New Innsmouth is the titular- cand capital-planet of the Union of New Innsmouth, which is one of the major political rivals to Ancalagon.
New Innsmouth is a cool, wet planet in a close orbit around the K4-type dwarf star Dagon. It is also the captial-planet of one of the largest societies in the Exile, this being the appropriately-named Union of New Innsmouth.

New Innsmouth has a surface gravity of 0.92 G and a radius of 7,231 Km, making it somewhat larger than Old Earth. Its average temperature is currently 11°C, though this is substantially warmer than the pre-terraforming value of 6°C.

The planet is notable for its extensive oceans - around 94% of its surface area is accounted for by water. What landmass the planet possesses is mostly distributed in the form of low-lying atolls, with a few larger islands centred on hotspot volcanoes. However, the land that the planet does possess is quite fragmented - there are a lot of islands dotted throughout its seas. The biggest single formation is the Oleurio micro-continent, which is about half the size of Australia. (Oleurio owes its anomalous size to the presence of not one but two Hawaii-style mantle plumes underneath it, and consequently the presence of two active volcanoes, one at either end of it.)

The primary reason for New Innsmouth’s aqueous state is its age - the planet is around 6.5 billion years old. Its store of internal heat is thus more depleted than that of Old Earth (or Ancalagon!), and as such its outer core and mantle have become cooler and harder, and so its tectonic plates have become sluggish. There is little active mountain-building or crustal uplifting, and consequently erosion has washed away a large proportion of its original landmass. (New Innsmouth has always been a watery planet, but geological evidence shows that it did once possess more land than it does now.)

New Innsmouth has a range of climatic zones, however the planet as a whole is fairly cool. This is a side-effect of its geological inactivity - carbonate rock formation has of course continued through the mechanism of sea-bed sedimentation. However, those sediments are not vigorously-subducted under plate boundaries, as they were on Old Earth (before its oceans boiled off). Consequently, the carbon stays trapped for a long time, and this lowers the concentration in the atmosphere. Also, geological emissions of greenhouse gases such as methane are depressed, lowering their atmospheric concentrations too. These factors are offset somewhat by the omnipresent water vapour, but, overall New Innsmouth’s planetology has an inbuilt bias toward planetary cooling. Whilst the planet is renowned for its cool, fresh air and deep blue skies, said skies are fairly useless at keeping heat in!

When the original colonists arrived on New Innsmouth in 26 BE, the situation was sufficiently extreme that polar ice covered as much as 30% of the planet’s surface. Even the equatorial belt rarely presented anything warmer than a temperate climate. The New Innsmouth Development Authority undertook a comprehensive terraforming project, which included efforts to warm the planet. Whilst this project made sense in context, following the terminal eco-catastrophe on Old Earth, deliberately-warming a planet was extremely controversial. NIDA’s efforts were broadly-successful - New Innsmouth now has an average temperature of 11°C rather than its original 6°C - but ironically, they had the effect of damaging the corporation’s reputation almost from the word go. NIDA was, quite literally, a victim of its own success.

As well as a cold climate, the early colonists were faced with difficulties from the planet’s pelagic nature. Living space was limited on the islands, and also most of the planet’s natural resources were either in or under the sea. Consequently NIDA decided to adopt a genetic/physiological adaptation program that could allow for a semi-aquatic lifestyle. The end result was the modern somewhat-piscine appearance of Innsmouth’s inhabitants. (Technically the altered physiology owes more to whales, dolphins and the other cetacean mammals, but the superficial appearance is more fishy.)

Unfortunately, NIDA’s program was essentially the Platonic ideal of how not to do this sort of thing. It racked up a substantial body count, a huge volume of ethics violations and eventually caused widespread public unrest. Corporate rule on New Innsmouth lasted less than a century. The result was an extremely violent revolution, which also failed to completely-dislodge NIDA. The resulting civil war lasted for 11 years, before the last corporate holdouts were destroyed. Whilst a nominal republican government - the Union of New Innsmouth - was eventually established, unfortunately the whole sad saga permanently warped the colony’s politics. It left behind a taint of cruelty and violence that has never quite been successfully-erased.

In addition, New Innsmouth is relatively metal-poor, and most of what deposits it does have is difficult to mine (due to being deeply underwater). This has left its economy dependent on external imports of raw materials, and thus vulnerable to fluctuations in commodities prices on galactic markets. Combined with the above social trends, these economic factors have merged to give New Innsmouth a distinctly-piratical foreign policy.

The Union of New Innsmouth initially expanded through conquest of weaker neighbours. Following the establishment of the Solar Union, this process mostly - mostly! - stopped. However, the Union has accused of orchestrating political unrest amongst several of its remaining independent neighbours. The Union has proved quarrelsome with the other major powers - it and Ancalagon have come to war several times, in fact as recently as the reign of Emperor Keriat. The Solar Union has attempted to mediate all such conflicts, though only with mixed success. The Union and the Empire have awful mutual relations. (Fafnir actually considers New Innsmouth a bigger threat to its territory than it does the current remnants of the Black Flame movement.)

The Union’s politics take the structure of a representative government, with a nominally-elected Assembly and President. However, the ruling Harmony and Peace Party (“Harmony through Obedience, Peace through Control!”) has never been effectively-challenged at any election - power alternates between the various factions within Harmony and Peace, rather than between H&P and other parties. Even the two biggest opposition parties rarely control more than a couple of dozen seats in the Assembly. The Opposition has only ever managed to take a planetary governorship on two occasions in the Union’s history.

Voting in the Union’s elections is conducted along ethnic lines - the three "Federally-Recognised Species" receive the overwhelming majority of Assembly seats, whereas 'associate citizens’ (that is, inhabitants of conquered planets) are limited to a handful of 'group representation’ seats.

Whilst their cultural inclinations are authoritarian, the people of the Union cling to the appearance of a representative government out of memory of the corporate autocracy under NIDA. Some commentators have observed that the Union appears to want to have a democracy, but doesn’t appear to know how to make it work. One serious sociological explanation is that this is actually a product of the collective trauma that was burnt into the society by its early mis-experiences under NIDA’s rule.

As it is founded on conquest and structural injustice, the Union is a restive place. Civil disorder, riots, colonial rebellions and uprisings are common (though not on the capital-planet itself). Consequently the Union maintains a very large military, most of which is dedicated toward maintaining internal security. This, combined with the toxic legacy of discrimination, have placed a large drain on the Union’s economy. Despite being the largest single state in the Exile, both in population and raw number of planets, nonetheless the Union’s economy is actually the smallest of the Big Four.

The Union currently controls 159 inhabited stellar systems. It is the single largest political grouping in the Exile. The Union has a total population of 32.4 billion people.