The Inner Sphere
Inner
Sphere Colonies- click for larger image
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The Inner SphereInner
Sphere Colonies- click for larger image
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Locations in the Inner Sphere, viewed
from above the Galactic Plane from Galactic North. Note; the grid has a
scale of 10 light years per square Links to visible locations Aardwolf | Ain Soph Aur | Ao Lai | Arcadia | Atlantis | Audubon | Bolobo | Bourgatov | Caph | Daedalus | Daffy | Dante | Danzig | Darwin | Dionysos | Diwali | Ecotopia Dyson | Eostremonath | Felicidade | Fons Luminis | Halcyon | Nessus (Alpha Centauri) | New Mars | New Root | Novoterra/Nimbus | Nova Terra | Ouaddai | Pacifica | Penglai | Bill and Bull | Sesharia| Silence | Tierra del Fuego | Terranova | Turing | Twilight |
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This view shows the Inner Sphere from a
viewpoint above the Galactic plane and to rimward and counterspinwards
of Sol. The location of Sol is marked by a red diamond. Links to visible locations (additional to above) Deucalion | Kiyoshi | Oikoumene Dyson Swarm | Trees | |
At the center of human space lies the Inner Sphere / Core / Old Worlds / Local Bubble / Centre / Hub / Alpha. It is a roughly spherical region of the earliest colonised worlds, approximately 200 lightyears in diameter. It is the home to many of the oldest cultures or inhabited worlds, contains many capital systems and a dense mesh of wormhole links. Due to the age and historical complexity of the region many empires and other political units overlap or mesh.
As humanity and terragen civilization spread, much colonisation occurred radially outwards which made most of the main empires look roughly like pyramidal frustrums. This tendency was emphasized by the wormholes, as the expense of wormhole building led to a treelike topology with the root near the core and the branches extending outwards. This radial structure has led to the core practice to name regions/radial directions after the ancient earth constellations; "Centaurus" refers to the pyramid extending from the Sun in the Centaurus direction. This is what is meant when someone says that the Solar Dominion mainly lies in Ursa Major, Canes Venaticorum and Lynx. This is of course both inexact and solarocentric, but works most of the time and has actually been used by interstellar cartographers.
In the outer parts of inhabited space the radial pattern breaks down, as the colonisation fronts grew increasingly diffuse and were often affected by the density of habitable worlds, wormholes or other features. The empires dissolve into a mess of independent clusters, isolated worlds, small colonisation spheres launched from especially vigorous cultures.
