Earth 2654, Space Travel

The traveling from one world to the other in the Solar System relies on two different transportation “networks”. First a large number of unmanned shuttles, slow moving and inexpensive, that use traditional orbital mechanics to move cargo from one world to the other. Equipped with fusion engines, the shuttles have limited maneuverability, and are not atmosphere worthy. Transfer of cargo from the shuttles to the moons, planets, and asteroids is made with smaller shuttles that do the landings.

The second system is made of faster ships, mainly commercially operated ones, but some private ships as well, that run with more powerful fusion drives and can cover interplanetary distances in a shorter time than the long haul cargos. The fusion drives require a lot of heavy hydrogen, hence the booming hydrogen economy of the gas giants. Such ships can cover the 4.5 billion kilometers between the Earth and Neptune, for instance, in four weeks, and can reach the outermost worlds within six months. Trips are comprised of an acceleration phase, during which there is gravity due to that acceleration, a “cruise” phase, where there is no gravity (spinning ships to induce gravity was tried at some point, but turned out to be causing more space sickness than simple weightlessness), and a deceleration phase, where gravity is present again. Some of the fastest and most advanced ships skip the “cruise” phase altogether, and accelerate up to half of the trip, roll-over, and decelerate the second half of the trip. This allows constant gravity for the passengers, and maximum comfort. The prodigious amounts of energy needed to accomplish this mean that those ships tend to be cramped, because of the amount of fuel to bring along.

For most passengers, space travel is not fun, not to mention expensive. Cramped quarters, no gravity, limited food, all reason that most people try to limit their movement between worlds to the strict minimum. That’s one of the reason most colonization efforts tend to work very well: once you’ve gone to the trip there, you don’t want to go back…

The colony ship sent to Alpha Centauri was a monster: a huge ship, hosting hundreds of people. Its journey lasted close to 50 years. The 4.37 years of delay in signals to and from the Centauri Colony make contact with it very rare, and no one has traveled to Alpha Centauri since the original expedition.

Earth 2654: The League of Worlds, part II

Jupiter

The Jupiter system is one of the busiest places in the Solar system. It is a turning point of commerce from the asteroids and Earth towards the Outer Worlds. The moons of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede are heavily populated, and the abundance of water ice made them ideal colonization candidates. The Trojan and Greek asteroids, two groups of asteroids at the lagrange points of the Jupiter orbit, are exploited by the Jupiter corporation. One of the main export of the Jovian system is heavy hydrogen, extracted from the Jovian atmosphere by robotic Zeppelins, and which feeds the nuclear reactors throughout all worlds.

Saturn

Saturn, with its spectacular rings and its myriad of moons, brought many people to its orbits. Hydrogen collection is also an important economic activity. Its upper atmosphere hosts a number of Cloud cities, devoted mainly to hydrogen mining. Titan is one of the only successes of planetary transformation, mainly because of the abundance of hydrocarbons that could provide a cheap source of energy. Although the cold prevents populations to live on the surface, underground cities house 6 billion people, making Titan the single most populated world after the Earth. It houses the Saturnian Parliment and the seat of the Outer Worlds Union.

Uranus

Uranus is also a Hydrogen mining world, and was the first gas giant to be inhabited itself with the construction of cloud cities in the 24th centuries. The larger moons are inhabited, but by relatively few people.

Neptune

Neptune is the gateway to the Kuiper Belt and beyond, where thousands of rocky and icy worlds host the great variety of humanity: isolation and distance mean that each of those worlds is a closed system, and many of the tran-neptunian colonies were founded by one eccentric or cultural group or another, seeking to flee the levelling forces of the Media Corporations that control mainly earth, but whose influence reach all the way to Uranus. Neptune itself has Cloud cities, like Uranus, but the main population is on Triton, Where bustling spaceport handle the traffic and people to and from the Outer Solar system.

the Kuiper Belt and scattered disc

The Organization of the Kuiper Associated Worlds, seated on Triton, is a very much unorganized association, and most of the Kuiper Worlds keep to themselves. They tend to be “Thematic” worlds, devoted mainly to one specific activity. Monasteries, breweries, instrument makers, games, sex, universities, libraries, ancient Egypt, celts, religious fudamentalists, cults, music academies, zen budist temples, martial arts schools, the whole diversity of mankind. Populated worlds reach far beyond the Outer Worlds, and the largest of those worlds, Yggdrasil, long left undiscovered, is also one of the furthest, lying in the space between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud.