The Galaxy Far Far Away (Skyriver)

## Size

The GFFA is a spiral galaxy with a diameter betwenn 100,000 and 120,000 light years and is about 13 billion years old. It's stellar disk has a diameter of 2,000 lightyears and is surrounded by a less dense area known as the 'outer' or 'thick' disk with a total diameter of 7,000 ly. The Galactic Bulge is a spheroid with a diameter of 4,000 ly to 6,000 ly.

Beyond the disk is a stellar Halo, a huge sphere containing 187 globular clusters and a couple billion disparate stars with orbits unaligned with those of the disk.

## Contents

Of the 400,000,000,000 Stars in the Galaxy, around 90% are main sequence stars, the rest being pre/post-main sequence or compact stars, with a few exotic stars remaining such as blue dwarfs or ultraviolet supergiants.

About a quarter of the galaxies stars have been properly investigated, with levels of mapping varying from region to region. So are the Core and the Colonies considered mapped, but Western Space remains largely a mystery.

It is estimated that 70% of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, with around 1% being habitable and a fraction of that settled. In truth, the galaxy is considered to be home to 7.1 billion stars capable of supporting life and 3.2 billion planets with the materials and location necessary to do so. Current thought is that around 1/3 are likely to hold sentient life either through settlement or evolution.

## Structure

The Galaxy consist of a Core Bulge, four spiral arms and stellar Halo.

To ease navigation, the galaxy is granted a Galactic North, South, East and West, that were originally calibrated using the position of Coruscant relative to the Galactic center but these days are instead calculated using the positioning of a series of pulsars.

The Galactic bulge is about a third the size of the entire galaxy and contains the Deep Core, Core, Colonies and Inner Rim/Discus regions of the galaxy.

It is a star dense area of the galaxy that also contains a good chunk of it's population. In it's core, the stars grow close enough to make hyperspace lanes volatile and uncertain.

To the west of the Core, traveling in a north-southly direction is a chain of hyperspace anomalies, that make travelling westwards difficult. A similar Hyperspace anomaly can be found around 5 million ly out from the galactic centre, surrounding the galaxy in a ball of impenetrable hyperspace, though there are signs of these anomalies stabilizing.

The four galactic arms are known as the Bakchou Arm, the Ettarue Arm, the Tingel Arm and the South arm, the latter of which begins in the south and wraps west into the unknown regions.

### The Deep Core

The deep core is the name given to the dense cluster of stars surrounding the supermassive back hole at the centre of the galaxy. It's outer boundary is known as the Inner Line of hyperspace travel, beyond which most hyperdrives refused to travel unless on the Koros Trunk Line or another known hyperroute. The secondary boundary, the Horizon just inside Princess Teta is the line beyond which it is considered impossible to travel in Hyperspace due to the star density. What few ships have managed to travel inside the Horizon were all force assisited.

The Inner Line rests around 6,000 ly from the galactic Core, and the Horizon 4,000, though the phenomena they describe aren't perfect spheres.

### The Core

The Core is the most densely populated area of the galaxy. Astrographically it is split into three areas by star density. The Inner Core, stretches between 6,000- to 7,000 ly from the Galactic Core, and contains the start of the Koros Trunk Line, the planets of the innermost Corellian Run and the Agricultural Circuit. The Mid-Core streches out to 9 kly, containing Coruscant and the innermost Hydian. The Outer Core stops at 10kly, containing Alderaan and the northern half of the Herglic Trade Empire.

## Anthropography

*That word took a while to find. It's the study of the distribution of humans, technically, but as we just don't have words to deal with several sentient species this has to do.*

*Perhaps something like Sophiography/Sophiology - from Sophia or Phronetography/Phronetology from Phronesis meaning 'practical wisdom' and might be translateable to something like tool using/passing on skills/learning as a culture. You could even differentiate - have Phronetology be the study of a low level of sentience that involves the passing on of information from animal to animal, and Sophiology the study of species that can actually be considered Sapient.*

There is a lot that could be talked about here, as there are more than 30,000 sentient species in the Galaxy. Instead, we will focus on spacefaring governments.

The oldest known spacefaring governments