Category: [FACTION DOSSIER]
Type: [Treaty Body, Regulatory Agency]
Canon Tier: Tier 2 (Expanded Universe; pending Council review)
Tags: [NEW-FACTION] [NEW-INSTITUTION] [NEW-EVENT] [NEW-CHARACTER] [NEW-WORLD]
The Solaris Colonial Authority (SCA) [NEW-FACTION] is the treaty body that charters colonies, licenses surveys, runs the Interface Ports and keeps the Register of every chartered system and the glass ledger of every seedglass cassette. It has no navy, no mines and no shipyards. What it has is paperwork that every FTL ship must carry and a port code that every arrival must obey. It is proud, overstretched, procedural and cosmopolitan, and it is the only institution all four blocs sit inside.
In the c. 2460 game era the SCA Register lists 71 chartered systems, and century-old colonies treat charters as suggestions. The Authority has the legal power to hold the Sphere together, and nowhere near the force to do it.
| Parameter | Value (c. 2460) |
|---|---|
| Seat | Charter House [NEW-WORLD], a ring habitat in high lunar orbit, at least 400 km from Selene Interface Port |
| Founding | Treaty of Epsilon Eridani, 2352 (signed at Relay Station Alpha) |
| Head | Commissioner-General |
| Charter Board | 11 seats: EC 4, JD 2, ORC 2, colonial delegates 3 (since 2431); Guild observers, no vote |
| Register | 71 chartered systems |
| Major Sol ports | Selene Interface Port; Earth Capital Port (capital-class, Earth-Moon L2); Callisto Interface Port; Titan High Port; Ceres Port |
| Port code | 5 km hush-zone; habitat standoff at least 400 km (capitals at least 2,000 km) |
| Constabulary | Charter Marshals: about 140 Beacon-class tenders (300 t, non-FTL), about 60 teal couriers |
| Ship prefix | SCS |
| Revenue | Slot fees, charter dues, Register and ledger fees. No production |
Scale checks. The Beacon fleet displaces about 42 kt in total ($140 \times 300\ \text{t}$), less than four Atlas-class capitals (12 kt each, so 3.5). The Sphere makes about 11,300 FTL jumps per year, or 31 per day ($11300/365 \approx 31$), and each arrival is a port event. With about 16 t of seedglass made per year (Sol 11 t, colonies 5 t) at 0.50 kg per standard cassette, the ledger tracks about 32,000 serial numbers a year, or 88 per day. If an average arrival fee is about 9 kJC (an illustrative figure, from 1.5 kJC for a courier to 150 kJC for a capital, so that no hull pays more to arrive than it burned in glass to get there), slot fees come to about 0.10 GJC/yr, roughly 0.4% of the Jovian He-3 trade (about 24 GJC/yr). The Authority is cheap by design.
The SCA exists because a ship that arrives at the wrong place at the wrong time is a weapon, whether or not anyone meant it. Every colonial charter, survey right and port rule descends from one premise: arrivals are legal, regulated events, not raids. The port code’s heart is the Hush Convention: ports are neutral, nobody fires inside a hush-zone or at a ship in merge.
The Charter Board [NEW-INSTITUTION] is the legislature: 11 seats, 4 Commonwealth, 2 Jovian, 2 Rim (inherited from the Saturn Free Ports Assembly) and 3 colonial delegates, who joined after the Colonial Seats Reform of 2431. Observers from the three guilds sit without votes and speak a great deal. The Commissioner-General heads the Authority. The Charter Courts hear charter and port disputes, under a Chief Justice. The Survey Office licenses prospecting and settlement rights. The Port Service runs the Interface Ports. The Register records chartered systems and the glass ledger records seedglass. The Charter Marshals are the constabulary.
The Authority publishes the Interstellar Navigation Conventions (INC), the annex to the 2352 treaty and revised at the Ceres Protocols of 2393. These include the Gate Covenant (the Rapidity-Gate is mandatory; bypassing it is a universal crime), the Torch Code, the Charged-Hull Rule and the Ceres Protocols. See Space Warfare Doctrine.
The Authority was born at Epsilon Eridani Relay Station Alpha, where in 2352 the Commonwealth, the Jovian Directorate and the Saturn Free Ports Assembly signed the Treaty of Epsilon Eridani [NEW-EVENT]. It was the first formal agreement that FTL ports were a shared commons and that the people who arrive by FTL must be able to trust the people who receive them. The treaty gave the SCA colonial charters, survey rights and the port code.
Milestones:
The SCA holds no land except the ports themselves: small, hard stations kept at the standoff distance from every major habitat. In Sol the principal ports are Selene Interface Port (the Moon), Earth Capital Port (capital-class, at Earth-Moon L2), Callisto Interface Port, Titan High Port and Ceres Port. A port is a ring of beacons, a hush-zone, a queue of arrivals, a quarantine bay and an inspection yard. See FTL Interface Port.
Staff: port crew drawn from the Pilots’, Astrogators’ and Engineers’ guilds; Register clerks; marshals; and a core of local language-model clerks, named and credited like their human colleagues. Beyond Sol, the Register covers 71 systems, home to about 350 million people in total. The two oldest, Alpha Centauri (about 100 million, Proxima included) and Epsilon Eridani (about 85 million), hold more than half; six Charter-Era systems hold 10-25 million each, about twenty hold 1-5 million, and the youngest forty-odd hold between $10^4$ and $10^6$. Colonial polities are treated generically on this page.
The SCA charges slot fees (to land a ship in a port), charter dues (annual, per colony), Register fees (for each recorded survey or title) and ledger fees (per cassette serial). It produces nothing. This is the point of the design: no member can accuse the Authority of favouring its own products.
Its most important single product is trust. A courier arriving at a port with a sealed, ledger-matched cassette passes in minutes. A courier whose charge-hours do not match the ledger is held for inspection: the glass is checked by glow test and the ledger is audited. See Slide Catalyst. Each bubble torpedo needs 0.30 kg of glass, so the ledger is also the Sphere’s anti-proliferation tool, and a quiet source of Authority power.
There is no navy, which is the problem. The Charter Marshals [NEW-INSTITUTION] run about 140 Beacon-class port tenders [NEW-TECH] (300 t, non-FTL), used for inspection, escort in the standoff lane and rescue, and about 60 teal-painted dispatch couriers. Anything heavier is seconded from the signatories, and the Authority has learned the hard way that “seconded” is a polite word for “withheld.”
Port defence rests on law more than force. A merge cannot be aborted, so a port cannot stop arrivals; it can only meet them. Marshals hold the 400 km standoff lane (about 12 min of flip-burn at 0.3 g, since $2\sqrt{d/a} \approx 12$ min) and the 5 km hush-zone. A ship that fires in a hush-zone loses its port rights across the Register, which for an FTL hull is a death sentence.
The SCA’s culture is procedural and cosmopolitan: Charter House staff speak a dozen languages and conduct meetings in a deliberate, overly polite English. They are proud of the Conventions, which have outlasted a blockade war and a skirmish season. They are also overstretched. A Commissioner-General’s worst week is the one in which two colonies file contradictory claims to the same asteroid, and a chartered system disappears from the Register because it paid in an unrecognised currency.
Marshals have a tradition of hanging a small brass hush-bell over the port office door. It is struck once on any incident that ends without a shot.
Teal, sand and white. The emblem is a charter star-map: a ring of small stars around a large one, with lines running between them. Port signage is large, bilingual and plain.
Notables. Commissioner-General Adaeze Morrow-Kaplan [NEW-CHARACTER] (b. 2399) is a former port inspector. Chief Justice Emeric Lisowski-Dube [NEW-CHARACTER] is a stickler for the 2352 text. Marshal-Commander Pita Havili [NEW-CHARACTER] commands the Beacons.
Story seeds.