The importance of Earth faded and the Company reaped ever smaller profits as the economic focus of space turned outward. Then came Cyteen, and later others, and a new and frighteningly different society grew in the farther reaches of space. Earth was no longer the anchor which kept this vast empire from coming adrift, the one living mote in a sterile universe.īut Pell was just the first living planet. The discovery of Pell's World forever altered the power balance of the Beyond. Then came Pell, the first station centered around a newly discovered living planet. The Earth Company which ran this immense operation reaped incalculable profits and influenced the affairs of nations. The Great Circle the interstellar freighters traveled was long, but not unmanageable, and the early Stations were emotionally and politically dependent on Mother Earth.

Publisher blurb: 'The Beyond started with the Stations orbiting the stars nearest Earth. (In the real world you could probably thrust inwards for a few minutes and maintain a powered orbit around the rotation point of the station, which would give enough time for the docking ports/clamps to engage and latch, and allow the station time to transfer fluid to maintain its center of rotation).Condition: Acceptable. But in the real world you probably couldn't transfer enough water fast enough to handle something as massive as Norway docking to the rim of a station at 1g, but Cherryh's worlds are more space opera rather than hard science fiction, so we aren't dealing with the constraints of the real world. But stations have gone unstable in that universe (typically stations that aren't being properly managed). (You could start the ship rotating during it's approach, so that at the moment of docking the ship is motionless from the perspective of the docking port/clamps).įrom memory they pump water around to adjust the center of mass to compensate when things dock/undock. In the real world you could aim for a 0.2 metre gap, and have the docking clamps reach out and grab the ship at the point of closest approach. You can simply plan a path that is tangent to the docking port, and time your arrival so the ship and the docking port both arrive at the point where tangent touches the circle, with the same velocity and at the same time.

Downbelow station