Space Habitation in Qhevak

Given it's location in the Oort clouds of an uninhabited region of deep space far from habitable worlds, the vast majority of Qhevak's population lives in self sufficient deep space habitats. While varying greatly in scale and form, the vast majority are located near or on comets and powered off of mined deuterium - though some also make use of solar from the red and brown dwarf stars scattered throughout the region. Abundant fusion power enables very high efficiency recycling via high temperature mass separation and spectroscopy - in conjunction with atomically precise manufacturing capable of constructing most goods a typical hab is completely self sufficient as long as it has power. As both fusion fuel and solar are extremely easy to acquire, a given space habitat is perfectly capable of ignoring the rest of society for as long as it wants - unless, of course, it breaks certain unwritten rules (exit right violations, unrestrained self replication and involuntary memetic contamination are the big three) and the Clade/Hab Militia guns come out.

A list of the most significant space habitats in Qhevak can be found here.

=Spinhabs=

A Spinhab is a general term for a space habitat designed to produce gravity via centrifugal force. These vary widely in size and scale, but almost all Spinhabs beyond the very smallest are built to hold large, open interior areas mimicking the surface of a planet.

While a wide variety of shapes exist, the most popular are rings and cylinders - generally rings are more common for smaller habs while cylinders are more popular for larger ones. Spinning disk and beaded torus configurations are occasionally also seen but are rather less popular. A common mix is outer residential rings with a smaller central cylinder holding various manufacturing and entertainment sections, as seen with the Quel'Tan class to the right, which mounts a pair of 11 km diameter rings and a 6.4 km diameter cylinder. Two or more counterrotating spin sections are normally used for stability purposes, as an unsupported hab's rotation is at risk of destabilizing from unplanned mass shifts. Outside of the spin section, most habs have a lengthy non-rotating truss holding docking ports, power systems, radiators, cargo and zero-gravity factories. A larger configuration is so called "spinscrapers", dozens to hundreds of mid-sized spinhabs packed together on a flat truss, with counter-rotating habs on each size. A spinscraper city can enable massive living area at fairly low structural mass and high environmental diversity, while providing a very large secondary zero-gravity truss area. The smallest habs can be as small as a few tens of meters wide - these are typically for personal use, and while usually having roughly Lunar gravity even the spin rates needed for Earth level gravity at that scale can be adapted to by zero-augment baselines with a gradual increase in spin rate over a few days. The largest normally seen SpinHabs are Bishop Rings, massive rotating cylinders with diameters on the order of 1,000-1,500 kilometers - at that scale the habitat can be left open to space, with 2-300km retainer walls trapping the atmosphere inside. These are the most popular class of habitat among the Kumiho clade, providing space for massive internal ecosystems with plenty of room to run and hunt.

Spinhabs are one of the cheapest habs to manufacture overall. Advanced nano-material structural materials and radiation shielding means they can be built very light (as low as a ton per m^2 for smallar habs), and SpiderFab style manufacture systems can quickly assemble them en-mass given suitable materials. With a wide variety of generic, open-source designs in widespread mass production, SpinHabs are one of the more popular choices for new clades looking to break off to their own place, and dozens of new ones are typically completed on any given day.

=Processor Habs=

Processor habitats are essentially ﬂoating computers in space. They are not intended for habitation by biological life, instead populated entirely by AGIs and ems. Processor habs have the usual cloud of support structures that accompany most habitats: drones, reﬁneries, factories, defense satellites, and so on. The actual habitat units consist of one or more massively shielded processor blocks. These form a mesh in which a large number of minds can run, often in a simulspace.

The environments inside of a processor hab vary a great deal. Some offer simulspaces that are relatively comfortable for transhuman-born ems, where humanoid or animal-like avatars can interact in a world that provides an illusion of physicality. Others are surreal and disorienting, with simple simulspaces consisting entirely of interactions between geometric shapes ranging in complexity from basic polyhedrons to wild fractal clouds. A number also attempt to mimic older societies, with a wide range of forms - one of the more well known ones is Ever-Falling Sun, a neverending PvP combat match simulating various historical battles, with typical matches lasting 5-15 seconds realtime (or 5-15 days with the 1e5x time acceleration used). Some erase their memories to live entire lives without knowing they're in a simulation - this naturally comes with a number of risks, and a number of people have even been temporarily slap droned for behaviour in an amnesia sim.

