Gamemaster Third Orbital Zone: Terra (IF)

Solar Hard SF Setting

In modern usage, Terra refers to the orbital zone around Earth's orbit of the Sun, while Earth refers specifically to the planet.

Earth

Campanilismo — Italian for “attachment to one’s own campanile (bell tower),” meaning fierce local pride and rivalry.

More than anything else, Earth is rich — rich in culture, in people, in heritage, in variety. And thanks to Earthforce and the colonies, rich in wealth as well. No world is as diverse: there are still tribes living stone-age lives on isolated islands, while others live almost entirely in the virtual. Between them stretch nations, communes, and city-states of endless complexity.

But this richness has bred campanilismo — the world is more divided than ever. Everyone cherishes the local, the distinct, the culturally unique, and with Nemes translating all languages instantly, there is no reason to learn a common tongue. Language and culture have devolved to the local, each community defining itself by its differences.

Earth holds a little over three billion people across a patchwork of blocs, city-states, climate authorities, and charter ports — roughly three-quarters of humanity. By sheer weight of votes, Earth dominates the Commons of Earthforce. Earth can make Earthforce tax the colonies for its benefit, but when it comes time to divide the spoils, it fractures again.

Not that Earth really needs the colonies to survive. The cislunar economy once rescued it from the collapse of the 21st and 22nd centuries, but with only a third of its old population and far greater technology, Earth now thrives on its own. Most resources are abundant, though bulk materials like steel are still cheaper to import. Earth leads in science — especially the humanities — and exports social models, culture, and aesthetics coveted across Sol space.

Half of Earth’s people have worked in orbit or beyond, and this experience has reshaped life at home. The compact, self-sufficient lifestyle of the habitats inspired the rise of arcologies on Earth — towering, self-contained cities near old urban cores, which remain inhabited out of choice rather than necessity, maintained as cultural districts and parks.

Earth is more pristine than it has been in centuries. Agriculture has moved indoors into hydroponic farms, leaving vast regions to rewild. With global warming reversed and most people living in cities or arcologies, most land has become nature reserve. Much of it remains manicured and tame, but true wilderness is returning year by year.

Climate & Ecology

Earth’s biosphere nearly collapsed in the 22nd century, forcing people into cities. Massive carbon capture and orbital sunshades cooled the plane, setting the stage for ecological restoration. The 23rd century became an era of reconstruction — slow, deliberate, and ultimately successful.

Today Earth’s ecosystems are healthier than at any point in a thousand years. Outdoor farming continues, but hydroponics and vertical agriculture provide most food. Restoration projects continue to reintroduce species and rebuild wilderness from the margins outward.

Society & Culture

Earth’s diversity is unmatched. Every district celebrates its own customs, dialects, and micro-cultures, many of them revived or newly invented. With an abundance economy, much of society revolves around cultural work — performance, design, and craft. The human body itself is a canvas: fashion, cybernetics, and gene-tailoring are social statements. Cultural export is a major industry. Offworld ideas take root here, flourish in new forms, and are then re-exported as the next wave of fashion or ideology. Many places have sister communities in space.

Security

Earthside forces are municipal and corporate. Conflicts are common but small — coups, not wars. Apocalyptic cults and ideologies flare up but rarely last; the memory of nuclear populism runs too deep. Communities will starve out extremists rather than fight them.

Earthforce avoids direct rule, but its mere presence deters large-scale violence. Its deployments focus on elevators, lifters, and orbital courts. Since the Fall, anti-Kessler treaties have been ruthlessly enforced — creating debris, or “Kessler spread,” is now treated as a war crime.

Access to Space

Low Earth orbit remains a scar from the Fall — littered with the remains of shattered solar arrays and dead satellites. Only a few narrow “green lanes” are reliably clear, certified by Earthforce and heavily insured. Most traffic rises via offshore fusion lifters, their luminous plumes marking the night sky, or through vacuum trains feeding launch towers along the equator. Passenger launches are rationed and politically coveted; freight ascends through long, calculated windows to Luna and back.

The lifter archipelagos function as charter ports — half city, half spaceport — governed by their own laws and arbitration courts. Here, downcomer elites mingle with groundborn guilds, engineers, and pilots in a constant churn of trade and ambition. Overhead, shade arrays and mass-driver spurs carve bright arcs through the heavens, watched closely by Earthforce patrols enforcing safety and anti-Kessler law.

Economy

Earth’s abundance economy is the envy of the system. The European Union in particular wields immense soft power, setting the safety standards and best practices that shape interplanetary law. Emigration is no longer a necessity but a choice — the mark of ambition or wanderlust. Many young people seek to avoid the gerontocracy of established communes by moving into new space colonies — this has become the main driver of expansion.

Energy — Scarcity is a memory. Thorium breeders dominate the grids; they were easier to restart after the Fall than fusion plants. Thorium is abundant, while fusion remains for industrial peaks and scientific megastructures.

