Stellar Codex (CivBE)

Wonders

Stellar Codex
Wonder in Beyond Earth
Cost	300
Maintenance	None
Requires	Ballistics
Specialist slots	None
Effect	+5 Diplomatic Capital +8 Orbital Coverage
Notes	None

Quote

"Maui and Hina, having seen all the oceans of Earth, raised their eyes to new oceans, where they still sail." - Nainoa Charles, Neowayfinders of Polystralia

History

The Stellar Codex is further proof that human beings will always look up at the sky, no matter the circumstances that surround them. Our best evidence suggests that Earth at the time of Seeding was surrounded by a nimbus of artificial satellites with both terrestrial and celestial-facing devices, used for mundane tasks such as location positioning and extraplanetary collision threat detection. When the first colonists arrived, they set about creating ways to gather this information.

While created to solve simple problems of navigation and assist in space research, the Stellar Codex also had tremendous influence on the cultural development of the colonists. Did those early colonists perhaps still carry ancient senses carefully attuned to a clear night sky above them? Or was it a matter of recognizing the truly vast distances that separated the planet from Earth? Or did the Seeding raise the possibility of other worlds around other stars being habited by people, and thus make the sky less threatening? Whatever the case, it is common to find records in the Stellar Codex shot through with veins of awed prose.

The Stellar Codex's very architecture called back to those first orreries, with its swooping and interconnected circles, each of which housed astronomy databanks, correlators, and cosmological conjectural synthesizers. It was a profoundly functional structure, but also one of incredible beauty, with pointillistic lighting recalling night skies, and floors made of smooth and glassy Etowahform marble, recalling gas giants, nebulae, and sandstorms. The most mundane details were treated with reverence, down to the terminal faces framed with Wildmanstatten-patterned meteoric iron.

The religion of the day was profoundly affected by the Stellar Codex and its views of the neighboring space. Adoration of the Magi by Fra Arcangelo depicts a collapsing nearby WN4 star, as seen in Codex Record 392.39-omicron. Neoastrology owes its entire underpinning to the Codex. And it is not an accident that the Tyrant of Drees wished to cement his authority over that community with a statue depicting himself as a Stellar Codexicant.

Images