Station Geography
AX.GAT.01.02 - Station Geography
Astraeus Terminal was built to a corporate specification that assumed controlled populations, predictable traffic, and a management structure with clear authority over everyone aboard. The architects delivered a station that physically encodes those assumptions: a central spine of authority connecting three rings organized by function and access tier, with the most restricted spaces at the top and the most expendable at the bottom and edges.
What the architects did not account for was the station becoming permanent home to thousands of people who were never meant to stay, developing communities the original specification had no category for, and operating for long enough that the gap between the station's designed social hierarchy and its actual one became a source of ongoing friction that no administrative directive has managed to close.
The station's physical structure is legible. Its social structure is more complicated.
Physical Structure
Astraeus Terminal is built along a vertical axis: a single central Spire roughly three kilometers long, with command and administrative functions at the top, primary reactor cores and fuel pod clusters at the bottom, and critical infrastructure, life support, communications arrays, structural management systems, distributed throughout. The Spire does not rotate. Three rings encircle it at different points along its length, each independently rotating, each connected to the Spire through pressurized transfer junctions that compensate for the rotational difference.
The Hangar Ring sits at the upper third of the Spire. The Cargo Ring occupies the lower third. The Habitation Ring, the largest of the three, the one most people mean when they say "the station", wraps the Spire's midpoint. Hangar and Cargo rings rotate counter-clockwise at a slower rate than Habitation, producing reduced gravity that makes moving large masses easier. Habitation rotates clockwise at standard rate and produces gravity close enough to planetary standard that most species never consciously notice the difference.
Transfer junctions are the physical transitions between the Spire and each ring, pressurized corridors that pass through the rotational joint. Walking from the Spire into a ring means crossing a transition threshold where the floor is briefly not behaving the way floors should, where the Coriolis effect becomes briefly perceptible as a slight sideways tug, where the ambient hum of the station changes register. Experienced residents stop noticing this. Arrivals remember it. The transition to the Cargo and Hangar rings, with their reduced gravity, is more pronounced, the body's weight changing in a step is not a sensation most species find neutral.
The Spire
The Spire's interior is the station's restricted core. Access requires credentials from Station Administration, Mil-Sec Command, or the engineering/technical guilds, and the specific level of credentials determines how far along the vertical axis a person can travel. The upper decks of the Spire, where bridge functions and command staff quarters sit, are accessible only to designated personnel. The lower engineering decks require technical clearance. The mid-Spire infrastructure corridors can be accessed by maintenance crews with appropriate guild credentials.
What the Spire feels like: narrower corridors than the Habitation Ring, better-maintained surfaces, the constant background hum of systems everywhere. The upper Spire is quiet in a way that communicates authority, soundproofed surfaces, controlled lighting, the studied calm of spaces that expect to be taken seriously. The lower engineering decks are the opposite: loud, warm from reactor proximity, populated by the kind of functional chaos that keeps everything else running.
Most residents of Astraeus Terminal will never see the inside of the Spire's upper levels. Most don't need to. Most have opinions about what happens there anyway.
The Hangar Ring
The Hangar Ring handles ships up to medium size and the passengers and smaller cargo they carry. Thirty-six quad-bay hangars accommodate small vessels; twelve larger single-ship bays handle medium hulls. The ring also maintains berths for the station's own complement: forty-eight Stellarhawk fighters distributed across twelve dedicated quad-bays and thirty light drone fighters launched from external moorings along the ring's outer face. The station's primary response vessel, the Seraphim-class battlecruiser, is too large for the ring's standard bays and occupies a dedicated external mooring on the Spire's lower section, adjacent to the engineering decks that service it.
Access to the Hangar Ring beyond the public arrival areas requires dock worker guild credentials, security clearance, or ownership documentation for a berthed vessel. The distinction matters in practice: passengers arriving at the Terminal are processed through the ring's public reception corridors and directed to transit junctions for the Habitation Ring; only those with legitimate business in the bays themselves pass deeper.
Gravity in the Hangar Ring runs lighter than Habitation, roughly two-thirds standard. Experienced dock workers move through it with the particular economy of motion that comes from long adaptation: small pushes rather than full steps, tools secured before they're set down, the instinctive spatial awareness of a body that has learned to work in an environment that doesn't fully commit to keeping things where they're put.
The smell of the Hangar Ring: ship fuel, hydraulic fluid, recycled air processed through the ring's less refined life support systems, and underneath it all the faint metallic taste that means you're close to hull. The sound: the rhythmic impact of cargo moving, distant drive tests, the pressurization cycles of bay doors opening and closing with the regularity of breathing.
The Cargo Ring
The Cargo Ring handles bulk materials, raw extraction product, and large container freight. Thirty-six individual cargo bays line the ring's interior, most of them large enough to contain an industrial operation if that's what a lease-holder needs. Gravity here is lower than in the Hangar Ring, closer to one-third standard at the ring's outer edge, and moving through it requires more deliberate navigation. First-time visitors to the Cargo Ring tend to overcorrect; the gravity is light enough to launch a body off the floor with an incautious step, but substantial enough that the landing, when it comes, is unpleasant.
Access is restricted to security personnel, credentialed dock workers, cargo brokers, and the owners or designated agents of specific shipments. Unauthorized access to the Cargo Ring is one of the more reliable ways to get a Mil-Sec response. The ring's contents represent the economic engine that justifies the station's existence; the factions that depend on that engine protect it accordingly.
Gorrathi workers are disproportionately present in the Cargo Ring. Their physiology, adapted to high-gravity conditions, gives them an operational advantage in reduced-gravity heavy labor that has translated into a de facto guild presence. A new hire on the Cargo Ring who isn't Gorrathi will be working alongside Gorrathi crews and should expect those crews to have opinions about work standards, load capacities, and what counts as an adequate safety margin.
The Habitation Ring
The Habitation Ring is where the station lives. It is the largest single structure on Astraeus Terminal, the part of the station that was built to accommodate a managed population and has been managing that population ever since in ways that have drifted substantially from the original design intent.
The ring is divided into six Sectors, each designated by color and subdivided by numbered blocks. The color system was designed as a neutral navigational aid. It has become, over decades of station life, a social shorthand that everyone on the Terminal understands and approximately nobody is neutral about. Where you live in the Habitation Ring communicates something about you whether you intend it to or not. Where you can live communicates even more.
Transit through the Habitation Ring is primarily on foot for most residents, the ring's interior corridor system is wide enough for comfortable movement and frequent enough in its cross-connections that most destinations are reachable inside fifteen minutes of walking. For longer distances, the ring operates a tram system along the main interior circumference; tram access points appear at regular intervals in most sectors, with notably less maintenance investment in Violet Sector than elsewhere.
Red Sector
Red Sector occupies the section of the Habitation Ring directly adjacent to the upper Spire transfer junction, and the proximity is the point. Administration offices, the bridge access node, command staff residences, and Mil-Sec Command's headquarters all sit here. The sector communicates authority through the quality of its surfaces: better lighting, maintained fixtures, a cleaner air mix than the ring's lower sectors, the quiet that comes from soundproofed walls and the kind of foot traffic that doesn't want to be overheard.
Velhari have a particular presence in Red Sector's administrative and research tiers, their governance frameworks shaped several of the station's foundational charters, and the institutional positions that resulted cluster here. Working through Red Sector's administrative offices means working with Velhari in roles that are ordinary enough to be invisible. This is a fact that various factions have various feelings about.
Residents of Red Sector are mostly here because they're required to be, command staff, senior administrators, officers. The sector's population is small by Habitation Ring standards and turns over at the rhythms of corporate rotation schedules and command appointments. People who live in Red Sector by choice rather than assignment are a specific type, and other residents of the ring know it.
Orange Sector
Orange Sector is the station's wealth display, VIP residences, premium eateries, curated green installations that require more maintenance than most parts of the ring receive in a year. It is where the station presents its best version of itself to people whose business the station needs. Corporate visitors, high-value contractors, senior guild representatives with reasons to be comfortable: this is the sector designed to make them feel that the Terminal is worth the distance.
The curated parks are the sector's most striking feature, small installations of living plants in sealed environments, maintained at significant expense, providing a quality of air and sensory experience that no other part of the ring matches. The parks are technically public. The social pressure on who is welcome to use them is not technically public but is very much present.
Orange Sector is also where the station's most expensive shops concentrate, specialty goods, faction-specific services, equipment that reflects the Restricted and Controlled tiers of the station's credit economy. Browsing here without credentials is not prohibited. Purchasing here without them is another matter.
Yellow Sector
Yellow Sector is the station's primary residential space for long-term residents who are not command staff and not wealthy enough for Orange, which means, in practice, most of the people who actually live on Astraeus Terminal. The housing units are two-story quarters arranged around a continuous central hall that runs the length of the sector. A second-level walkway overlooks the central hall from both sides, with bridges spanning the open space at regular intervals. The effect is something between a corridor and a neighborhood: narrow enough to know your neighbors by face, open enough that events in the hall are visible to a substantial number of people at once.
This visibility is a feature of Yellow Sector's social life. Arguments, celebrations, negotiations, public disagreements with station management, Yellow Sector's central hall is a venue for all of them. The sector's residents have developed, over time, an informal set of expectations about what the public hall is for, who can use it, and what happens when those expectations are violated. None of this is written down. All of it is enforced.
