Qamar

The Federative Union of Qamar is a country in eastern Itaan. It borders Monnais to the north, Arkand to the south, and Delsin to the southwest. The Qamari region of the Irim Desert is the only location of naturally occurring emerald air. Its capital is Cadaz, a large coastal city home to the Qamar Historical Center.

Qamar has a population of approximately 35 million. Roughly 5 million live aboard a few hundred landships in the Irim Desert with the remainder residing in coastal and desert waypoint settlements.

Geography

The Irim Desert, also known as the Qamari Desert, covers most of western and southern Qamar. Emerald air pockets appear at high altitudes over the Irim and are visible as green and cyan atmospheric light. The border region with Arkand is sparsely inhabited (except for Nu Ayzen, a minor Qamari city) and the exact border has historically been poorly defined.

Oasis towns are scattered throughout the Irim, many of which serve as supply, repair, and waypoint stations for landships conducting aether-collection operations.

Economy

Much of Qamar’s economy is centered on the collection and export of emerald air. Since the late first century, collection is undertaken by town-sized landships that travel the Irim Desert following aether pockets. Landships operate scout planes to track the movement of emerald concentrations and tethered aerostats equipped with industrial compressors. The collected aether is pumped into tanks on the landship then taken to port towns for sale to brokers, who then export internationally.

Landships

Qamari landships are self-contained mobile communities, each functioning as an autonomous town. A typical landship houses five to ten thousand residents and contains housing facilities, maintenance workshops, and commercial spaces such as shops, restaurants, and swordball courts.

Each landship is internally self-governing, typically run by a council or captain-led administration. Landship governments maintain their own treasuries funded by taxing aether sales and are responsible for their own operational costs. Laws regarding ownership of on-board property vary. Some landships allow private leasing, while others directly operate their own collection operations or residential facilities.

Most landships dock at oasis towns every few weeks for water, food, and repairs, and at coastal export cities at least once every season. Some landships are built for extremely high autonomy and can survive for months in the western Irim with no external contact.

Government and Politics

In practice, individual landships and oasis towns are largely self-governing, with the federal government working to coordinate the use of shared national infrastructure and directly administering some coastal cities.

The Qamari Federal Air Service is a semi-militarized civil service agency. The Air Service conducts weather and communications patrols between oasis towns and landships and maintains a capable fleet of combat aircraft. Cooperation between landship security forces and the Air Service is limited, and Qamar does not otherwise have a standing army.

History

Pre-Enchantment Qamar was characterized by coastal trading cities and desert convoys to Monnais and Arkand.

After the Enchantment, it was observed that the lights over the Irim Desert persisted long after they had disappeared elsewhere. Wizards in oasis towns soon noticed that aetherpower effectiveness increased when the lights were overhead. Early attempts to harvest this air made use of stationary aerostats, often positioned according to the predictions of wizards. This proved to be very inefficient, and later aetherists have determined that the wizards likely had no special insight into future pocket locations.

Throughout the 20s and 30s, former desert convoy traders began experimenting with mobile collection. Early “landships” were converted supply wagons drawn either by sail or camel. By the 50s, following the invention of aetheric engines and the subsequent price increase of emerald air, the first true landships were constructed. Over the following decades, these early prototypes were replaced by moving towns.