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Outer Planets

More than a billion people live in the vast space beyond the orbit of Mars. Most of them are in the belt, or in the Saturn system. It is an economic power-house, concentrating on resource extraction, high-tech manufacturing and advanced R&D.

Uploads hate "lag" (communications delays), so they never ventured far from Earth, leaving the Outer Planets to living humans. Free from the suffocating influence of their "elders", belters have developed a vibrant and diverse culture. New and weird religions and cultural fads arise, split, and fade, yielding a bewildering diversity.

Corporations are the big players out here in the cold far reaches of the solar system. Even the largest colonial governments have little power beyond their immediate volumes. Only the Space Patrol wields any unifying authority.

The espers have managed to suppress major military resistance in the Outer Planets, but they have been completely incapable of occupying more than a tiny fraction of it.

Space Patrol

Space Patrol sigil

The Outer Planets have no central authority, however the Space Patrol is a single organisation that weaves a common thread through all of the OP communities. Cadets are recruited from across the solar system, and trained at their headquarters in orbit around Saturn. From there, officers are dispatched to every community, dispensing justice, and upholding civilized ideals. For centuries, Patrol officers have been the idealised lone heroes of popular imagination.

The Space Patrol sigil is a silver rocketship. Patrol officers wear black jump suits with the silver rocketship swoosh across the breast. Rank is denoted by silver stars on the left shoulder. Cadets wear orange jump suits, with a silver-on-black rocketship patch on the left breast.

Asteroid Belt (pop=1b)

The asteroid belt is home to around 1 billion "belters". A majority of these are homesteaders, who live in independent village-sized groups, on bodies that have been claimed under the terms of the Homestead Treaty. There is a degree of dissatisfaction amongst the less well-off homestead residents. Several large interstellar colony vessels have been launched over the last century, carrying disaffected belters to pastures new. There are a number of bubble-world habs that have been constructed from iron-rich planetoids - the Iron Angels. They are spun for artificial gravity, and use giant mirrors to provide "outdoors" conditions on their inner surfaces. Each bubbleworld is home to tens of millions of belters. The Belt is mostly run on libertarian anarchic principles. The Space Patrol provides a light-touch policing function.

There is a small colony on Jupiter's moon Callisto (pop=800k). This moon-like worldlet is the only place in the Jupiter system that is safe from the giant planet's intense radiation belts. Callisto's main industry is extraction of Helium-3 from Jupiter's atmosphere. The fuel is tanked up and send down to the Inner system in robotic ships, or fired by rail gun. The Callisto rail gun was briefly militarised by the Outer Planets Alliance, until Earth Union fleet units disabled it in 2719 CE. There is a Space Patrol base on Callisto.

Patroclus (pop=25k)

Patroclus colony, at Jupiter's L5 point mines water ice and sells it to asteroid miners.

Saturn system (pop=200m)

The Saturn system is home to hundreds of orbiting space colonies - usually wheel, or cylinder patterns, with populations ranging from 1k to 10m. Their biospheres are sustained by hydrocarbons exported from Titan. In some ways, these Saturn colonies have better living conditions than the moons: they can spin for higher gravity.

The Space Patrol headquarters is on Island One, one of the larger colonies.

Titan (pop=150m)

Saturn's sixth moon Titan has the largest population of any body in the outer system. It has been successfully terraformed, following a pattern that is being emulated by human terraformers of several gas giant moons (e.g. Eridani - 1817). Vast quantities of sulfur hexafluoride have been added to the atmosphere, and warmed by giant orbiting mirrors. Today Titan is a small water-world. Traditionally, the population lived aboard gigantic floating cities - the capital of Titan is Kraken, a floating city-state with a population of 15m. Kraken is renowned as a hub of the arts - theatre, poetry, comedy. Every three years, the Kraken Festival attracts performers and sophisticated audiences from across the solar system and beyond. Floating vegetation-mat species have been imported from a distant world, and now support an oxygen breathing ecosystem - called the "Islands". The largest island city is Prometheus, a manufacturing hub, and home to the Titan Institute of Engineering - a respected university. Titan's main industry is the mass production of organic materials.

Enceladus (pop=20m)

Saturn's second moon is also home to a substantial population.