Mass flows — Earth imports phosphorus from the Belt and steel from Luna and exports culture: art, entertainment, software, and biotech. Biological samples and animals are shipped outward to seed ecosystems and nature preserves across human space.

Polity Map

Earth has never been more fragmented, yet regional alliances endure. China and India remain great nations and the European Union is powerful but disorganized. Earthforce provides the closest thing to global oversight, though it avoids overt governance.

American Commerce Accord

The Americas are dominated by this trade-first confederation that links elevator zones, river ports, and orbital hubs under one legal framework. Politics are left to the states, and the old borders have faded. Cultures shift gradually southward from French to English to Hispanic, with revived Amerindian traditions creating new identities as wilderness is restored.

European Union

Formally unified, culturally diverse, Europe mirrors the world itself — united outwardly, divided within. Low population gives even the great cities an air of emptiness, but the countryside remains vibrant. Half the continent supports pastoral agriculture; a quarter is urbanized, and the rest wild. The farming is organic, with a lot of livestock grazing, overseen by shepherds using both dogs and drones.

Indosphere

India has become a federation of city-states. With much of the land made uninhabited by global warming, there was little population in the countryside and much restoration work has been done. Like Europe there is land reserved for pastoralism, but this is only about a quarter of the land, with another quarter as urban areas and the remaining half nature preserves in various stages of recovery.

Sinosphere

China has withdrawn to its Han heartlands, while Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, and Taiwan stand independent. Yet Sinitic culture still links the region from Korea to Vietnam. Political power has waned, but cultural influence has never been greater. People of this region have always been concentrated in cultivated belts with untamed land in between; the settled zones are smaller now, and the hinterlands more untamed than ever.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Climate collapse, famine, and limited nuclear war struck hard but unevenly. Populist mismanagement deepened the disasters, yet in many regions local communities adapted and endured as central states withered. As the old colonial borders dissolved, trade and culture reconnected along ancestral lines. The result is a mosaic of city-states and ethnic polities, thriving in restored heartlands amid vast stretches of uninhabited land returning to wilderness.

Middle East & North Africa

Once scorched and shattered, the region is again habitable. The “meltdown” — the 22nd-century nuclear exchange — destroyed the great cities and left minorities and rural enclaves to rebuild. The survivors formed a mosaic of tribes, sects, and enclaves loosely united under a cultural 'Dar al-Islam'. Israel, having moved underground before the meltdown, survived mostly intact and shared its technologies for subterranean living, giving a new legitimacy as neighboring communities copied their methods. Underground settlements remain symbols of safety and continuity. With ecological restoration a priority during the Golden Age, the temperature is now lower and the land greener than it has been in a thousand years.

Archipelago Compacts

Freedom of navigation has returned, though oceanic bulk trade is rare. Each continent self-sufficent and trades primarily with orbit. Tourism and environmental restoration dominate the seas. Small island nations enjoy outsized influence in the Earthforce Senate and serve as favored sites for diplomacy and leisure.

Undersea settlements are rare but enduring. Built with technology proven in Europa’s oceans, they host research, climate management, and secure data archives. Costly and self-contained, they never grew large — but their secrecy and resilience give them quiet strategic weight.

Switzerland, Bern, and Earthforce

Earthforce was founded in 2068, on an Earth far removed from today’s peace. Registered for neutrality, it chose Bern in Switzerland — a neutral ground financed by cislunar interests. As Earthforce grew into the most powerful interplanetary authority, Switzerland remained neutral largely to protect it — a condition few Swiss objected to.

Earthforce maintains an office in Bern, but its true capital is the vast Bern Orbital at Earth–Moon L1, legally a part of the city of Bern but many times its size and population. There, Earthforce governs at full scale — equal parts parliament, port, and power.

Earthforce

Interplanetary politics are dominated by Earthforce, a colonial administration based in terran space that stewards the solar system. Earthforce is not a government in the traditional sense, but a framework for interplanetary cooperation. Founded in 2086 as a neutral cislunar consortium, it grew into a three-chamber council with small executive arms. Its power rests on prestige, voluntary contributions, and the memory of having led humanity through the Icarus Fall.

Earthforce earned enormous prestige by helping end the climate crisis, which made it a concord between all governments — and subject to public oversight to maintain legitimacy. Over time, after hard bargaining, it became a pseudo-democratic interplanetary council.

Despite the name, Earthforce never answered to Earth; it began as a cislunar commercial combine and was formalized in 2086 in Bern, Switzerland — chosen for neutrality — but always run from cislunar space. Earthforce is governed by a three-chamber parliament, each highly independent. It is effectively three embryonic governments running in parallel. Formally the bodies are styled the Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber of Commons, and the Senate Chamber, though in everyday speech they are simply called the Chamber, the Commons, and the Senate.

