HOFFMAN
Sector: Gallimaufry
Founded: Earth (United States), 2078
Principle Industries: Agriculture, explosives

Hoffman is one of the most successful of Earth's "Jenner Worlds." Earth has always had a consistent tendency to colonize *anything* which is even remotely conducive to sustaining life, and during the First Diaspora of the 21st Century, people would actually -volunteer- for genetic engineering so that they could inhabit environments which would spell quick and painful death, or at least a skyrocketing insurance premium.

Hoffman is a marginal class M world, for although it is littered with plant and animal life it has the mild handicap of being the most massive terrestrial planet ever discovered in Known Space. Gravity at mean sea level on Hoffmann is 3.06 G's, and only the unnaturally thin athmosphere allows organic life to exist at all here; an athmosphere proportionate to Earth's would be three times as dense as the pre-terraforming Venutian air.

As it is, Hoffman is only inhabitable by normal humans for a brief length of time; visitors must spend twenty-four hours in pressure rooms arriving or leaving the planet to accustom them to the air pressure, and the high gravity causes circulatory problems with prolonged exposure. One of the original scout party to the world nearly died of nitrogen narcosis- the bends- and another had to have a heart transplant several years later due to overwork.

But that scout party reported a potential bonanza. Hoffman was a green and fertile world, and the new plant life promised great things for the galaxy. The wiffle fruit would add another tasty staple to the galactic diet; a hardy grassoid, the Cable Weed, proved half again as strong as spun steel; and indeed many plants, such as Barbell Beans and Shot Put Nuts, fixated iron, copper, and heavy metals in such a fashion that the planet was, in effect, mining -itself.- None of these plants would grow outside their natural habitat, and so volunteers were found in the 2070s for a genetic modification to allow a Chicago-based corporation to exploit the world.

The result is the human derivative subspecies known as Hoffmanites. Hoffmanite males stand between seven and eight feet tall and tend to have a circumference of at least that much; although they look fat, very little of it actually is fat. Much of the bulk of a Hoffmanite is devoted to keeping internal organs from shifting about under heavy gravity.

Hoffman women average about a foot shorter and tend towards the voluptuous, aided by the same muscle complex which exists in the male. A Hoffman female who spends their entire post-adolescent life on 1G worlds need never worry about upper body support. Although much less massive, the women tend to be the -stronger- sex, with a much denser and more flexible musculature. (And face it, you -need- to be really strong if you're going to deliver a forty-pound baby- 120 pounds in a Hoffman hospital.)

Hoffmanites are designed to be immensely strong and highly resistant to impact or blast damage. This has led to various cultural rituals which resemble Klingon cultures in many ways. Hoffmanite family members or close friends, on encountering one another, will attempt to bash the other's head in or commit some other grievous bodily harm upon their loved one, on the theory that hugs really aren't demonstrative enough. Hoffman romance begins with high explosives and escalates from there. None of this causes the principals any lasting damage, of course, but witnessing two long-estranged loved ones greeting each other in the Hoffman manner has caused many a security force to panic. Also, for the sake of lowering property damage, many marriages on Hoffman are arranged beforehand to bypass the ceremonial wrecking-ball elopement.

Hoffmanites are completely cross-fertile with normal humans, but Hoffmanites find most normals about as sexy as grade-school children and, more practically, far too fragile to contemplate sexual culmination with. (Well, so long as -all- they do is contemplate it, it might be okay, but you get the message.)

Hoffmanites are agressively self-sufficient and tend to abhor ceremony. Most Hoffmanites consider themselves homebodies and simple folk, and very few leave their planet. Considering that, with the collapse of the colony's founding corporation in the fall of the short-lived Kingdom of Daleyland, the Hoffman people have become generally wealthy from their planet's resources, this is quite understandable. However, there are always a few malcontents who seek to escape New Hoffman's pastoral lifestyle, or who just prefer being able to lift a ton in 'normal' gravity, and thus it is not uncommon to see a Hoffmanite in any moderately crowded human habitation.

Redneck

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