Friday, November 6, 2020

Star Knight Lore: Terra, Center of Galactic Christendom

Terra, the homeworld of Mankind, and still the seat of the Church in the 4th Millenium embodied still in Vatican City, and as such is one of the most developed systems in the whole of Galactic Christendom. It's time to start talking about what that means.

Space settlement and development centers around the system of Lagrange Points within a given solar system. This follows the model developed when Mankind returned to space after the Cataclysm. After exhausting all of the stable points in near orbit, Man went on to seize the Moon. From there came the settlement of the system of Lagrange Points, which is where the explosion of space colony construction began.

The Earth-Moon set of points, being closest, got discovered and exploited first. As Mankind spread throughout the solar system, other points were found and identified. Each and every Lagrange Point in the Terran System is saturated with space colonies. As each one easily holds a million or more residents (if not tens of millions), and each point can hold massive clusters of colonies of that size, it is not at all hard to see how the population of a given system can have billions of residents just in the space habitations in these points alone. If you add asteroid homesteads, great and small alike, and imagining such a population in the billions is easy to do.

As I imply above, there are multiple sets within a solar system and mapping them out is part-and-parcel to interstellar exploration and colonization. This is how a nation's expansion into space can result in a nation's population exploding into the billions and still live in a manner than folks like Wrath of Gnon (and those he cites) would find charming.

Which leads to how this plays out in Galactic Christendom.

The entire solar system is the sovereign territory of the Church, as agreed to by treaty centuries ago. The nations have estates within it, including on Earth itself, but they are subject to the temporal authority of the Church as soon as they arrive in Terran space. Enforcing this authority is the fundamental mission of the Vatican Solar Guard, so this is where the Guard is headquarters--the Admiralty is on Palatine Hill in Rome--as well as the rest of its institutional infrastructure rests. The other armed elements of the Church are more specialized, and as such often cooperate with the Guard to reduce friction and avoid disorder.

Most of the diplomats are in House-held town homes in Rome, as the Court of Stars is there just outside the Vatican in a fully-restore Roman Senate building. They keep second homes often in other cities on Earth. (e.g. Count Qis's family has a home at Oslo, Norway as they are a Norwegian noble house.) Many also have other Terran holdings elsewhere in the system, be it Earth orbit or elsewhere. The large intersteller guilds also have officials posted in Rome, and otherwise copy the nobles, and therefore the city once more is a hotbed of politicking and intrigue petty and grand alike.

The cities of Earth use the traditional vernacular architecture of that nation, with things like power generation kept to a point that best balances security (political and geological) with accessibility, and are deliberately (re-)created to be walkable from end to end with minimal disruption by any motorized transport. This ethos is replicated in all of the space colonies and other planets in the system, and through the influence of the Church dominates the rest of Galactic Christendom.

As for planetside populations, those are found only on Earth, Venus, and Mars. The latter two had their gravity normalized to Earth-standard during the expansion from the Moon to the rest of the system when colonization of those planets occurred in the wake of their liberation from the Nephilim by means only the Church possesses to this day.

Mars and Venus are terraformed to varying degrees as the original industrial and military concerns behind their colonization passed and it became apparent that long-term peace and security entailed permanent settlement of the planet and its subsequent justification of the world to Christ. This also is why Mercury has its orbital population, despite the planet itself being inherently hostile to Man, as well as why the other planets remain surrounded by orbital colonies; some call it a pacification, and they are not wrong.

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