Uranus and Neptune

Posted by: Maanika Kristoffson, Firewall Proxy

Beyond Saturn’s orbit, the Solar System turns into a sparsely populated wilderness with just a handful of large settlements and countless smaller ones. Uranus orbits at 10 AU beyond Saturn, and Neptune at 10 AU beyond that. The distances between stations and delta-v required to reach them is enormous, growing larger by measures the farther you travel. Life in the rimward system is both fragile and self-sufficient. It’s a hodgepodge of brinkers, anarchists, romantics, scientists, and entrepreneurs — sometimes all combined.

The Ice Giants

Uranus and Neptune are ice giants, comprised of water ice, methane, and ammonia with rocky cores. The resources mined by skimmers on both worlds are vital to life beyond Saturn, from the water that keeps settlements alive to the volatiles used to fuel the freighters that plumb the outer trade routes.

As the saying goes: it’s a cold, rough life, but it beats inner-system bullshit.

Uranus

Uranus has the distinction of hosting most of the civilized settlements beyond Saturn. It’s the last stop for comforts (and vices) before losing yourself in the final wilderness of Neptune and the Kuiper Belt. Most of transhumanity disregards Uranus as a boring backwater not worth the fuel it takes to match its odd orbit. Their loss. Uranus’s oddness, and that of its inhabitants, is precisely what makes it beautiful.

From a distance, Uranus is a stunning, featureless greenish-blue. It’s only when you get closer that you can appreciate the nuances in the clouds, the glittering ring fragments, and the jewel-like moons.

The Sideways

Uranus’s equator is inclined ~98 degrees to its orbit. Uranus’s magnetic field is inclined ~60 degrees as well, though it’s far weaker than Jupiter’s or Saturn’s, making life among the clouds a relative cakewalk. Orbital insertion around Uranus requires a short, furious burn that challenges even the best of pilots (who still require software assistance). It’s one of the reasons Uranus remains remote and largely unsettled.

Life Among the Clouds

Uranus is perfect for supporting aerostats and the local culture of skimmers have turned harvesting volatiles into a cottage industry. Without strong radiation or winds, these aerostats bumble happily along, converting Uranus into useful materials. They range in size from a few dozen people to single-person operations.

Skimmers like their privacy, but if you let them engage you in conversation, you’ll be opening yourself up to dubious stories of derring-do, plausible tales of escaping the authorities, or yarns about shapes in the clouds. Nearly every skimmer has at least one story of a strange heat source, sighting of an off-record ship or aerostat, or something even odder floating among the methane plumes.

Varuna

Varuna is Uranus’s only large aerostat. It’s run by an elected council and acts as a hub for skimmers. A few hypercorps maintain small offices here, trading for volatiles. Visitors find Varuna either provincial or charming.

Several independent and hypercorp-controlled science labs have set up shop on Varuna, One major research project is an attempt to adapt pre-Fall Earth life to create oxygen-free biomes on gas giants. Success would open the colonizable area in the Solar System by several magnitudes.

Uranian Moons

Uranus has six significant satellites and several tiny moonlets in increasingly eccentric orbits. The main moons orbit around the planet’s tilted equator, which means intercepting them from the system’s elliptic takes a hell of a lot of fuel and skill. Most Uranian moons are sparsely inhabited. Due to their inclination, the smaller moonlets may be the last uninhabited places in the system.

Oberon

8,000 of Oberon’s 10,000 inhabitants live in Chat Noir, a frontier outpost run by a handful of anarchist collectives. It has advanced resleeving, egocasting, and manufacturing facilities, primarily to service the Fissure Gate, the only pandora gate in anarchist control. The gate’s discovery transformed Chat Noir from a backwater to a boomtown overnight. So far, the Consortium has been unable to take control of the gate from the anarchists, and Chat Noir’s security keeps it that way.

The Cobweb is one of the premier farcasting facilities in the Solar System, taking advantage of Oberon’s distant orbit from Uranus’s interfering magnetosphere to egocast nearly anywhere. The facility is mobile, crawling across Oberon’s surface on spiderlike legs to achieve maximum signal fidelity. The Chat Noir collectives control Cobweb and only those with a high enough @-rep can use it.

The Consortium and various hypercorps, tired of dealing with the anarchists’ security measures and Chat Noir’s lack of more luxurious amenities, have started prospecting to build a second spaceport on Oberon.

Titania

Titania is synonymous with Xtreme sports, high-end holidays, and media glitz. It started as another autonomist prospector camp, until bored kids began diving from Messina Chasma, one of the largest canyons in the system. Titania’s low gravity means the 0.5-kilometer fall takes a full 51 seconds, and an elastic carbon-fiber cable allows easy return to the base.

A few grainy videos hitting the mesh was all it took for media hypercorps to leap on the commercial possibilities. Now the moon is a resort for inner-system glitterati interested in frontier fun. Most of Titania’s settlements ring Messina Chasma.

The settlement Crossing is the de-facto Xtreme sports headquarters because it hosts the 5-kilometer bridge that crosses the canyon. It’s a classic rural resort town with surprisingly luxurious amenities, from its resleeving facility to its drinking, dining, and sex dens.

