Editing SCRPG Cosmic Tales/Setting (section)

== CALYPSO ==
The actual physical setting of the story.

Calypso is a binary star system - two stars in stable orbit with one another.

Twenty planets and their moons - around 200 planetary bodies in all - orbit the two stars.

One of the stars, the Heartstar, is surrounded by a Dyson Swarm - at a radius of about 1 Astronomical Unit. The non-Dyson Swarmed star is known as the Lifestar

The Dyson Swarm is comprised of thousands of hexagonal tiles, each perfectly machined, each 500 meters thick, and 100km wide at its widest point.

The Swarm was perhaps constructed by Celestials.

When the Calypso system was discovered, the sentients who first settled here figured out how to draw power from the tiles of the swarm. And then they began to build.

The surface of individual tiles facing away from the Heartstar became the ground floor for sentient construction. Currently, 7.5% of the tiles have some form of sentient construction built on them. These Heartstar Swarm facilities are shipwrights, tradehubs, entertainment districts, private residences - they run the gamut.

The planets and moons amenable to it were terraformed - and turned into thriving population and agricultural centers of their own.

When originally settled, the Calypso system was a bit out of the way - but close enough to major trade routes to attract smugglers and pirates.

As the smugglers and pirates grew materially wealthy off their plunder, and as the Coalition and Pontificate both grew and got closer to Calypso, the people of Calypso started to shift towards legitimacy.

Today, the Calypso system is the hub, and an FTL choke point, with multiple hundreds of spoke-FTL routes out to independent systems and polities, and about 100 spoke-FTL routes into both Pontificate and Coalition space. It's a thriving, rollicking, free-trade zone bazaar of a system, with a still in the bloodstream undertone of criminality. It's mostly gone legit, it has a democratic government, a customs and police force, and courts and contracts and the force of law.

It's also still got genuine smuggler's hideouts, a few pirates lairs, and plenty of places to contact the less savory types that populate the galaxy with the square-jawed and law abiding citizens.