Cato Byss

Cato Byss is a field of asteroids that was once a planet. It is inhabited by Byssians, who are very secretive and renowned for their shipbuilding abilities.

## History

During the Ancient Space Age, Cato Byss was a minor participant in space travel innovation, but when that era ended the Byssians maintained their practice of building spaceships. With all other civilizations they knew of discontinuing space travel, Byssians resigned to exploring and mapping their region of the galaxy. In those explorations, they came across a yet unidentified entity or civilization that was innately hostile towards them. This power followed explorers back to Cato Byss, where it was defeated by the Byssian fleet, but not before it set in motion a cataclysm that would fracture Cato Byss into thousands of asteroids. The Byssians reacted quickly, evacuating in large ships, predicting which land regions would survive most intact, and constructing massive pressurized biospheres to preserve what native life they could. While all but two biospheres and a tenth of the space fleet were destroyed either during the cataclysm or in the aftermath, the Byssians retained the vast majority of their collective knowledge and survived long enough to develop sustainable life. They rebuilt their shipbuilding facilities among the asteroids of their former home, and for centuries continued to refine their craft, focusing on efficient collection and transport of resources unobtainable from Cato Byss, like water (which they obtain with little consequence from Calpha) and metals for their shipyards. When other civilizations began to venture further into space, Byssians became more seclusive and avoided discovery primarily out of protection of their home, since they were by nature rather vulnerable in their asteroid dwellings should any force get past their formidable fleet, and since their biology would make their biomass desirable for particularly heartless attackers. The first friendly contact they Byssians had with modern space travelers was with Pyros, who has corresponded with the Byssians about whom to trust to make contact. Currently, the Galactic Armada is fully aware of Cato Byss and is a major customer of their shipyards; however, the ships are the only details the public has about the planet, since the Armada dutifully keeps Cato Byss' location and inhabitants a top-clearance military secret.

## Byssians

Byssians are humanoid arthropods with two legs and four arms, spider-like mouth parts, and four eyes spaced evenly around the crown of their heads. They spend most of their lives in and around pressurized cities on Cato Byss, using breathing masks when outside. Their biochemistry is heavily dependent on large amounts of gold, a trait that makes them more able to withstand the vacuum of space and the direct radiation from their sun for extended periods (their eyes have an extra lens that moves into place when they are looking near the sun); they require only breathing masks despite working full shifts in non-enclosed shipyards. This biochemistry also makes Byssians very valuable to gold harvesters, since a single Byssian body contains over 200 grams of gold, and their diet requires them to maintain a significant collection of gold. This gives them all the more reason to be secretive about their very existence.

## Shipbuilding

Cato Byss produces all varieties of spaceships, who are sold via either the Galactic Armada or extremely trusted third parties. For their own use they produce three main categories of ship: large container ships who are rather efficient at collecting certain necessary resources and transporting them back to Cato Byss, a well-armed defensive fleet of small fighters, and large but agile tugboat-type ships used for directing and adjusting asteroids, since that is quite often a matter of survival and occasionally of convenience. Notable other ships that Cato Byss has produced for the rest of the galaxy include Pyros' Mark II starfighter, which was for a long time the only ship to include the Byssian's Neutrino Reactor.