Summed up in an adage: Commons says go, Senate says no, Chamber hires the lowest bidder.

Earthforce is not a government, it is a framework for interplanetary co-operation with emergency powers to intervene against human-rights and environmental abuse. Each chamber has its own executive branch. This mandate gradually grew as humanity expanded outward and a few million people. Still, all branches are smaller than one would expect for an authority claiming the whole solar system. In the Icarus Fall emergency, Earthforce briefly became a government of sorts: contributions hardened into taxes, and the Navy expanded greatly, though it remains mostly a civilian force. Earth tries to establish Earthforce as a permanent government, while the colonies want to reduce it to its original framework role.

Chamber of Commerce

• Governance: Corporate votes by Earthforce shareholdings; anchored in cislunar combines and port guilds. Many firms seek incorporation into the commercial Earthforce to gain influence.
• Mandate & tools: Issues the Lunar Credit; oversees finance, registries, ports and lanes standards, and insurer–underwriter compacts. Lender or last resort.
• Current push: Regain control of Earthforce finances by ending levies; restore buffer of resources in cislunar space; harmonize port safety to reopen marginal lanes.
• Fault lines: Perceived “rule by ledger”; currency governance seen as Earth-leaning; accusations of underwriting tax drift via emergency levies.

Lunar Bank issues the Lunar Credit and is the central financial arm of the Chamber, as well as the system’s leading user of qters (quantum hardframes) and distributed ledgers. It runs the microtransaction grid that underpins everyday trade and culture: even in an abundance economy with universal basic income, people seek recognition and credit for work and achievement. Every click, view, or contract access is logged, and the Bank pays out fractional sums from its reserves rather than charging those granted access. This keeps participation free while making popular creators and service providers wealthy. The Bank clears vast volumes of these payments, keeps liquidity flowing, and sets the official interest rate. The Lunar Credit is guaranteed by the Chamber’s cislunar resource baskets; in practice, other resources are priced against their cislunar value. The Bank resists anything resembling a tax, preferring to finance Earthforce internally, and is pushing a name change through council protocols to ease colonial resentment.

The Fall drained the Lunar Bank’s cislunar reserves to perilous levels. In response, it is courting major corporate depositors and underwriters, trading governance influence for liquidity. The result is a volatile credit environment — rapid expansion driven by renewed confidence, but precariously under-collateralized and prone to systemic shocks.

Financial Integrity Directorate (FID, colloq. “Fides”) is the Senate's enforcement arm. It acts as a financial police service, investigates financial manipulation and money laundering, and conducts asset recovery (collateral seizure/repossession) through local courts under Senate-charter law. Fides has some direct enforcement capacity but usually relies on local authorities or other Earthforce agencies.

Stormwatch is Earthforce’s system-wide space-weather service, tracking solar storms and related hazards. Formally under the Chamber, it began centralized but is devolving into regional bureaus — at least one per orbital zone, with multiples in the Belt. Raw sensor feeds stay local; fused forecasts publish system-wide. Colonies press for control of their own bureaus, while Earth insists on a uniform alert code to keep insurers, ports, and accelerators aligned.

Registry Authority maintains registries of ships, habitats, mining claims, and transponder IDs. It issues certifications, manages liens and transfers, and collects modest fees that fund its operations. Disputes over registration are a frequent source of appeals to higher Earthforce bodies.

Standards Bureau sets and enforces interplanetary technical standards: docking rings, Q-time seals, hull alloys, EVA connectors, safety protocols. Though often resented as meddling, its specifications keep the system interoperable and prevent lethal incompatibilities. Colonies regularly lobby for exemptions, yet most still adhere out of necessity.

Commons

• Governance: Proportional by population; an Earth-leaning plurality fractured by campanilismo — polities and NGOs pulling in rival directions.
• Mandate & tools: Writes interplanetary statutes; allocates territorial and charter regimes; may call emergency contributions (now functionally taxes).
• Current push: Keep Earthforce acting like a government — fund Navy rescue, debris remediation, climate nets; universal human-rights and habitat-safety baselines.
• Fault lines: Legitimacy gap from Earth plurality; levies hardened into standing taxes; colonial bloc decries centralization-by-crisis and exploits Earth’s internal divisions.

Navy of Earthforce is the Commons’ most visible instrument, chartered to guarantee freedom of navigation, deliver rescue and relief, and intervene against gross abuses of human rights or environmental safety. Its backbone is small patrol carriers operating in dispersed flotillas; a marine corps trains for boarding rogue habitats or vessels. A wet squadron on Earth’s oceans maintains surface freedom-of-navigation. During the Icarus Fall the Navy’s hardened craft were the first to recover, executing rescues, debris clearance, and triage that saved entire populations. The surge in prestige was immense — but in many colonies it also fixed the Navy as Earth’s arm of coercion. Crews are largely cislunar-born, caught between Commons authority and colonial suspicion, even as most acknowledge the Navy’s role in keeping lanes open and habitats safe.

