///From the author: this is a brief rundown on the location of Europa, as featured in the upcoming Spacers Saga story, The Europa Goodbye. Included are a couple of maps put together to illustrate the basic look and feel of the settlements there, as well as some lore about the history and present of the frozen moon circa 2351 CE, when the story takes place - with luck, this one will be out for you all to see in full sometime next year. When it is, these maps might just make it into the addendums, and the lore therein will be more fleshed out as a matter of course
Map and Background of Europa
Demographics/Statistics
First reached by humans: July 2029 (uncrewed); October 2091 (crewed)
Current gov't: Europan Resource Authority, est. February 2216
2389 Population: approximately 3.2 million (estimated per the 2386 census)
Capital: Port Midas, Connemara distric; population approx. 1.3 million
Affiliation: Interplanetary Cooperative Administration; Interplanetary Dynamics
Government: quasi-democratic corporate oligarchy (administered by the ERA for IPD); seat of power - the ERA Presidium, Central Control Terminal
Primary industries: high-tech R&D; cryo-computing (intense cold used to support high-speed computation); shipping (IPD oversees roughly seventy percent of ICA deep sapce trade in the outer solar system)
Historical Notes
Jupiter's second large moon was first settled in 2112 as part of the Pathfinder Organization’s push to establish a permanent human presence in the outer solar system. During the expansion into deep space which filled much of the 22nd century, Europa became a hotbed for research projects of questionable moral standing, conducted under the authority of the ICA and specifically the Spacer Corps’ STRATCOM.
After hosting the infamous IDC black site at Kelvin Station throughout the 22nd century, Europa has become a home to more general ICA-aligned industry, as well as generalized commodities transit under the purview of the Europan Resource Authority (ERA). This organization, though not quite a political entity or a corporation in the strictest sense of the word, nevertheless runs a very tight ship on Europa, and oversees all of the highly profitable trade in and out of the Jovian system which the ICA conducts in this volatile era.
The ERA maintains relative peace and tranquility amid the ongoing strife of the era of Draconist Crisis in the outer solar system by way of the Jovian Security Force (aka as J-Sec), a mercenary police force comprised mostly of former ICA military personnel assigned to crack down hard on local union movements and keep the wheels of the Europan research industrial complex well-greased, by any means necessary.
Map and Background of Port Midas
As of the mid-24th century, Europa's population is largely contained in a handful of urban housing projects, similar to the "glass cities" on Luna and elsewhere. The two largest of these, Port Midas and Cilixville, are home to roughly 82 percent of Europa's population as per the 2386 census, or approximately 2.6 million people. Many of these only live here for the chance to work in the ports orbiting above the moon as part of Interplanetary Dynamics' mission of moving the solar system's goods from one point to another.
Port Midas is the capital of the Europan colony and has a population of approximately 1.3 million, spread between seven wards (numbered by order of their construction). Each of these is a separate and self-contained centrifuge city, approximately five kilometers in diameter and about three kilometers in height from their base to the upper rim. These cities spin on their long axis to provide a modicum of centrifugal gravity to the population, in order to prevent microgravity casualties among the thousands of worker inhabitants.
The nine wards of Conamara City are laid out around the Central Habitation Terminal (10), which also houses the shuttle landing pads and administrative offices. It is from this central point that the ERA runs Europa as a sort of technocratic fiefdom, with E-Sec as their force in readiness to contend with errant syndicalists and Draconist sympathizers. As of 2351, ten years after the Jovian Civil War ended, the bosses on Europa are eager to get on with business as usual, even though people still turn up dead with alarming frequency.
Story pitch for The Europa Goodbye
2351. While the Draconist Crisis tears the Solar System asunder, a fragile peace is held in place on Europa by the iron hand of the Jovian Security Force, a corporate-funded mercenary police bureau.
Darius Maroney, a J-Sec agent and veteran of the Titan Civil War, is given a special case: a murder investigation involving a wanted fugitive who once led Draconist cells in the revolution.
But this case blows the doors off of a scandal that reaches far beyond the tunnels and catacombs of Port Midas. As Maroney races to get to the bottom of it all, he might find out just how expendable he is…
More to come, when it's ready...
This is brilliant. Your map work is fantastic as always. We should put these in the final novel when it comes out next year. We could call the big Encyclopedia "the frequency," in honor of this blog, and work them into the chapter breaks.