Kuiper Belt

"It is a graveyard of worlds, and a cradle of experiments. Here, human ambition is preserved in ice as often as it burns out in fire."

— Archivist Silestra Ordein, Solar Collegium

A Frozen Frontier

The Kuiper Belt stretches from roughly 30 to 50 astronomical units beyond Neptune, a vast expanse of icy bodies, dwarf planets, and frozen debris left over from the formation of the Solar System. Its objects are composed of water ice, methane, ammonia, and rocky material—remnants of the primordial disk. The Kuiper Belt is divided into classical objects with near-circular orbits, resonant bodies like Pluto and Orcus locked in orbital harmonies with Neptune, and scattered objects with eccentric, tilted orbits. Many short-period comets originate here, flung inward by Neptune’s influence, carrying with them chemical records of the Solar System’s earliest epochs.

A Laboratory of Civilizations

In the Age of Convergence, the Kuiper Belt is more than just a cosmic relic—it is a political and cultural frontier. The sheer distances and isolation between settlements mean colonies are often forced to survive without help from Earth, Mars, or the Inner System. Each planetoid or domed city can evolve along its own trajectory, experimenting with governance, economics, and culture. Some embrace radical forms of democracy, others corporate feudalism, religious theocracy, or militarized clan structures. To the Great Houses, the Kuiper Belt is a proving ground for ideas too unstable, inefficient, or dangerous to attempt in the heart of civilization.

A Patchwork of Experiments

The Belt’s populations, though small compared to planetary polities, are diverse and fiercely independent. Some worlds thrive as hubs of innovation, turning their distance from the core into freedom from oversight. Others languish in cycles of collapse and rebirth, repeating the harsh lessons of survival amid scarcity. Smugglers, philosophers, techno-barbarians, prophets, and idealists all carve out domains here, their legacies often flashing brilliantly and vanishing into silence. Outsiders sometimes call it the "geopolitical laboratory of humanity"—a thousand experiments in civilization conducted in ice, radiation, and silence.