Kapteyn's Star

Kapteyn's Star (often abbreviated to KapStar) is in the Republic Sector, and was once an important outpost on the frontier. It is therefore the site of a large ERSN base that used to be central to Star Navy Command. As the frontier has expanded outward, however, KapStar (also the name of the base) has become largely vestigial, and has been relegated to a site of administrative and logistics work for the Star Navy.

In the Prime Universe, KapStar base was destroyed by the Z superweapon, Howl, on April 9th, 2156. All souls on-base at the time perished, except one. This individual was saved by the ERS Maelstrom. KapStar was avenged when the Maelstrom executed the Howl ship that destroyed it.

Orbital Base
KapStar possessed advanced sensors and communication technology, with the ability to communicate directly with Command at Earth through hyperspace, bypassing the light-speed delay between stars. It had large docking bays and extensive repair capacity, particularly for ERSN ships, though it did not possess ship yards.

The base had a complement of one thousand personnel. At the time of its destruction, those personnel were largely administrative employees, naval reserve crews and marines, and Star Navy engineers.

History
At the height of its importance during the Second Praezorian War, KapStar was center of operations for a large contingent of aggressive Star Navy admirals and other officers, as well as their staff. Communications began to break down between frontline war operations at KapStar, where admirals were directing the war effort, and Command and Parliament back at Earth. Ultimately Star Navy Command felt it had lost control of KapStar, and sought to rein it in. As a result, KapStar's importance has been greatly diminished and in recent years it has housed far fewer admirals and represented much less of Command's operations, which are now kept centralized at Earth.

Astrometrics
Kapteyn’s Star is currently at a distance of 12.76 ly from the Earth. The star is between one quarter and one third the size and mass of Sol and much cooler. It is a sub-dwarf star with a luminosity lower than that of a main sequence star.

Kapteyn’s Star is distinctive in a number of other regards: it has a high radial velocity, orbits the Milky Way retrograde, and is the nearest known halo star to the Sun. It is a member of a moving group of stars that share a common trajectory through space, named the Kapteyn Moving Group. Based upon their element abundances, these stars may once have been members of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster that is thought to be the remnant of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way. During this process, the stars in the group, including Kapteyn’s Star, may have been stripped away as tidal debris.

Kaptyeyn’s Star has no planetary bodies in its system, though there are some icy and rocky asteroids. Due to the scarcity of heavier elements (Kapteyn’s star has only 7.4 percent of Sol’s abundance of iron), it has a bluish cast.

Kapeyn’s Star is the closest known halo star. Halo stars are distributed somewhat spherically around the galactic core, but most members of the halo lie far above or far below the galactic plane. Halo stars are among the galaxy’s oldest stars, thought to be mostly 10 billion years or older. The habitable zone is located relatively close to the star at around 0.107 to 0.209 AU. The KapStar orbital base was located within this zone, at 0.109 AU.