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Orbital (habitat)

Orbiting space habitat, any habitat not on the surface of a planet, moon or asteroid

Construction
Image from Alex Mulvey
A rotating space habitat under construction
Orbiting space habitats, often known simply as orbitals, are found in almost every colonised system in the Sephirotic Empires, and in many non-aligned and independent systems as well. These diverse structures house the vast majority of the embodied modosophont population. It is estimated that some 83% of non-virtual sophonts live on orbitals, with most of the remainder in other kinds of artificial habitats such as bubblehabs, worldhouses, dome habs, and so on. In contrast, virtual sophonts, aioids, transapients and archai generally inhabit orbiting computronium nodes or similar processing structures which tend to be largely uninhabited by physical beings such as bionts.

Some orbitals occupy low orbits near planets, although these will require regular reboosting in order to maintain their altitude. A popular location for orbital habitats containing medium to large populations is in Clarke Orbit, syncronous with the planet below; a location which can be reached using various elevator technologies. Other common locations for orbital habitats include the Lagrange points of various bodies in the system, and in separate orbital bands far from any perturbation by such objects.

Hangar
A hangar located in an Orbital space habitat, allowing smaller craft to dock within the structure for disembarking, unloading, repairs and refuelling as necessary
Orbitals come in a vast number of sizes, configurations, and environments, depending on the motivation, tech level, and resources available to their builders. Very large rings (including Bishop Rings Banks Orbitals) and Diskworlds generally occupy circumstellar orbits far from any planet (one reason for this is to avoid tidal effects). Large cylinders such as McKendree cylinders can house millions or even billions (especially when coupled in multiple arrays). Somewhat smaller rotating cylinders or spheroids such as O'Neill cylinders, Stanford Tori, and Bernal Spheres are commonplace, as well as rotating space habitats of many kinds in the kilometre-scale range.

Microgravity orbitals can utilise a very wide range of irregular shapes, and have no requirement for artificial gravity, since the inhabitants of (and visitors to) such habitats are artificially optinised to thrive in zero-gee.

Often the first priority for any new colonisation effort is to build orbital habitats from local materials, and these structures will increase in size, number and complexity as the population increases. In most systems the colonisation of planets and other objects has a much lower priority than the construction of such habitats, which can be built to order with relative ease.

 
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    Originally, a nation state or city state based on habitats in orbit around Old Earth. Over the course of the Interplanetary Age the term came to be used for any such state in Solsys. By early First Federation times the term Orbital was used more broadly for any independent or semi-independent state based on a hab in orbit around a planet.
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Appears in Topics
InfrastructureMegascale Engineering
 
Development Notes
Text by M. Alan Kazlev
Additional material by Steve Bowers.
Initially published on 17 December 2001.

Orbital image by ATMLVE added 2022
 
 
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