• Earthforce Navy

Relief and Reconstruction Office (RRO) coordinates disaster response and rebuilding. It emerged from the Icarus Fall, when Earthforce had to triage and restore crippled habitats. The RRO works closely with the Navy’s logistics arm, but emphasizes civilian-led recovery and equitable allocation of emergency funds.

Earthforce Medical Service (EMS) monitors system-wide health risks—epidemics, radiation exposure, vaccination programs, and long-duration habitation standards. Smaller than planetary health authorities, it serves as a clearinghouse for data and issues advisories most polities voluntarily adopt. It also oversees genetic engineering and human enhancement, traditionally a restraining force; regulations were relaxed during the Fall.

Senate

• Governance: One vote per polity; a leading Jovian caucus reinforced by Belt leagues and charter traditionalists.
• Mandate & tools: Upper-house veto (qualified majority); adjudicates inter-polity disputes and treaty breaches.
• Current push: Re-limit Earthforce to a framework — time-limit every levy, restore opt-in programs, strengthen local charters and exemptions.
• Fault lines: Gridlock with Commons; forum-shopping of disputes; Jovian caucus signals conditional loyalty and explores legal paths to secession.

Tribunal of Accord is the Senate’s highest judicial arm, convened only for matters beyond local courts. There are no crimes automatically under its jurisdiction; polities may refer disputes upward, and the Tribunal may self-select cases where precedent, inter-polity conflict, or judicial abuse demand resolution. Anyone may petition, though very few are accepted — screening petitions is a major part of the docket and where junior operatives earn their stripes. Judgments blend law and diplomacy, setting norms for coexistence under the Earthforce charter. The Tribunal can issue writs to local authorities, override abusive rulings, and arbitrate sovereignty disputes. It maintains a small enforcement branch, but nothing like the Navy.

Emblem: a gold rim enclosing a light-blue field; at center, a silver bear rampant facing heraldic sinister, holding a golden balance aloft in its forepaw — strength tempered by justice.

Heraldic blazon: A roundel azure, a bear rampant argent facing sinister, sustaining in the forepaw a balance or; all within a bordure or.

Accords Mediation Service (AMS) attempts to resolve disputes before they reach the Tribunal. Its mediators and legal scholars broker settlements, draft charters, and shuttle between blocs. While often overlooked, their quiet diplomacy prevents many crises from escalating to formal litigation.

Adventure Hooks

Shade Ledger Heist — A city alleges Bern’s vane schedule stole two harvest weeks. Prove fraud or expose a local counterfeit.

Dead Boroughs Seat — A shell constituency swings a Board vote. Burn the paper trail in Bern Orbital or flip the proxy holder.

Weather Debt Riot — Mandated flood-release for a delta authority sparks unrest — and a sabotage campaign against sluice control.

Elevator Blackout — A debris forecast shutters an elevator cone; your client must smuggle a VIP via an offshore fusion lifter before a trade tribunal convenes.

Carbon Bounty War — Competing capture firms game measurements; a whistleblower vanishes between port arbitration and an ACA court.

Bern Orbital

Bern Orbital is a vast open-sky ring habitat, built at the Earth – Moon L1 NRHO. Its two counter-rotating graphene spines generate 0.9 g at a radius of 103 km, each with a 10 km-wide living deck. Rim speed is just under a kilometer per second, giving the apparent sky a twelve-minute revolution and a slow 0.5° drift of the stars. The side walls are cable-net membranes that trap a one-bar atmosphere; bay shutters and gas reserves can seal any section within seconds after a strike.

The Orbital was solar-powered before the Fall, its sky lit by a swarm of heliostats and day-night shades. During the Kessler years the mirrors were destroyed, and the station was reconfigured for fusion alone. Laser-based heat dumpers replaced radiators, venting waste energy as narrow beams aligned with tug plumes. Today the heliostat constellation is being rebuilt; sun-tracking panels on the ring remain in use as backup. The Shade Guild, a cross-chamber Earthforce bureau, manages lighting and seasons, a comfortable sinecure for the children of insiders and a valuable stepping-stone to higher office.

Legally, Bern Orbital is Swiss territory, a compromise that confers Earth residence and neutrality. In practice, Dexter ring —the “right bank” — is under Senate protocols. Here Earthforce maintains its headquarters, the three chambers, and an enclave of some fifteen million permanent residents plus millions of transients. Prestigious housing and tourist resorts occupy the surface, with infrastructure and agriculture buried below. Dexter is both resort and capital: its exaggerated mountains echo Switzerland, but unlike the original, these slopes are open to mass tourism.

Sinister, the “left bank,” is Earthforce’s logistics and training hub. A million crew live here, with surge capacity for several million more during exercises. It is effectively under continual operational law, though after two centuries of peace enforcement is lax. Visitors whisper of secret fleets and alien embassies; in practice, the districts are parade grounds, barracks, ports, and recreation areas.

