who would have their own kind of set of rules and you know again I don't know if we're going to still be able to run with that idea but it was sort of fun that you would have to you know Landing in one section you could do things that you couldn't do in another and stuff like that but anyway um and actually if you want to get sort of a FL a taste of the flavor of it in the opening chapter of uh The Lost Generation uh serial story uh Tanya's buying a tavar and codex uh on spider but um anyway the overall idea was just to have it be that sort of dank gritty cyberpunky Style Space Station with kind of crazy gangs Hive of villainy etc etc but but basically a place with the

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    potential for a bunch of fun stories and characters uh and apparently good waffles if you talk to King Shadow uh but from a practical standpoint we needed basically a major Landing Zone that would accommodate sort of the criminal characters we'd have Earth we'd had Tara and we just needed sort of a you know third third part to to throw in there uh and the act the actual inspiration behind the idea of it was uh inspired by uh by the raft in the end of snow crash if you've read that if you haven't go read it uh basically there was this massive flotilla of ships and oil tankers and boats that's slowly making its way across the ocean and it was a really just great Visual and a book of great visual so it was just uh but it did obviously create a lot of uh migraines in the dev team thinking about how we're going to possibly build

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    something like this but anyway um getting back to the history so cathart pretty much is sort of that that was sort of its flavor and it stayed that way for for quite some time uh but something started to change probably in the 30th century uh we'll go back to the star Afters to kind of illustrate this but uh again sort of seeing where it's it's situated uh you have basically Cathcart here Hades here Nexus which for a really long time was basically an unclaimed system Min and then uh tyrannis and uh so with this sort of cluster actually less so than Tannis but with this sort of cluster here you had a a pretty high concentration of of unclaimed systems and all of them were basically uh uh attracting a lot of people like

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    they were become pretty pretty settled and particularly after during the Messa era when people were trying to get away from the sort of really oppressive uh uee government I mean not that there are many people probably living in Hades just because it's sort of that dead you know ancient civilization Civil War torn Planet you know destroyed Planet thing but uh but even so you still had like this sort of mass of unclaimed systems in the middle here and uh but anyway rumors started to spread basically that there was talk about kind of uniting all of these systems together to form sort of we would you know equate to sort of an independent country uh type thing so it' be independent of the uee and uh be its own own type of government so uh in 29 I believe it was 31 uh Dean Keller went on this thing infamous thing

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    called Keller's run where he basically he picked a fight and cart and started this sort of sprawling system system to system Chase uh that just looped in a bunch of criminals and bounty hunters and Pirates and and eventually law enforcement and when the cops kind of started to jump in they realized how little control that they could exert in this area and uh so many people believe that uh as you can see here that Nexus is now a claimed uee system that the reason why the uee decided to reclaim the system and kick every kick all the criminals out was kind of to uh not only establish some Law and Order in that area but was also potentially to break up the bid of this sort of area of space from becoming sort of an you know I mean an outlaw government is probably not accurate but you you get know what I mean um so anyway uh needless to say a

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    lot of people in Nexus system didn't take too kindly to being kicked out of their homes so they started to basically fight with the uee uh in there so the uee simply held their ground and did their best to Fed off the attacks but uh in 2019 35 there was this thing called uh the waler massacre which was at uh op station Damian which you will see in uh starmarine which basically uh the a bunch of Outlaws came in and just murdered a lot of people and the government and the authorities basically you know the the authorities kicked the horn or the The Outlaws basically kick the hornet nest if you will uh so in response the military convinced that supporters of the attack uh were congregating in Cathcart launched basically an intensive bombing campaign to try and decimate uh a lot of the inhabitants so it's it was sort of not

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    the message that this Progressive UE was really wanted to send but uh they attacked spider in the sort of opes of suppressing these violent insurgents and but due to the vast amount of trash and debris in the system Navy ships weren't able to get close enough to effectively destroy spider or make much of a dent overall but they still you know hurt some people uh and all it did ultimately was just kind of piss every everybody off even more uh so that's basically where we're at now that was the the massacre was in 2935 so it's sort of you know the the sort of wake of that is still relatively fresh uh but um but yeah so that's that's pretty much Cathcart as it stands uh and again you know obviously this team hasn't started to to look at this system yet so you know while this webik network of of

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    lashed together Capital ships uh sounds really sweet long story short cool pirate system awesome man-made uh pirate Bas thing and uh not a lot of law anyway uh so that is Cathcart in a nutshell but thank you for watching um if you haven't you should obviously you know if you haven't dug into the star map I really really recommend it it is amazingly beautiful and full of really really cool uh little tidbits about the sort of the system at large for Star Citizen and where you guys will ultimately get to to wander around um I'd like to thank you to subscribers for helping us make shows like this and ATV and Bug Smashers possible and a big thanks to all the backers in general because you're the reason that we're here at all so uh I'm

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    Dave fock this is La makers guide of the Galaxy and I'll see you next time thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest and staff citizen of Squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon