PAYLOAD: Star Map - UPDATED

Payload: The Galaxy

    It is the year 2350. Earth is a centuries-dead husk, but humanity thrives beyond the stars. Immense foldspace gates link distant worlds, allowing near-instantaneous travel between the centers of human population and new colonies.

    The great nations of old died with their birthworld; in their place, corporate powers rule over the scattered enclaves of humanity. The Big Four — Balero Enterprises, DiMaki Cybernetics, the Exchange, and XON Industries — tower above all others, and an uneasy peace binds them.

    To keep the peace and enact their will, corporations use the mightiest weapons known to humanity, the Armored Combat Engines or ACEs, towering humanoid war machines capable of wielding all manner of exotic weapons and equipment. But they are not the only ACE pilots; mercenaries also ply their trade between worlds, acting as cheap and deniable muscle for corporations and private citizens alike.

    The Sol System remains the home of most of humanity, the teeming masses who struggle to escape to a new life in the colonies. Over the course of the chaotic escape from a dying Earth and the centuries that have passed since, populations have come and gone on virtually every body in the solar system, regardless of size, and many others lived however transiently in isolated deep-space ships and habitats.

    Humanity’s second world, Mars, is home to the dark and mysterious XON, a shadowy cabal blamed for everything from the Death of Terra to the very smallest of complaints. Only they know how much truth there is to these rumors, and what plans have already been set in motion to control the future. All that is certain is that XON has mastered realms of science that other corporations barely know exist.

    From their isolated estates on Europa, the Exchange — the galactic banking and industrial cabal — rules over their densely-populated sister moon of Ganymede, once home to those refugees of Earth who did not fall under XON control, now home merely to the poor and disaffected. The reach of the Exchange is vast, but they are a fractious body, a loose coalition that does not lightly undertake any joint action.

    Beginning in the 2170s, population pressures on Mars, Ganymede, Titan, and elsewhere in the solar system led major corporations to send out colonization ships, creating the colony worlds. The history of many colony worlds is complex, with rebellions, punitive wars, alliances, and betrayals.

    Among the early colonies were the “Rigel Worlds” of Tianlong, Solomon, and Camilla. Rocked by a particularly virulent and widespread rebellion and Exchange-led crackdown, these worlds have largely settled down and been terraformed, but still bear the scars of that long-ago conflict. Other prominent colony worlds include Inheritance, where Balero refines its terraforming arts, hoping to one day truly establish a “second Earth”; Iwakura, home to DiMaki and known for its thin atmosphere and towering mountain spines; and Maximus, a dusty, dismal world known solely for being the birthplace of arena ACE fighting.

    To avoid an all-out war, the Treaty of Elysium was signed to regulate inter-corporate affairs, limiting their ownership of planets. As a result, most worlds are owned by many powers, large and small, cooperating and competing by turns — and hiring strangers to fight for them when it would be politically dangerous to act openly. The only exceptions are the corporate homeworlds — Inheritance, Iwakura, Europa, and Mars.

    The newest-settled planets are known as frontier worlds, informally defined as those settled in the colonial waves beginning in 2270. Better-equipped, better-planned, and better-connected to humanity at large, settlements on these worlds are less chaotic than the colony worlds were in their early days, but they remain a vast and largely lawless frontier — a fertile home for mercenaries, rebels, freethinkers, and those who reject corporate control.

    Across the galaxy, from the solar worlds to the frontier, there are those who live in comfort and contentment, those who live under the heel of their corporate masters — and those who strive to be more, to carve their own path through history. For them, the ACE is not just a war machine — its steel hands and roaring engine are how they will seize their destiny.

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Updated the planets in the known galaxy, I kept the gate connection lines off for now in case we need to add more planets or move the current ones again.  Its kind of a pain to adjust them each time.  Once we finalize it, they will return!