Overview Map of Basilea (you can zoom in thru the link!)
My labor of love is finally semi-done! (Hopefully the final version will have more infrastructural info like shuttle routes and lighthouse locations; it’ll probably be a patreon bonus).
[ID: A 2D map of a multi-star system with four suns (Sol Jenya, which has eight planets; Sol Atya, which has four; Sol Minerva, which has one; and Sol Suraya, the outermost without any planets). The system is surrounded and intersected by forty-nine orbits–represented as rings–which are grouped in seven sections. The groups are labeled, from innermost to outermost, ‘the Jenya group,’ ‘the Atya group,’ ‘the industrial group,’ ‘the Minerva group,’ ‘the starlight belt’ (the smallest section with only 1 orbit ring), and ‘the Suraya group.’ The Suraya group has a slight gap and the two rings standing apart from the gap are labeled ‘the palisade.’ Numerous orbiters, satellites, and space stations are represented on the orbits as small white dots in orderly configurations. The orbit rings are labeled from 1 through 49 with roman numerals. End ID/]
While this map is not exactly to scale (if it were most of the planets and structures wouldn’t be visible), it is roughly proportional using the Minerva Unit (the distance from Sol Minerva to Sitheria) as a reference.
Each small white dot outside a planetary system is an astraea-made structure, mostly moon-sized terraformed cities of a few thousand to a few million people.
The orbits of the inner ten orbiters are much more complex than portrayed here as they’re designed to course-correct on a regular basis. Their location on the map is also for readability over accuracy–the goal is for them to follow the habitable zones of the suns as closely as possible.
The inner three rings are uninhabited and are purely for collecting solar radiation and producing these house-sized batteries that have to be shipped in to the “Sun Followers” (the first 6 orbiters built) and their smaller exurbs. Despite getting literally more natural light than anywhere else in the galaxy, these 6 use by far the most power per capita of any residential area, because of course they do.
The “starlight belt” refers to the area of the Rings that gets the least natural light, which despite having no permanent macrostructures is actually fairly populated because it’s the midpoint between the inner rings and the outer ports and also where all the ‘not in my backyard’ stuff, like factory space stations and FTL shipyards, goes. It’s considered the forty-first ring despite not really being a ring so that it can have an envoy to court, although they keep changing who that’s supposed to be. For most people out there unfortunately the law begins and ends with whoever owns the ship/station/temporary building platform they’re tethered to.
The outer two rings are nicknamed the palisade because at one point when the Rings were very new and the LGA wasn’t quite a thing yet they were important lines of defense. The rulers of the outer orbiters, the Nine Marchiesas (one of em’ was supposed to be ring #50 but in actual practice wound up a satellite to the 46th, but that’s another story), still are considered to have a military post out there even though it’s now almost completely ceremonial.
The industrial group hasn’t been purely industrial for a long time, it’s basically the old starlight belt but it’s been built up and nowadays it’s just considered the middle class/new money orbiters. The “mid 20″ were considered rough/poor in the period when Lux was growing up/a young adult, now they’re hipster
(Obviously these are all HUGE generalizations, these are areas of light years and massively diverse with dozens of areas/towns/cities/villages. The lower 10 also have a bunch of agricultural orbiters that are majority working class and a bunch of asteroid-sized orbiters that are like, dominated by one particular immigrant community. I’ll have to make a post describing the character of the different places on a more micro scale but I wanted to give a broad overview so you can at least envision what I’m talking about when I say “the Rings” and “Basilea”