Keth communities cluster in Yellow Sector in numbers that make the sector's central halls feel different from the rest of the ring, the pheromone dynamics of pack-bonded groups create social warmth that other species in the sector either find welcoming or find uncomfortable depending on their biology and their relationship to proximity. Several cross-lineage pressure circles among Meridian residents have their regular meeting points here. The sector's demographics are the most mixed on the ring.
Green Sector
Green Sector contains the Habitation Ring's primary park space, the real park space, not Orange Sector's curated installations. This is larger, less manicured, organized around the practical reality that the park is also where the ring's main CO2 processing and biological waste management systems live. The plants serve a function. The function happens to produce something that looks and smells like a garden.
Residents use Green Sector for the obvious reasons: it is the largest open space on the ring, it smells like living things rather than recycled air, and the ambient sound of growing plants and circulating water is a reliable antidote to the station's characteristic background hum. The sector's population is low compared to its footprint, it is not primarily a residential area, but the maintenance and processing workers whose guild credentials cover the sector's systems have informal living arrangements in its utility spaces that Station Administration has periodically noticed and periodically decided not to escalate.
The park's light cycles are managed to approximate a planetary day/night rhythm. This means that Green Sector, at night cycle, is genuinely dark in a way that other sectors are not, maintenance lighting only, the sound of biological systems continuing their work in the absence of residents. The sector's security presence drops during night cycle in ways that are known to people who need to know them.
Blue Sector
Blue Sector is the Habitation Ring's commercial center: the largest casino and entertainment venue on the station, a sprawling marketplace for goods and services spanning the affordable to the merely expensive, and the heaviest concentration of bars, eateries, repair shops, information brokers, and the category of businesses that don't advertise what they sell. It is the loudest sector, the most densely populated during station day cycle, and the one most likely to contain, at any given moment, the specific person or thing a character is looking for.
The casino anchors the sector's entertainment district, a facility large enough to host multiple games simultaneously, with attached performance spaces and a reputation as the Terminal's primary social venue for anyone who isn't in Red Sector having a meeting. The casino's management has relationships with every significant faction on the station, extended credit lines to most of them, and information about all of them. This is, in the casino management's view, what casinos are for.
The marketplace occupies roughly a third of the sector's interior and operates across most of the station's day cycle. Goods available here span the Standard credit tier freely and shade into Restricted territory depending on which stall you're at and what relationship you have with the seller. Guild representatives are present in significant numbers during market hours, the Traders Guild maintains several formal stalls and an informal network of independent operators that extends well past what the formal stalls represent.
Violet Sector
Violet Sector was scheduled to become additional residential quarters. The funding was diverted before construction was complete. The infrastructure exists, corridors are finished, the basic life support connections are in place, the structural work is sound, but the habitability work that would turn industrial shell space into livable quarters was never done. Walls end in exposed conduit. Lighting fixtures are the construction-phase temporary variety: functional but not maintained to the standard of the rest of the ring, producing a patchwork of well-lit areas and genuine darkness rather than the consistent illumination that the other sectors take for granted. The tram service runs through Violet Sector but stops less frequently and with less reliable timing.
Station Administration knows Violet Sector is occupied. It has made a calculation that the cost of clearing it is higher than the cost of not clearing it, provided nothing in the sector becomes a documented problem. The sector's residents, those without credit for Yellow Sector quarters, those with reasons to avoid the documented population registry, those who prefer the inattention of a place security patrols less heavily, have developed their own infrastructure in the gap between official neglect and official tolerance. Power is tapped from the sector's construction connections in ways that are reliable but not authorized. Water runs. Waste processing functions. Nothing is comfortable, and everything works.
Illicit Industries' operational presence on the Terminal is heaviest in Violet Sector. Not exclusively, the organization's business touches every sector, but the combination of low security presence, unofficial population, and the general institutional preference to not look too hard has made Violet Sector the closest thing the station has to unclaimed territory. The people who live there know this is conditional. The condition is that nothing in the sector becomes something that Administration has to officially address. So far, the residents and the organization have maintained that understanding.
Drift-Touched who prefer proximity to the outer hull sometimes pass through Violet Sector's outer corridors, the sector's position on the ring puts its outermost spaces closer to hull-face than most of the Habitation Ring gets, and in those corridors the Ki Nebula's electromagnetic presence is perceptibly stronger than in the sector's interior. A handful of Drift-Touched have semi-permanent arrangements in the sector's outer sections, accessible from the hull maintenance routes.