Processor habs hold most of Qhevak's population, a plurality of which are Oyuin. While often independent, many are tightly integrated into other habs with realspace accomodation, with virtual reality and telepresence systems allowing interaction between both sides, though the extreme speeds (often 1e5x realtime or more) that processor habs run at can make this difficult in practice.

=Beehives=

Beehives are a form of large scale habitat consisting of tunnel networks bored into asteroids. Tunnels burrowed into rock or ice, often in the wake of mining or exploratory operations, are converted into living spaces by either fusing the existing material or coating the walls with a sealant. Chambers are dug out of the host object and internally sealed in the same manner if additional internal volume is required. Access points on the surface are capped with airlocks, docking modules, or hard seals to prevent depressurization. Beehives are interesting because they are built much like underground bunkers and warrens on the planets, but share the microgravity environment of tin cans and cluster habitats. For people without the training or mods to think three-dimensionally, this can make beehives a veritable labyrinth. Purpose-built beehive habitats use color coding and grid assignments to make navigation easier. Those adapted from mining tunnels or designed for internal security may not have such luxuries.

An asteroid, comet, or Kuiper Belt object has to be large or dense enough to hold itself together to be suitable for a beehive. Rock and dust piles or actively venting comets are just too unstable and usually aren’t worth the energy expenditure to melt into a usable state. As a result, beehives are limited at the lower end to metallic asteroids approximately a quarter of a kilometer on the long axis. An advantage of Beehives is versatility - while usually mostly low gee counterrotating pairs of spinhabs can be built until the tunnels, with lower masses required due to the radiation shielding already provided by the outer asteroid. They are also inherently very durable - and are therefore a common choice for the HQs of private military contractors.

Beehives habitats can be built at a wide range of scales and therefore have widely varying population sizes, from tens of thousands for the smallest to 1.9 billion for Moria.

=Dyson Trees=

Dyson Trees are large scale space habitats formed out of trees grown from comets. A fully grown tree is a spherical structure up to a hundred kilometers across. It generally consists of 4-6 trunk structures growing out from a comet nucleus. Branches grow from the top of each trunk and intertwine and merge with each other to form a single structure. The trunks and primary branches are hollow and contain a breathable atmosphere and symbiotic ecology as well as a space adapted ecology on their exteriors.

Growth of a new tree begins when a suitable comet is either diverted into a close solar orbit or irradiated by a suitable emitter array, and a seed is planted on it. Over several years the seed extends a root system into and around the comet and then begins the growth of the primary trunk systems. Depending on the material supply in the comet and the distance from the star, full growth may take up to a century. However, most trees are ready for initial habitation within 10 years of planting. Average tree lifetimes run to a millennium even without life-extension bio-nano, and a mature tree may support a population in the millions. Some are even sapient, as seen with the Loci clade.

While some trees are constructed as nature reserves, temples or works of deep space art, most are simply spaces for habitations, and are quite popular resort destinations for nearbaselines. One of the most popular is the fifty kilometer wide Ninkasi Dyson true in orbit of a small brown dwarf, which acts as something of a less extreme and more external-tourist friendly version of Tlazolteotl. There are even wild versions of dyson trees. These propagate by sending seeds that are propelled by solar sails, chemical rockets, or even nuclear-propelled devices. Whole ecologies have spring up in some star systems.

=Shellworlds= The construction of a shellworld is one way of creating a large habitable area on smaller moonlets. Self replicating constructors are utilized to gradually manufacture a thin layer shell over the surface of a small planetoid, held up by a large series of pillars. This shell is filled with with air and water, often imported from elsewhere in the system; artificial light sources on the ceiling provide sunlight. The power for these light sources may come from fusion, or solar power collectors on the surface or in orbit. Shellworlds have necessarily low gravity, which means they are often populated by biomorphs engineered for such environments.