=Dione= 
**Posted by:** Roberto Alvarez, Firewall Proxy <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
Dione’s main habitat, Thoroughgood, is a fairly typical populous outer system settlement, except for the moon’s most obvious feature, the Long Array—150 kilometers of radio and microwave dishes and antenna attached to a spar extending from the surface to an orbital station counterweight.
==The Long Array== 
Jointly operated by the argonauts and [[Titanian Commonwealth|Titanians]], the Long Array is designed to send and receive everything from long-wave radio to t-rays. Radio astronomers and SETI researchers seeking sapient life love this bad boy, and it has enough spare capacity to keep most of these scientists very busy. So far, there have been no conﬁrmed SETI radio sources, but I don’t pretend to understand much about cutting-edge radio astronomy; I’ll leave that to my fellow argonauts who are more versed in those areas. However, the Long Array also has some far more immediate uses. First, it can broadcast signals that are easily received anywhere in the solar system. More importantly, it can receive radio signals from all across the solar system, including signals that are normally far too weak for anyone who’s further than a few thousand or so klicks away to receive.
There are two primary uses for this sort of reception: discovering emergency broadcasts and spying. The ﬁrst is a bigger deal than you’d imagine. I was surprised how often someone ends up on some asteroid, comet, or distant moon with a damaged ship and no one looking for them. If a particular portion of the sky is largely clear of radio trafﬁc, the Long Array can pick up a radio booster at ﬁve billion klicks. There’s money to be made in rescue and salvage. Even if no one is close enough to get there before someone’s biomorph croaks from lack of air, everyone appreciates having their stack retrieved. That appreciation can equal some signiﬁcant rep. The crew that operates the Long Array send out bulletins whenever they hear a distress signal. Two outer-system transport microcorps, headquartered on the moon Helene, at Dione’s L4 point, are in the search-and-rescue business and contract with freelancers throughout the system to respond to these emergency signals. 
Of course, the big news on Dione isn’t astronomy or distress signals, it’s spying. Most of what gets received here is never made public, but there are lots of rumors. Since most highly secure long-distance data either goes via QE comms or entangled farcasters, the Long Array usually intercepts trafﬁc that no one really cares about. Sometimes the collected information is interesting, but just having access to the signals isn’t enough, since they’re usually encrypted, and to get at the good stuff you need to break that encryption. Other intercepts are fragmentary, with only parts of the conversation or data burst received.
The partnership that runs the array makes all of the collected data publicly available to anyone on Dione that’s interested in it. They are sometimes accused of hiding data on behalf of allies or of being inﬁltrated by one of many intelligence services.
==Thoroughgood== 
**Station Type:** [[Beehives|Beehive]] and [[Clusters|Cluster]]
**Allegiance:** Autonomist Alliance (Mixed)
**Primary Languages:** English, Korean, Mandarin
**Population:** 350,000
Split between a plateau beehive and an orbital cluster, Thoroughgood is an autonomist station run on anarcho-collectivist lines. Thanks to the Long Array, however, Thoroughgood is a cosmopolitan hab, with various groups maintaining enclave presences here. There are reps and ofﬁces for a dozen of the more important hypercorps, including an entire division of [[Nimbus]] that rents access time from the Long Array partnership. Other enclaves represent the Titanians, [[Extropians]], [[Luna|Lunars]], and argonauts. Even the [[Jovian Republic|Jovians]] maintain a small and impressively detachment here, though they mostly keep to themselves. The Array has also attracted a couple of less organized groups, including a number of anarchist hacker groups. There are occasional ﬂare ups between the hypercorps and the anarchists, but most parties steer away from overt trouble.
Though all of the factions have legitimate uses for the Array, signals intelligence is what really interests them. Codebreaking is a competitive industry here, as various groups take the encrypted communications recorded by the Array and attempt to crack them. Some of the parties here have established impressive quantum computing and processing power resources simply to brute-force codes. Some of these simply collect data for their own intel archives, others actively publicize what they crack. The most notable anarchist hacker collective, the Laughing Squids, have embarrassed both the [[Morningstar Constellation]] and several of the hypercorps by releasing decrypted communications to the mesh from their crypto operations on Dione.
The encryption and decryption research going on here possibly make Dione the center for crypto in the known universe. This goes both ways, so if you need some good encryption or a cipher you can use to communicate with your intelligence operatives, this is the place to get it.
All of this combines to make Thoroughgood a very weird place. In public, everyone is exceeding polite and studiously oblivious to others, but paranoid to an extreme in private. Many factions send their most promising intelligence assets to Thoroughgood as a sort of ﬁnishing school for operatives. If you have training and experience in these areas, going freelance on Dione is a clear path to success. Taking care of the more mundane needs of the various political and hypercorp enclaves is another signiﬁcant industry on Thoroughgood. People willing to inhabit ﬂats and to act as servants and entertainers to the Jovian enclave
are in particularly high demand, and if you want to make a little extra money on the side once you’re on the inside, drop me a line.

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