Mapping the Sector

I've got the raw data for 635 major worlds in front of me, to build the Aurin Cluster:

These worlds have names like: Al-Hash, Rubicon, Sarnia, Telmuwun, Abadyo-IV, New Asia, Port Strela

      
I decided that is probably the limit, I will not create any more worlds.

Considering that Earth has a few billion people, that have billions of stories across dozens of genres, I think 635 worlds are more than enough to tell stories for the few decades of my life that I have remaining.  I need to have a focus, and a goal and at 635 systems, I said, okay. Enough.

Space Opera focusses on a few key worlds, and other worlds are less likely to be habitable.

There was a vast Empire in this region of space, that reached out at least to the World of "Basa Haula" in the Varala Drift Subsector.

That polity is now long gone, for millenia, leaving many worlds with ruins and data caches, from the days of the Vestiges of the Terran Empire in this setting.

I envision (at least on the frontier, in the Aurin Cluster) enormous towers, built with technology that the current inhabitants only dimly understand, and cannot maintain. Giant floating cities that speak of days millenia ago, when the Empire was at its height, and it had controlled thousands of worlds, spanning across at least parts of 12 sectors.

But now, at the crumbled fringes of a long-lost Empire, the Technology that connected most of those worlds is long lost, but slowly being rediscovered. It has cut places like Basa Haula off from their interstellar neighbors.

The process means I have to recalculate a lot of what I have done already for a more realistic flavor.

Smaller worlds will end up like Mars or the moon. These will be airless worlds, good only for mining, or poor candidates for agriculture, or large-scale colonization.

Likewise, if atmospheres are thin, water will be lost to space, small cold worlds will tend to have ice, and hotter worlds will be more like Venus.

The population on these worlds will be affected, so that low or high gravity worlds with contaminated or toxic atmospheres will have fewer people.

Moderate size worlds with breathable atmospheres will have more population, and because of the idea that the colonies established will generally fund their own Starports, small tiny populations of a few thousand per world will be a landing field, and not much more if a star port even exists.

A local population will (with some bell curve randomness) need to have about 100,000 people to have sufficient cause to build even a modest frontier port and local scout bases.

The average interstellar port on a trade route will serve 10 million inhabitants, and the largest Trading ports will be located on worlds with a billion inhabitants or more, connected by the Bulk Freighters, and the largest ports reserved for the largest populations, typically 10 billion and up, where Starships are constructed. Most of these are Alien, non-human worlds.

All of this fits with what I am trying to do. Lots of work ahead.