• Bern Orbital

Cislunar Space

Cislunar space is humanity’s oldest frontier and still its busiest. Generations of rebuilding after the Fall have turned it into a layered, working landscape — crowded, but stable, prosperous, and confident in its own routines. Cislunar space is a cluttered, hazardous frontier shaped by centuries of expansion, conflict, and the aftermath of Icarus Fall. In the early expansion period, cislunar space was a place of proxy conflict and bitter competition that over time developed its own identity and finally independence. By no means a unified state, it was dominated by lunar mining conglomerates that worked together to create Eartforce in 2086. This started a period of growth that resulted in the Golden Age 2102-2310. Cislunar space became the dominant power in the solar system; dozens, then hundreds of habitats led the way in colonization of the rest of the system, while also helping Earth's ecological — but not political — recovery.

Kessler Space

All of this was solar powered, huge shades that reduced the temperature of Earth and also generated huge amounts of power. This all came falling down in in In Icarus's Fall. The orbital environment around Earth and the Moon was choked with debris and derelict satellites, creating a dangerous “Kepler syndrome” that complicates navigation and transit. Most tiny objects have burned up by now, making previously inaccessible areas merely dangerous — still far from safe. But low earth orbit is still dangerous. Abandoned habitats and the ruins of solar architecture this means salvage is a thriving business.

The congested debris fields and damaged infrastructure of cislunar space create unique adventure zones. Smugglers and runners use risky passages through the junk fields to bypass patrols and cut time, while insurance companies aggressively deny claims tied to these routes. Salvage hunting remains profitable but lethal; most easy targets were stripped clean decades ago, leaving only hazardous, heavily contested wrecks. Intelligence on salvageable sites and hidden hazards is highly valuable — espionage, sabotage, and information warfare are staples of cislunar intrigue.

Cislunar Civilization

Today cylinder habitats and stations cluster around Earth, Luna, and their Lagrange points. Today's habitats are more uniform in size, fusion-powered, built in the great restoration effort after the fall. Older habitats still hang around, both larger and smaller than this standard — these are oddball polities that range from the poorest to the very wealthiest, retaining habits from the Golden Age and even earlier earlier.

From low orbit to the lunar Lagrange points, thousands of habitats, shipyards, and relay stations form a continuous chain of light. Every orbit has a purpose: power, fabrication, logistics, or governance. Earth’s gravity keeps the region bound together, while short transit times make it the hub of interplanetary trade and culture.

Centuries of coexistence have created a pragmatic civic culture. Station authorities compete, cooperate, and interlock through guilds, treaties, and arbitration boards rather than wars. People here value competence and continuity more than ideology; reliability is currency. Cislunar citizens are cosmopolitan, well-educated, and used to living with constant negotiation — a culture of professionals who expect to make the system work rather than tear it down. For all its scars and clutter, cislunar space remains the beating heart of human civilization, where innovation, art, and policy still set the rhythm for the rest of the Solar System.

Hovering in the background is Earthforce, in cislunar space mainly identified as the Chamber of Commerce, the banker, broker, and owner of vast resources. Shares are based on adding to these stores, creating a voluntary system of taxation that concentrates a lot of power in cislunar space.

Cislunar Habitats

• Spin Habitats

Plover Spindle — Tier I

25 m radius × 1 km length. A thread-thin salvage spindle that never standardized. Built to the very minimum radius of human health, the personnel has either lived her for decades or were born here, but still take medications to fight vertigo and spend most of their time in vertical work coffins, moving the entire coffin into their salvage ships. Plover thrives on “needle lanes” through Kessler pockets, harvesting guidance cores and radiator spars with hand-flown skiffs. Deck space is cramped; bunks stack three high beside tool cages. Culture is fatalistic and funny, with memorial walls at every lock. Reputation: the best small-part appraisers in cislunar. They are poor in cash, rich in know-how, and welcome by name at every scrapper bar.

Acheron Yard — Tier 1

50 m radius x 500 meter length. Acheron Yard drifts in a marginal lunar orbit, half shipbreaker, half den of thieves. Officially a licensed salvage consortium, it “recovers” derelicts and debris from old Earth–Luna lanes; unofficially, its crews have a habit of finding ships before their transponders go dark and cargo loads from the Belt and Mercury before they are registered. The habitat itself is a 50 m radius spindle, cobbled together from scrap hulls, its rotation uneven enough that visiting crews often feel the wobble in their stomachs. The interior smells of oil, ozone, and rust. No one admits to piracy — every cutter swears to registry and salvage law — yet navies quietly blacklist its contracts. Still, Acheron’s scrap auctions and repair slips are too useful to ignore. When a wreck drifts too far into danger or jurisdiction, someone from Acheron will already be there, cutting it apart in silence.

