Baikonur

The colony world of Baikonur is the first planet in the Soyuz system. The planet is one of the closest colony worlds to Earth, located in the Argo sector.

Colonisation
Baikonur was one of the first worlds targeted for colonisation in the 2330s, with a significant population of Martian settlers landing on the planet in 2334. At the time of its settlement, Baikonur was viewed optimistically as a reasonably-habitable world with great terraforming prospects. Although the Martian economic boom had revitalised Mars during the second half of the 22nd century, a large population had been left behind the new wave of industrialisation and felt the "New Mars" had no place for them or their skillsets. These settlers primarily hailed from the regions between the major population hubs of the Mariner Sprawl and the Hellas Sea, which did not see quite as much benefit from the renewed focus on industry and began to see a major "brain drain" to the primary population centres. As interstellar colonisation opened up, the New Frontier was viewed as an opportunity to start anew - something especially welcomed by the nascent Martians for whom interplanetary settlement was a part of their cultural mythology. Baikonur was selected for colonisation, and was part of the first wave of colonies settled that would later grow to become known as the Inner Colonies.

Acclimation to the new world proved difficult for the Martian settlers, who struggled to adapt to the planet's 1.05G gravity - by the end of the second year of colonisation almost half of the initial settler group had succumbed to medical issues resulting from their failure to adapt well to the local conditions or had retreated back up the well to live in the more comfortable space habitats in orbit. The lack of resultant manpower on the ground effectively halted the schedule for infrastructural construction projects, and concerns began to spread about the potential for a total collapse of the colonial venture entirely. By 2342, almost 65% of Baikonur's population lived in space rather than on the ground - though a lack of any real economy in the system meant that most of the space-borne population were left jobless and simply subsiding on rations held over from the initial expedition.

As the years passed, the Baikon government appealed to the UEG for aid and numerous relief missions were launched, though their nature only served to keep the fledgling colony on a lifeline, rather than truly solve the core issue. The settlers were stubborn and refused to relinquish their land to UEG-sponsored colonisation initiatives, and interstellar travel of the era had not the capacity to evacuate the settlers back to the Sol system.

Baikon Gold
In 2347, a chance survey mission proved to strike lucky in the Soyuz asteroid belt - a large asteroid containing huge deposits of Technetium (a crucial element in the manufacture of slipspace drives) was discovered, believed to be an interstellar capture from a relatively-recent supernova. The asteroid finding attracted the attention of numerous organisations in the Sol system, who sought the element to fuel the exponentially-growing interstellar colonisation initiatives going on across human space. As a result, companies began to invest in the development of Baikonur's space infrastructure and planetary habitability, and hundreds of thousands of workers began to inhabit the system prospecting for more "Baikon Gold". The influx of money and manpower quickly began to reverse the fortunes of the Baikons themselves, and the existing space habitats (themselves largely consisting of stripped-down modules from the initial colony ships) were upgraded and replaced. Those living ground-side were given advanced medical treatment to allow them to live on the world more comfortably. The "Baikon Golden Age" of the 2350s-2360s was later considered a semi-major contributing factor to the slipspace pathway revolution, and the world was a lynchpin in the fleet expansion programs of the Colonial Military Administration during the Inner Colony Wars.

As the 2370s rolled around, the fortunes of Baikonur began to tend downward once again, amidst a continued habit of mass spending by the Baikon government. 2375 saw Baikonur experience an economic crash across the system as the news finally broke; the Technetium deposits that had brought the system its good fortune over the years had run dry over two years prior, and no suitable alternatives had been found. Instead, the Baikon government had covered-up the issue in the hopes that a similarly-suitable source could be found, to largely little effect. Faced with this reality, the Baikons had purposefully restricted the flow of Technetium, artificially inflating the price of purchase to help keep the economy afloat for longer. By 2375, these last stocks in the warehouses had been all-but depleted and government officials had begun to accept bribes from the system's corporations in return for political and economic benefits - including exclusive rights to infrastructure projects and near-monopolies on certain consumer industries.

