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Welcome to: Cosmic rage!

By Nathan Tech!

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general help: backstory of space

this file is for those who are interested in how things came to be.
this content is purely to enhance your roleplay experience.
You can also find out about this information from NPC's in character.
As you may have expected, humans in the early days used Astronomical Units.
Dragons also had their own thing.
This caused quite the problem then when when the races became allies and tried to direct each other to certain destinations!
"It's 5 AU to the east!" said Pilot Bob.
"Five Astro what now?" asked Jim golden Scale, wondering what drugs Bob had been taking.
Something had to be done.
that is why in discussions with the Galactic Senate, the sDL came up with a system called Polaris.
The full name was Polaris expansive Navigational coordinated Intergalactic lining system, but everyone kept shortening that to pencils and so it was shortened to Polaris.
The Polaris has been in force since the early 2200's and is unlikely to greatly change any time soon. there have, of course, been minor additions or subtractions over the years, but for the most part things remain stable.
As far as your character goes, Polaris is definitely a word they would know. They would know that Polaris is the name of the system behind how space is mapped out.
they would also know what the terms box sector, local space and deep space mean. Please see the linked help files for more information.
Expansion has come and gone in waves over the years, but the most stable and successful has always been state sponsored.
In the old days, this would be expansion done by Earth countries such as the USA, Russia and so on. These days that usually means Galactic Senate sponsored.
There have been, and still remain, some very successful colonies that were set up by business ventures or even small groups of pioneers but they are, alas, the minority.
colonization is an insanely expensive task, there's more to think about than terraforming which is a job all of its own.
Gravity generators have to be set up, weather monitoring stations, satellites and more.
You may notice as you cruise around the game that most of the sectors run in a straight north south line.
There are a few contributing factors to this but the biggest one is simply the fact of known data.
The first countries explored northward outside of the solar system. Other countries new what was there, they knew it was safe, so they carried on going that way.
Of course expeditions went in the other directions, but why sacrifice money by going very far west to find a planet, when instead you can go north, refuel at Maraquda and then carry on going that way? Surely it's much safer. "colonization is expensive enough!" cried politicians.
colonization of new sectors was doubly expensive, because there was that much more of a travel time.
You may be wondering, and rightly so:
"So what happened to solar systems?"
nothing, they still exist, indeed if you go to Earth your computer will tell you that you are in Sol's solar system.
In the older days of piloting, by this we're talking about pre 2300's, pilots saw everything.
Every planet, every station, every trading platform and every little monitoring station. Including the satellites for the mobile phone network!
I'm sure you can imagine, their sensor screens just became walls of data that really the computer could handle and they didn't need to know.
As such, Polaris was updated to allow for sensor categories. Essentially what this boils down to is that a pilot sees only what is relevant to him.
So a pilot who is a trader will only see trading ports.
A pilot who works in communications will see communication stations.
You, as a general purpose pilot, see stations that are open to you. You don't see satellites that are not relevant, or factories of big companies you have no reason to visit, your computer simply processes the data, and moves you around them so you never crash into them.
OOCly: This is the explanation given as to why there are not millions of stations and planets in the game. We might have fantastic builders, but they can't make that much!
What all this comes down to in terms of solar systems is that the planets are there, you just may not necessarily be able to see them because they're not relevant to you or not open to the public.
The best example here is Sol's system.
Venus, or as it was renamed in the 2180's Alpha, is closed to the public because of high crime rates. This is set to change in the near future, with the Galactic Senate investing money in new builds but that's something you'll have to puzzle out in character.
Pluto you don't see because it was lost in the disaster.
All the other planets though you see but dwarf planets you don't, because there's nothing to see.
If a host finishes working on a new planet and it gets put in an orbit that is in an already established sector, we will always provide an IC explanation for why you couldn't see it and now can.
This can be as small as negotiations with the planet's government (as in the case of Diana) or as big as new investment in the planet (like with Venus/Alpha).
Recommended help files: help getting started with space on the game,help Deep Spac.
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