Vulcan’s Rest — Tier 2

125 m radius x 2 km length. Vulcan’s Rest is a low-gravity foundry station orbiting near the Moon’s trailing limb, built to refine regolith metals into quick-turn bulk feedstock. Its 125 m ring houses just a few thousand workers, most on permanent contract. Inside, every surface is coated with the fine gray dust of processed lunar slag; air filters roar constantly. The foundry’s strength is speed and price, not quality — it produces “cheap-and-cheerful” steel, titanium, and aluminum for orbital construction, built to spec only loosely. Workers boast that if it can melt, they can pour it. Shipwrights buy their metal here when margins are thin, supplies turn up short, and inspectors aren’t looking too closely. On paper Vulcan’s Rest is profitable; in practice it’s held together by patch welds, loyalty, and caffeine.

Ruthenium Vale — Tier II

120 m radius × 3 km length. Mid-size refiner that took in regolith volatiles and NEA concentrates before the Fall and retooled for post-Fall trace-metals cleanup. Vale’s long arc furnaces and cold traps still do boutique runs of rhenium, hafnium, and doped ceramics. The community is craft-proud and union-strong; every promotion is voted. Visitors note ritualized shift handovers and a chapel to “Saint Tolerance,” patron of tight specs. Their alloys certify parts used by Concord Lineworks.

Hecate Ladder — Tier III

400 m radius × 8 km length. An old mixed-use cylinder with terraced farms on one half and refit vaults on the other. Hecate’s claim to fame is a “black book” of pre-Fall connector standards and the artisans who can still machine them. Families here run multi-generation shops; public theaters stage plays about safety audits. Ladder politics are baroque but stable. If you need a weird coupling or a pressure door that matches a 2197 ring, Hecate makes it and ships on time.

Helio Service Ring — Tier III

2 km radius x 60 km length reconstruction hull. A Stormwatch-aligned maintenance city that calibrates sensor packages and replaces scorched skins on sun-rated hardware. The habitat runs “flare weeks” where all shifts flip to storm-time protocols for drills. Culture celebrates readiness; kids learn shade geometry before algebra. Helio’s export is certified reliability. Expect strict EVA quals and surprise audits of visiting craft. In return, Helio signs off your gear for near-Sun work without a second look elsewhere.

Concord Lineworks — Tier IV

2 km radius x 60 km length reconstruction hull. A post-Fall yard-city standardized for refit and certification. Concord turns derelict frames into insured hulls that meet current Standards Bureau specs. It hosts registrar offices, arbitration docks, and a ring of bonded slipways sized for shuttles through medium freighters. Culture is guildish and by-the-book; crews rotate through fixed 12/12 shifts and live in identical stack flats. Known for quick-turn inspections, honest defect lists, and a zero-bribe culture that infuriates fixer types. Pros: predictable slots, clean supply chains. Cons: fines for “creative” paperwork.

Larkspur Commons — Tier IV

2 km radius x 60 km length reconstruction hull. A residential and services cylinder feeding Bern Orbital’s overflow. Schools, clinics, and cultural exchanges dominate the interior; half the deck is parks and day-care coops. Larkspur sells “terran-normal childhoods” to cislunar families. Employment is education, care work, and public-sector contracting. Its culture prizes soft standards and mediation. Visitors find community boards everywhere and volunteer rosters that actually fill. Known to incubate NGOs that later migrate to Bern.

Parallax Clearinghouse — Tier IV

2 km radius x 60 km length reconstruction hull. A finance and clearing node for small-port invoices, salvage liens, and micro-royalties. Parallax hosts Lunar Bank satellites, insurer desks, and a busy dispute floor for escrow releases. The deck plan centers on trading pits and quiet arbitration suites. Residents skew to analysts and paralegals; nightlife is subdued, dress codes are not. Parallax’s “three-quote rule” for any job above a threshold is unpopular with hustlers but keeps scams rare.

Port Calder Bench — Tier IV

2 km radius x 60 km length reconstruction hull. Standardized logistics cylinder at a cleared cone to an offshore fusion lifter. Calder’s ramps, bag-habs, and bonded warehouses move bulk quickly between elevator, lifter barges, and Luna rails. Everything is color-coded and timed to the minute. The place feels like an airport that actually works. Customs is digital-first with human spot checks. Calder’s crane guild will loan a driver at cost to keep schedules; miss your slot twice and you are parked at the far end of the queue.

Fortuna Caisson — Tier IV

2 km radius × 80 km length reconstruction hull. Grand-style cylinder from the late Golden Age, now a white-collar powerhouse. Fortuna pivoted from refinery operator to lender, insurer, and portfolio manager for mid-belt yards. The agricultural band remains, but the main revenue is banking, registry services, and risk modeling. Residents live under vaulted “skies” with curated seasons; status comes from which underwriting house hosts your salon. Outsiders joke that Fortuna smells like old money and fresh varnish. They sponsor Parallax’s arbitration floor.

