Beltworlds

Beltworlds are established megaengineering projects that have been constructed by the Affiliated Habitats for over a century now. The first one was built around Hope, but today they have been built around Niima and several gas giants under industrial development (with one under construction around New Sephamagore). Beltworlds are different from other habitats in which instead of having a natural ecology with wide open spaces, they are more like giant cities around planets.

The first beltworld was built around the planet Hope (see Sephamagore). Hope had seen a massive increase in traffic around the system, aswell as an increase in the construction of satellites and habitats orbiting Hope; computers were having a harder and harder time maneuvering habitats, satellites and spacecraft safely, along with the tracking of space junk this was starting to take up a lot of processing power in the conventional fibre-optic computers and an emergency QC had to be employed to stop the economy from grinding to a halt.

The Comissioner of the solar system advised an interesting solution. As many satellites as possible could be connected together in a giant orbital ring around Hope, making other orbits less crowded and providing ample area for interplanetary traffic to dock. In fact, the Affiliated Habitats was already toying with this idea and needed a planet to test it on; Hope was perfect (this was not a co-incidence, it was discovered later that the Zambarau had had a significant influence on the arrangement of this decision). Beltworlds are usually given extra support by a DCM running the length of the ring, which is also used as a high-speed maglev.

It took only a few years to build the giant ring (named 'Beltworld') as all of the components for it were already in orbit (one of the virtues of this form of habitat). Unlike other habitats, Beltworlds are more like giant space stations or buildings than 'open-air' ecological systems, meaning they have a significantly higher population density than all other habitats. Currently all Beltworlds exceed the populations of the planet they orbit significantly.