My Life As A Writer: What a Mature System Looks Like In Galactic Christendom

Galactic Christendom is a star-faring civilization. This means not only that Mankind has spread to planets beyond our own solar system, but that each settled system becomes a very dense network of planetside habitats (surface and subsurface), orbital habitats, and space stations in every possible Lagrange point in that system. Let's look at what that means in practice.

Using the home of Mankind--Terra--as an example of a mature system development, let's start with the settlement locations. Each planet is saturated with orbital facilities in addition to its planetside settlements and developments. Most of them use the O'Neill cylinder style popularized by Mobile Suit Gundam and Babylon 5, and they are built not as single entities but in large clusters arranged to facilitate mutual defense from hazards both natural and otherwise. These are not small stations. Each can hold a standing population of over a few million and transient populations of nearly as many. (Most of these are pilgrims, merchants, or out-system nobles visiting estates in the system.)

Due to the large number of celestial bodies with interacting orbits in the system--moons, planets, and the Sun itself--there is a massive number of Lagrange points wherein yet more space station clusters can be constructed and sustained due to the stability of the gravitational forces therein. Frontier systems usually focus on saturating the primary planet's points before spreading out (e.g. New Edinburgh), while mature ones will have hundreds of space colonies at every point. Over time some of these points, being so remote from the rest, either become nests of political or religious trouble or are staked out by officials specifically to prevent that from happening.

This vast, spread-out population within a solar system would not hold together with a unified sense of identity if it were not for the speed of both transit and information. The latter allows localities to maintain connections with the wider system community, and thereby through to even larger polities. The former means that travel in-system isn't so far that it becomes nigh-impossible to respond to local emergencies in a timely manner.

This is because a logical consequence of mapping out these Lagrange point systems is that savvy and skilled navigators can quickly navigate the fastest routes, some sticking to safe means and the more hot-blooded resorting to far more dangerous--but faster--means to get from here to there.

The last big population presence in-system is in the asteroid belts of the system, especially the mega-belt between Mars and Jupiter. Here is where asteroid-based colonies, using techniques originally pioneered for settling Earth's moon, are the norm. By the 4th Millenium, even these enjoy the benefit of artificial gravity and so don't resort to the same means that the cylinder-styled colonies do. The sizes vary, and rarely do you get one so large as to make a million-strong population viable, but that of a village or a small town are found in this belt and in the asteroid clusters elsewhere in-system.

You will find these settlement patterns repeated throughout Galactic Christendom, and the result is a predictable flow of traffic between points therein. Therefore most of the actual space of a solar system is rendered irrelevant; as there is nothing there to exploit, and nothing to conceal your presence, there is no reason to be there. The practical star-farer, therefore, conceives of systems only in terms of points of interests and distance between them.

And as for the common man, unless his is a family whose trade requires travel or he's either on campaign or pilgrimage, "far away" means "across the system" and "that place I'd like to go someday" would be interstellar in scope and scale.