Planetary Development

Planetary Development Schematics
Planetary development projects during the Great Expansion were akin to property development on a planetary scale. In line with the regulatory guidelines laid out by territorial planning boards, all the terrestrial features of planets designed for habitation were programmed into the gigantic terraforming machines sent to oversee the process automatically. When the a terraformer vessel arrived in orbit around a planet, the majority of its mass and material would fall down to the planet or moon in the seeds towers which it would then use to direct the genesis process. But, once the last seed tower departs, the remaining frame and shell of the terraformers would be repurposed (frequently to create orbital cities). Likewise, the seed towers would be used as building materials for the initial infrastructure associated with settlement and establishing the quantumnet.

By the time of the Plague, this process had been standardized well enough and grown to such a massive scale that there were thousands of terraformers sent to planets in the new world which continued their automated processes even though the records of their existence were lost. The various different corporations in the industry at that time also each had a different building style and produced terraformers with a variety of features depending upon what the developer wanted for the planet and the resulting orbital presence. There were subcontractors who performed the work of tethering asteroid and collapsing matter and installing the orbital cities or stations once the terraforming process was complete. In fact, a lot of the immortals that now live used to be employed in this industry.

Because the process was refined, there were few actual terraformers in Orion's Arm at the time of the Plague. Most had already been converted to orbital infrastructure. And, because the people who designed and run the manufacturing centers of the terraformers were killed during the plague, no terraformers have been made since. The Order of Mercury produced schematics for them based upon the ones in the process of being built, but since the manufacturing process (and the ship itself) was highly automated, everything was disassembled and used for parts for more orbital stations.

What this means is that nearly every settled planet has at least one orbital city or station... many have more and that nearly all of them have been located there since the plague. The scale of manufacturing and logistics required to build or transport objects of this size will not be possible until the period of Empires of Orion. So, only very small outposts have been built since then, typically found nearby asteroid fields since they used the asteroids as the gravity core and only had as much metal as they could transport there on their freight ships.