Xiphos

At a length of 5.5 kilometers and diameter of 1 kilometer, Xiphos is one of the largest and best-apportioned habitats outside of the Main Belt. It began its life as an O’Neill cylinder before Manu Bhattacharya invested to upgrade it and tow it from Saturn to the Uranian rings. It’s now a research and manufacturing facility where ultimate scientists develop advanced weaponized morphs and technologies. Any attempt to reach Xiphos by unauthorized approach is met with extreme and deadly resistance.

What most outsiders know of Xiphos comes from their annual, three-day Olympics events. Held in the Greek tradition, these games are broadcast across the mesh, but entrance is limited only to Ultimates who can afford the high-end morphs they’re showing off.

Neptune

Posted by: Sutton Wollenbacher, Firewall Sentinel

Cold, dark, and beautiful. That’s Neptune. I relocated here 5 years ago and haven’t looked back. We’re so far away that the rest of the system might as well not exist. Farcasting here is expensive, and arriving by ship is expensive and takes years. The planet itself is several shades of dark blue, and the highest winds in the Solar System batter anyone who tries to descend into its clouds.

Neptunian Culture

There’s two reasons to come to Neptune: to escape or to start over. The entire Neptunian system is home to barely 100,000 people. Here you are valued more for what you do than what you’ve done. Whether you’re running from the law, from obligations, or from some jealous partner you pissed off — no one here cares.

There’s your odd tourist, Xtreme sports enthusiast, or researcher too. My favorites are the prospectors, looking for a gate. “Gates at Mars, Saturn, Uranus, and Eris! There must be a gate at Neptune!” Not yet, but it won’t stop the cowboys from trying.

Most Neptunian life is concentrated on the planet’s moons or on the few habs that circle the ice giant. Except for the handful of known aerostats floating around in Neptune’s 2,000 kph winds, that is.

Mushroom

The brinkers on Mushroom embody the term paranoid: egocasting from a handful of trusted stations is the only way in. If you try to approach by ship, your molecules join Neptune’s beautiful swirling clouds. Once aboard, you’re held in psychosurgery until they determine why you’re there. If they don’t like the reason, you’re ‘cast off.

Mushroom is one of the few places to get an up-close look at Neptune’s roiling clouds and weather, but little research happens here. There are no radio or mesh transmissions allowed out; anyone found attempting to do so is exiled. The stat uses a few strategically placed repeater satellites to receive transmissions, so the inhabitants at least stay up on current events and sports scores.

Who’s footing the bill for this little venture and why? Ask any Neptunian about Mushroom and you’ll get a shrug and a quick change of subject.

Supposedly there’s a habitat called Jaques even deeper than Mushroom. I don’t think it exists.

Glitch

Glitch is the largest processor locus in the system. It’s a refuge for the smartest and most creative transhuman minds. The infomorphs that call it home claim you’re smarter and more creative as soon as you enter thanks to their architectural protocols.

Glitch’s systems allow infomorphs to communicate incredible amounts of information almost instantaneously with the entire locus. Egos arriving on Glitch tend to either leave right away or become permanent residents; those who stay and leave later say disconnecting from the locus is terrifying.

Mahogany

Mahogany was founded on the principle that uplifts and AGIs didn’t require human intervention. It’s now an inspiration for other mercurial colonies, but Mahogany’s autonomy doesn’t mean isolation. Its residents actively participate in system-wide scientific research, political activism, and media production. Mohagonans are most concerned with helping mercurials avoid persecution and establish new communities.

Afrik

Afrik is an attempt by mercurials to create a thriving, pre-Fall African ecosystem on a Torus hab around Triton. Unfortunately it never had the funding to fully realize its vision. The scientists running Afrik filled holes in the ecosystem using gene splicing, nanofabrication, and borrowed xenobiology. It’s worth visiting if only for its uniqueness, but understand that it is not a zoo.

Neptunian Trojans

Posted by: Adam Mooliee, Firewall Sentinel

By the numbers, there are more Neptunian Trojans asteroids than Jovian. Most aren’t larger than 10 km across and aren’t worth a damn in terms of minerals or volatiles, but they make a dandy place to hide. They’re home to tiny, scattered communities of brinkers, survivalists, and other eccentrics; most stations house 500 transhumans or less.

Hawking

Hawking is a hypercorps skunkworks facility. The local brinkers avoid it; ships that get too close are warned once and then fired upon with prejudice. ExoTech’s Morgan Sterling is supposedly one of the facility’s investors. Its research involves theoretical space drives. On the upside, Hawking’s remote location means any physics “mistakes” probably won’t hurt the rest of the system. Probably.

Ilmarinen

Ilmarinen is a celebration of the cold and vacuum of space. Every available morph has substantial environmental tolerance upgrades. The station’s residents freely mix and mingle with the chill and vacuum of the void beyond their walls. Areas containing plants and precious possessions have strict environmental controls; the rest of the hab can depressurize or drop drastically in temperature at any time. The station is a haven for engineers, designers, and techies who prefer to work free from hypercorp influence and control.