The Eburacum Gazetteer of Colonised and Inhabited Worlds

During the colonization of the Old Solar System, the development of the Moon, Mars, The Asteroid Belt and Jupiter were important milestones; but perhaps the most vital development of all was the strip-mining of the planet Mercury. Once the surface of this resource-rich planet had been covered in solar energy collectors, the fierce rays of the Sun could power magnetic mass drivers to launch further solar power collectors in orbit. Soon there were many million square kilometers of solar collectors within the orbit of the innermost world, and much of the energy collected was used to manufacture Antimatter in massive 'amat farms'.

By the year 2356 enough antimatter had been collected to begin a programme of interstellar colonization; the first target, Alpha Centauri, was lost to a swarm of human-built renegade Von Neumann machines but the Tau Ceti mission was a success, with Nova Terra becoming the first extrasolar human colony. Interstellar spacecraft at that time were mostly antimatter catalyzed fusion craft like the Dyaush which left for Eta Cassiopeia in

910 A.T.. These early missions took decades or even hundreds of years to reach their targets; most colonists were vitrified or subjected to Nanostasis, and awoken on arrival; other missions (such as that of the Dyaush itself) carried human zygotes which would be raised to term and beyond by robot parental vecs.

The mission to Eta Cassiopeia was not a success in human terms either, and the robot colony of Diwali that developed there is now one of the major Moravec Robot tourist attractions in the Inner Sphere.

The Great Expulsion from Earth following the Nanoswarms made it necessary for billions of people to find new homes off Earth; Many left in hastily constructed Generation Ships, each one boosted by fusion rockets billions of tonnes of hydrogen isotope fuel, often catalyzed by tonnes of antimatter; these ships used small asteroids converted into living quarters and compact food production plants. Slow and inefficient, the Generation ships uusually did not arrive until later, smaller faster ships had already taken the best territory. One of the biggest built at this time was the L.R.Shepherd, shown below.