The Core Sector is the CTA’s administrative heart. It contains the largest settlement, Navashta, and the gray, bunker-like Core Archives where physical air-gap backups are stored.
The Core Questions
The Core
General Info
Size: Very, very big (one system).
Population status: High class
Controlled by: CTA
Location: Center of the CTA’s 7 systems
The Core is the largest area in the system within the inner area of the CTA. Known for being a place of centralized power, it is the CTA’s administrative heart. It contains the largest settlement, Navashta, and the gray, bunker-like Core Archives where physical air-gap backups are stored.
To enter or work in the Core, individuals must hold:
Most CTA data is maintained on secure, partitioned storage clusters within Core Archives located at the central CTA building in the largest settlement in the Core Sector.
The Core is seen as both the heart and the cage of the CTA. Workers in the fringe envy its stability but resent its insularity. Hubworld residents view it as a place of opportunity and suffocating formality in equal measure.
Before the CTA, the Core was a fractured cluster of settlements, none dominant. Its centrality made it contested during the war, which in turn justified its selection as the Authority’s seat. It was chosen because of geography: the literal center of the seven systems, symbolically perfect for unification. Its relative neutrality also made it a compromise location.
The Core’s development traces back to the earliest days of the Central Trade Authority. When the CTA was formally established at 0 CY, its administrative heart was deliberately placed at the geographic and symbolic center of its seven-system jurisdiction. Before CTA consolidation, the Core’s location was a patchwork of independent settlements and trade depots, chosen later for its centrality. The Core quickly became the anchor for stability and legitimacy: a centralized space that embodied the Authority’s principles of control, standardization, and efficiency. Its early construction reflected the paranoia of a system still recovering from fragmented pre-CTA trade and the scars of intermittent conflict.
During the first two centuries, the Core functioned less as a place where ordinary citizens lived and more as a fortified complex of offices, storage vaults, and transmission nodes. Only later, as expansion into the fringe and Space Main increased the CTA’s stability, did it take on the additional role of a high-status residential and cultural hub. Navashta, the largest settlement in the Core, grew around administrative nodes and eventually eclipsed them, becoming synonymous with the Authority itself.