H-198: Captree, Platters on The Esplanade

arcology  (noun): a city intended to be contained in a single structure

Dominion Administrative Regions

Administratively, the Dominion is organised into a hierarchy, as follows:

• The Dominion as a whole could be considered the contemporary equivalent of a National government
• Within the Dominion there are nine Octants (Zargonia + eight octants in 3-dimensional cubic space around that planet) – eg Lia is currently in Octant 3, perhaps equivalent to a contemporary State or Province
• Within Octants, there are individual systems, for example, Lia is currently in the Captree system (and here, because of interstellar size, the contemporary parallels break down a bit)
• Within Systems there are individual worlds – the main world of a system is given the same name as the system, so, for example, Lia is on the mainworld Captree in the Captree system
  • However, in adventures detailed elsewhere, she has been on non-mainworlds such as Loyalists’ Rock in the Zarg’s World System and the Christos’ Scarf asteroid belt in the Argyropoulos System
• At the sub-world level the Dominion creates administrative regions for convenience based on population and geographic (or spatial) proximity.  In contemporary terms, this is equivalent to local government.  Regions usually have names (such as ‘The Lesser Archipelago’) but each also has a three-alphanumeric character designation (eg ‘LAR’).
  • Incidentally, this three-character designation is used in the Mer ID of anyone whose birth is registered in that administrative region.
  • For example, Lia’s Mer ID is U-201423-VV-LJS-01-002-F, the VV indicates she was born in the Emmaline system and the LJS indicates that her birth was registered in the LJS region of the Emmaline mainworld – Long John’s Sliver (originally Long John’s Spit), which is the site of a mid-size city on Emmaline. 

Conclusions

Someone wants to build a new arcology on Captree and make it part of the existing Lesser Archipelago (LAR) administrative region, but Raina wants a new region created for it.

Platters on the Esplanade

“I want both.

“In the long term, the opportunity to influence the composition of Captree’s governance structure, even though initially the new appointees will have limited influence, is an investment that will pay off.

“In the short term, every Money that we can convert from an accounting entry between the Finance and Industrial Bureaus into a real payment to real people in the Captree community enriches all of us.  The more Money we can get out of the Bureaucracy’s spreadsheets and into actual circulation the better.  Money is a form of power and unregulated trade enriches those who don’t do the regulating.”