Victoria Array — Tier V

2 km radius x 60 km length reconstruction hull. A research and medical services habitat rebuilt to a uniform spec for clean-room biotech and gene-therapy trials under EMS guidance. Victoria hosts traveling specialists from Earth universities and maintains the most complete posthuman health registry in cislunar. The social vibe is academic, with poster sessions in public greens and lab cafes open late. Treatment waiting lists are long but fair; charity flights from Luna bring low-grav kids for corrective work. The habitat itself is one of the standard Tier IV type mass-produced during reconstruction, with the colony is rapidly outgrowing — a new habitat is being built but finance has slowed its construction.

Tycho Meridian — Tier V

4 km radius × 200 km length. A sprawling old giant that once anchored three rails to Luna and now runs on fusion and inertia. Meridian houses universities, think tanks, and a dense web of standards committees. Its cultural quirk is obsessive record-keeping: every meeting is transcribed and published. Deals struck here move policy in half the zone. Wealth shows in public infrastructure rather than private mansions; the transit is free and never late. Earthforce recruits staff from Meridian’s civil academies.

Arcadia Magna — Tier VI

28 km radius × 1,600 km length. The great whale of cislunar. Arcadia is a sovereign city-bank with continents of interior and a skyline of terraced towers. In the boom it created asteroid mills; today it owns the leases on those owners. Banking, insurance, culture exports, and white-collar placement make it fabulously rich. Its quirks are elaborate etiquette and hereditary “letters of standing” that unlock lounges, libraries, and vote-weighting in guild chambers. Arcadia funds prizes for ecological art on Earth and scholarships for Luna’s “farmers” who want out of the pits. When Arcadia sneezes, underwriting rates across Terra shift by basis points the next day.

Concordat Wharves — Tier VI

35 km radius × 1,000 km length. Cislunar space used to be full of wharves that built everything from shuttles to interplanetary colony ships. Gradually most ship-building moved to the Belt or to Mercury, closer to the raw materials. Cislunar wharves had to consolidate, the result is Concordat Wharves, surrounded by a web of spines and construction robots. The old corporations still exist inside the concordat, making it its own worst competitor. In the post-Fall world business has been booming, making the habitat rich but creating many independent competitors. The station features showrooms by the various firms, along with proud models from their own history. In the zero-g axis the old Clark Station, the first cislunar habitat, now rotates in the open air as a memorial of humanity's first foray into space.

Luna

The Moon is politically and culturally fractured. Control is split between Earth-based powers, independent settlements, and external factions from the Belt and Jovian space. Still there is a Lunar culture, that is similar to Jovian culture in its strict work ethic and tolerance for cramped living. People travel between the different factions on Luna, cooperating to ignore the strict borders set by offworlders.

Early colonies began in lava tubes and expanded through excavation mining, controlled by large entities with heavy machinery. Moon gravity remains a constant health problem: some cities rely on rotating structures dug into lava tunnels to simulate Earth-like conditions; others use genetic engineering to adapt the human body, still others commute to habitats in space. These differing approaches have hardened into cultural divisions between habitats. Those adjusted to the low gravity form an underclass, with those commuting to space habitat as an upper class and the surface spin gravity habitats somewhere in the middle.

Luna’s main exports are metals, silicates (for electronics), oxygen (for air and propellant), water (for reaction mass), and and the fusion fuels deuterium and tritium. Tritium is skimmed of Luna's DD fusion plants, which is not effective but the loss is acceptable. What the Moon lacks is carbon. Biochemicals must be imported and meticulously recycled. It's considered rude to eat and not use the restroom.

Regolith mining on the surface is something else: dangerous, dirty, small scale, and mostly handled by independent crews — tough, low-gravity–adapted, and defiant. Derisively called “farmers,” they resist corporate, Jovian, and Earthforce control, making them central to black markets, sabotage ops, and free-Luna movements. They despise fixed-price contracts and prefer to deal with outsiders and smugglers.

The most heavily guarded sites on the surface are the magnetic accelerators that launch cargo and passengers offworld. In the boom before Icarus Fall, dozens of rails formed the backbone of the cislunar economy, shipping thousands of tons per day and making possible both Earth’s climate recovery and the colonization of the solar system. Today, only four major long-range accelerators remain in service with many more in ruins.

• Silver Spoke – 50 km passenger-rated launcher to lunar orbit, marketed to tourism and prestige travel. Can only run at low Gs.
• Blue Horizon – 50 km passenger-rated launcher to lunar orbit, handling most commercial passenger traffic. Can potentially ship cargo out of Luna's gravity well but is monitored to prevent this.
• Esperance – 30 km Earthforce-controlled cargo rail capable of launching heavy loads past lunar orbit to Earth or interplanetary trajectories.
• Iron Lance – 25 km launcher officially rated for cargo to orbit, but capable of high-G launches to Earth and used for passenger smuggling. Operated by “farmer” syndicates and small traders, it is a known hub for black-market dealings and could be weaponized.