Audits conducted by the UEG uncovered a series of murders and assassinations ordered by the Baikon government into particularly-resourceful investigators in previous years who had been close to uncovering the secret, and a targeted campaign to "Blame the Belters" (themselves fleeing the ongoing Belter Exodus in the Sol system) who had supposedly began to take up all the spacer jobs in the system and were responsible for the system's economic downturn. The scandal went on for years - exacerbated by the lack of superluminal communications in the system and an increasingly uncooperative government who made every effort to deny the UEG's officials docking access to their ports - and eventually resulted in a CMA battlegroup deployed to the system to force the resignation and imprisonment of the Baikonur colonial government. The mockingly-termed "Battle of Karaganda" saw several government officials attempt to flee the system's third planet, only for their ship to be disabled by a CMA destroyer and boarded. The rest of the system were mostly welcoming of the CMA, and a provisional government was installed by the CMA while the court case was undertaken on Earth.

Terraforming disasters
As the 24th century drew to its close, the provisional government of Baikonur were accepted as the official ruling body of the system, and they soon set about attempting to restore the Baikon economy. The largest symbol of this revitalisation attempt was the announcement of the Baikon terraforming project; something intended back when the system had been colonised sixty years prior but ultimately never realised. The announcement was met with widespread approval, hoping to use the long-term project as a sink to begin truly dealing with the system's unemployed population and a goal for which all Baikons could strive. However, while the old government had been removed by the CMA many of the underlying issues that propped them up had not been. A rampant criminal underworld and endemic corruption continued to plague the new Baikon state, and within a few years most of the ruling politicians had been bought out or "encouraged" to leave office.

The corruption issues plaguing the new government ultimately saw terraforming contracts awarded to those companies which were willing to pay off the politicians rather than those best-suited for the job. This saw a number of issues crop up in the earth-shaping process as many environmental impacts of various processes were ignored or covered-up, ultimately culminating in the Rosewater Disaster of 2401. As ice asteroid bombardment was beginning to be conducted to introduce water into the planet's atmosphere, an incorrectly-calculated deorbit saw a 1.5km diameter ice asteroid fail to break up on entry, impacting into the ocean mostly-intact. The resultant shockwave and tidal waves generated proceeded to impact the various coasts of Baikonur over the next week, and impact debris thrown into the sky caused the onset of an early winter and a series of storms across the planet, resulting in the deaths of thousands. The ensuing winter lasted for three years, during which time most crops failed and the populace was almost totally reliant on external imports for food and basic supplies.

The immediate effects of the disaster mostly subsided by 2405, though the damage done to the planet's infrastructure was extensive, and the system's economy largely broke. Martial law was declared and the UNSC stepped in to facilitate the rebuilding process. This oversight by Earth directly saw Baikonur mostly begin to rebuild and recover from the disaster. The 25th century was mostly-uneventful following the disaster, with the UNSC remaining an active presence in the system until 2431 - at which point Baikonur was considered self-sufficient. Nonetheless, the UEG began to exhibit a considerably closer watch on Baikonur throughout the following decades, ultimately able to root out the majority of the corruption and criminal influence in the system's government and reform the colony into a semi-major industrial hub serving the UNSC military base at Phocis. By the onset of the Insurrection, Baikonur had largely faded into the background of the colonial framework of humanity and was mostly considered a minor colony of little particular significance - situated on an unfavourable slipspace lane with few connections and overshadowed by its proximity to the industrial powerhouses of the Sol, Epsilon Eridani and many other Inner Colonies.

Human-Covenant War
The onset of the Covenant onslaught in 2525 had little effect on Baikonur; the system was stuck in a quagmire of political and economic uncertainty - leftovers of the previous administrations' failures in ruling. For most of the war, the citizens of Baikonur largely saw the massive recruitment drive of the UNSC as an easy way to gain experience, pay and qualifications to apply to their own lives back home. Like many other worlds in the immediate radius of SolCore, Baikonur's populace were heavily sheltered from the true realities of the war with the Covenant thanks to Office of Naval Intelligence disinformation campaigns and thus never truly believed the war could come to them. The war was a fact of life and something distant - a far-off conflict which could never really hit Baikonur without first challenging the considered-invincible juggernauts of the Sol and Epsilon Eridani home fleets.