The vector birthplace and bastion of civilization! As the homeworld of the Vector race, everyone tries to visit at least once in their life. Its climate is earthlike, as its its wildlife and flora. Its low gravity makes for some very tall buildings and taller trees. Vectors blessed wings make good use of this planetary quirk. Cities are densely built: massive corptown monocultures, or dense multi-faction areas where a single structure might house three different corporate offices. With a population of 5 billion and an inhabitable area perhaps a third of Terra’s, Mars is a bit overcrowded these days, but it still has a wide range of climates and environmental zones. Of the original Mars, only its breathtaking canyons and mountains remain. The rest has been remade into a new Eden.
Places to Visit:
Olympus Mons, “The Disk”
During terraforming, the dust and soil on Sol’s biggest mountain became a sort of natural concrete. In the chaos of the terraforming process, the mountain developed ledges, outcroppings, and enclosures that made it a natural location for Mars’s largest shipping area. It’s covered with shipping ports, shopping zones, and corporate offices: part industrial hot spot, part planetary shopping mall. Some vectors spend most of their lives in The Disk. If the system comes to you, why leave?
Valles Marineris, “The Vale”
The cultural hub of Mars, built along a massive canyon running 3000 miles along the martian equator. A cultural hub like Paris or New York, a business center like Los Angeles or London, and a festering pit of 700-year-old intrigue like Rome or King’s Landing in Game of Thrones. The hanging gardens and waterfalls are spectacular, as are the homes—The Vale boasts more CEO and celebrity homes than any other region on the planet.
Phobos
Mars’s strange potato-shaped moon has grown over the centuries, fully twice its original size. For centuries, it has served as Mars’s main port, a dock for larger ships and a neutral hub without a lot of open corporate cold war. Every generation of ship technology or dock improvement leaves a new layer of construction on the moon, and the labyrinth of obsolete shipyard supports a thriving underworld.
“For Deimos”
A lovely and expensive community, the “For Deimos” BlueSky Station was built in memory of the original Martian moon, Deimos. The tiny moonlet was destroyed some 200 years ago when it was marked as salvage and consumed by a team of geomats. The fact that the “For Deimos” BlueSky is no-where near the moon’s original orbit, and that the moon occupied some prime orbital real estate, raises difficult questions about how accidental its destruction was, and MarsCo has issued several formal apologies.