Dozens of shorter and less secure 15 km rails remain in operation for bulk cargo to lunar orbit. These feed short-haul trade and local industry.

Example Habitats

Dvaraka — Tier II

Dvaraka is a labyrinthine lava-tube city, home to thousands of degraved — humans whose physiology has adapted fully to lunar gravity. Their bones are light, their gait floating, their eyes enormous. They call surface-dwellers “mudmen,” mocking their dependence on gravity crutches and daily exercise cycles.

Built around geothermal vents and low-g gardens, Dvaraka sustains itself through regolith refining and emergency rescue work: fire suppression, hull patching, reactor quenching. When disaster strikes in another settlement, Dvarakans arrive first — their frail bodies risking gs they otherwise avoid.

They are proud, insular, and notoriously blunt, a caste apart in lunar society. Others view them as indispensable but unsettling: living proof that humans can become something other than human.

Amundsen Reach — Tier III

Set within the Amundsen Crater at the lunar south pole, Amundsen Reach anchors a web of surface spin habitats—half-buried cylinders rotating at gentle gravity for sleep and exercise. The crater floor is in eternal shadow, ideal for cryogenic mining. Vast fields of teleoperated drills and extractors harvest volatiles and metals from the cold trap. Operators work from the comfort of the spin habs on the sunlit rim, directing machines below with radio viable in the eternal shadow of the deep crater..

The community is small, unionized, and methodical — days marked by maintenance cycles and radio silence when storms interfere. Their culture prizes precision and endurance, quietly proud of living where the Sun never rises. Amundsen Reach is officially neutral, yet rumors persist that its telemetry relays double as deep-space listening posts.

Mare Laboris — Tier IV

Mare Laboris sprawls across the northern basalt plains, a rough belt of mobile mining crawlers and service domes connected by rail. Using teleoperation via laser link from orbit and relayed by cable to local senders as much as possible. Still many of its miners work onboard their rigs, especially outside and during the lunar day, steering massive fusion-driven diggers that scoop, melt, and refine ore in situ. The settlement aboveground is transitory — supply pads and launch spurs moving with the fleet — but every worker rotates through orbital housing at Mare Station, a mid-tier ring offering Terran gravity, schools, and clean air.

Mare Laboris thrives on industrial pragmatism: quick contracts, hard labor, and little patience for politics. Its shuttles and mining vehicles double as lifeboats, making every crew self-reliant and hard to intimidate.

Near Earth Asteroids

• Belters Guide to Asteroid Mining
• Spin Habitats

A near-Earth asteroid is one whose orbit keeps it near Earth’s distance from the Sun for most of its path. They are not “close” in the sense the Moon is — early spacecraft took months to reach them, and even with modern ion drives, travel still takes days. The same applies to all asteroids inside the main belt, though those with more eccentric orbits are even harder to reach and harvest.

Resources from near-Earth asteroids were essential to kickstart the cislunar economy, and they remain the inner system’s most important source of carbon. This carbon is found in regolith asteroids — loose collections of space sand and dust. In microgravity, mining regolith directly is inefficient, even dangerous, as most of it drifts off to become dangerous debris. The standard method is to heat the regolith until it gasifies, then collect the released gases for processing.

Many of these asteroids were eventually mined out, leaving only their hollowed husks and abandoned mining equipment — valuable salvage for later ventures. Some installations may even harbor desperate survivors, overlooked or abandoned during evacuations or simply forgotten in the chaos of the Icarus Fall.

Example Habitats

Khepri Station — Tier III

Khepri Station clings to the surface of asteroid 611 Khepri, a loosely bound regolith body rich in carbon, sulfur, and trace metals. The colony began as a spin ship from Earth and is rebuilding itself into a larger habitat from its own surplus material.

Mining started in the open, but drifting dust and debris forced the crew to bag the asteroid inside a vast, home-made net. The miners’ ovens extract volatiles by flash-heating regolith into gas, then separating and refreezing it into feedstock for export and construction. Carbon and sulfur flow inward to the markets; iron, nickel, and silicates are smelted into bulk plates for the growing ring. The expansion is a slow-motion terraforming effort — the skeletal frame of the future habitat already glitters in sunlight, kilometers wide, but only a few interior sectors are sealed and livable.

When the ring closes and the “open-air” gardens can finally pressurize, animal life will return. For now, the colony keeps only a few hardy species — geckos, cats, hairless rats, and a clutch of radiation-damaged hamsters. Breeding pairs of any other stock fetch prime prices.

Khepri’s people insist they are building a world, not just mining one. The words carved over the lock gates read: “We dig to build the sky.”

See Also

• Spin Habitats
• Belters Guide to Asteroid Mining
• Bern Orbital
• Earthforce Navy