Guide Entry: DamogranCopy Anchor Link

"Far away on the opposite spiral arm of the Galaxy, five hundred thousand light-years from the star Sol, Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Imperial Galactic Government, sped across the seas of Damogran, his ion-drive delta boat winking and flashing in the Damogran sun.
Damogran the hot; Damogran the remote; Damogran the almost totally unheard of.
Damogran, secret home of the Heart of Gold."

— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 4

Damogran is a hot, remote, and almost totally unheard-of oceanic planet located on the opposite spiral arm of the Galaxy, five hundred thousand light-years from the star Sol. As The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy notes in its introduction on the vastness of space, while light takes eight minutes to travel from Sol to where Earth used to be and four years more to reach Sol's nearest stellar neighbour Alpha Proxima (Alpha Centauri), it takes five hundred thousand years to reach Damogran on the other side of the Galaxy—whereas the record for hitchhiking this distance is just under five years, though you don't get to see much on the way.

Topographical Awkwardness & The Meaningful CoincidencesCopy Anchor Link

Because Damogran consists of nothing but middling to large desert islands separated by very pretty but annoyingly wide stretches of ocean, it has always remained a deserted planet. For this exact reason, the Imperial Galactic Government selected Damogran as the top-secret home of the Heart of Gold project, where its research team developed the golden Infinite Improbability Generator—originally materialized out of thin air by a lab-sweeping student using a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain finite improbability generator and a fresh cup of really hot tea—into a governable form of starship propulsion capable of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second without mucking about in hyperspace.

One of the side effects of work on the Heart of Gold's Infinite Improbability Drive on Damogran was a whole string of pretty meaningless coincidences, most notably the names of the main islands in the only archipelago of any useful size on the whole planet:

1. Easter Island: Site of Damogran's tiny spaceport. The name was an entirely meaningless coincidence—in Galacticspeke, the word easter simply means "small, flat, and light brown."
2. France: The island where the Heart of Gold was built and unveiled, named by another meaningless coincidence. France is about twenty miles long, five miles across the middle, sandy, and crescent-shaped, existing almost as a means of defining the sweep and curve of a huge bay. Its inner coastline consists almost entirely of steep cliffs, from the top of which the land slopes slowly down five miles to the opposite shore.

Indigenous WildlifeCopy Anchor Link

• The Damogran Frond Crested Eagle: A coastal bird that salvaged pages one and two of Zaphod Beeblebrox's discarded seven-page speech from the sea to build an extraordinary new form of papier-mâché nest that is virtually impossible for a newly hatched baby eagle to break out of—having heard of the notion of survival of the species, but wanting no truck with it.

Historical Incident: Unveiling & Theft of the Heart of GoldCopy Anchor Link

On Zaphod Beeblebrox's two hundredth birthday—the great day of culmination when the Heart of Gold was to be introduced to a marvelling Galaxy:

• The Reception Committee: Atop the cliffs of France stood the engineers and researchers who had built the ship—mostly humanoid, alongside a few reptiloid atomineers, two or three green sylph-like maximegalaticians, an octopodic physucturalist or two, and a Hooloovoo (a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue, temporarily refracted into a free-standing prism for the occasion while the others wore multi-coloured ceremonial lab coats), plus party officials, a government spider, a small knot of press creatures with Sub-Etha News-Matics, and Trillian.
• The Arrival & Heist: After zipping across the bay in his Presidential ion-drive delta boat and ascending the cliff inside a twenty-foot transparent globe on a red leather sofa propelled by a boiling water spout, Zaphod watched the huge white dome split and fold into the ground to uncover the 150-metre-long Heart of Gold. Announcing that the ship was "so amazingly amazing I think I'd like to steal it," Zaphod let out a wild whoop in major thirds, threw a Paralyso-Matic bomb to freeze the crowd's beaming smiles, and stole the starship.