The Outer Hull
The Outer Hull is not a sector. It does not appear on publicly distributed transit maps. It does not have an administrative designation or a security assignment. It is the space between the station's exterior hull plating and the outermost accessible interior corridors, a maintenance environment where EVA access points, structural inspection routes, antenna arrays, mooring equipment, and the equipment that keeps all of them functioning are located.
It is also home to a population that Station Administration has repeatedly declined to formally acknowledge.
The people who work the Outer Hull, Ashori technicians running EVA operations, Gorrathi crew handling external structural maintenance, the Meridian/Gorrathi teams that constitute the most capable hull-exterior pairing the station has, move through it with the ease of long practice. Many of them have arrangements in the hull's accessible interior spaces that are less than official and more than temporary. The Drift-Touched community, whose members are disproportionately station-born and disproportionately present in hull-adjacent spaces, has the strongest claim to the Outer Hull as home territory; it is the closest point on the station to the Ki Nebula's full electromagnetic presence, and Drift-Touched who grew up in outer hull sectors carry a relationship to that presence that is constitutive rather than observational.
The Outer Hull has its own informal economy, its own information networks, its own social structure that intersects with the ring's sectors in specific ways without being continuous with them. A character with reason to access it needs either the appropriate guild credentials or a contact who operates there, Station Administration's position is that the Outer Hull does not contain unofficial residents, which means it has no mechanism for managing the ones who are there.
Movement and Access
Within the Habitation Ring: unrestricted between Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue Sectors. Violet Sector has no formal access restriction; the social and practical barriers are real but the doors are not locked. Tram access works everywhere. Security presence varies significantly by sector, heaviest in Red and lightest in Violet.
Between Habitation and the Spire: transfer junction access requires credentials. Station Administration and Mil-Sec credentials cover the upper Spire. Engineering guild credentials cover the infrastructure and lower Spire decks. Neither credential gives access to the other's territory. The transfer junction itself is monitored continuously.
Between Habitation and the Cargo/Hangar Rings: transfer junctions exist but require credentials, dock worker guild, security assignment, or ownership documentation for a berth or cargo bay. Passengers arrive through the Hangar Ring's public reception and are directed to Habitation; there is no routine public access back to the ring without a documented reason to be there.
The Outer Hull: EVA guild credentials or specific maintenance assignment. Informal access through Violet Sector's outer corridors and known access points exists and is used; it is not authorized and the consequences of being caught depend on what you are doing and who catches you.
Emergency protocols: Mil-Sec Command can restrict movement between sectors and between rings on declaration of a security event. This has happened twice in the station's recorded history, both times in response to incidents in the Cargo Ring. The station's population has a collective memory of those events; the current generation of residents knows the protocols exist but has not experienced them.
Lineage Presence by Area
This is an observed social pattern, not an assignment. Individuals live where their circumstances permit and their preferences align.
| Area | Disproportionate Lineage Presence | Primary Draw |
|---|---|---|
| Red Sector | Velhari | Administrative and institutional roles |
| Orange Sector | Human, Velhari | Wealth-adjacent professional positions |
| Yellow Sector | Keth, Meridian, Human | Mixed residential; central hall social life |
| Blue Sector | Mixed | Commercial activity, guild representation |
| Violet Sector | Drift-Touched, Human | Informal housing, low scrutiny |
| Cargo Ring | Gorrathi | Heavy labor, high-mass operations |
| Hangar Ring | Ashori, Skein | Engineering, EVA, technical systems work |
| Outer Hull | Drift-Touched, Ashori, Gorrathi, Meridian | Hull maintenance, EVA, nebula proximity |
| Spire (upper) | Velhari, Human, Synthari | Administrative, institutional memory roles |
| Spire (lower) | Ashori, Gorrathi | Engineering and reactor maintenance |
Quick Reference
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Total permanent staff | 250 (command, security, technical, corporate, pilots, support) |
| Passenger capacity | 450 |
| Detention | 35-person capacity |
| Medical | 30-patient capacity |
| Hangar Ring, small ship bays | 36 quad-bays |
| Hangar Ring, medium ship bays | 12 single-ship bays |
| Station fighters | 48 Stellarhawk fighters (2 squadrons of 24) |
| Station light drones | 30 (external moorings, Hangar Ring outer face) |
| Station response vessel | 1 Seraphim-class battlecruiser (carries 6 fighters, 10 drones; external Spire mooring) |
| Cargo Ring bays | 36 individual cargo bays |
| Habitation sectors | Red · Orange · Yellow · Green · Blue · Violet |
| Habitation gravity | Near-standard (clockwise rotation) |
| Cargo/Hangar gravity | Reduced (counter-clockwise, slower rotation) |
| Spire | Stationary; restricted access; command top, reactors bottom |