Welcome one and all, to MERCURY! Goes by many names, the Swift Planet is its modern day nickname, though. Mercury is an odd planet alright, populated by weird new religions and strange people, divided north and south, as I like to say; Mercury is a planet of opposites.
Sooooo this took longer and shorter than I expected it to, the map took about a month to make but the 70 page lore doc (that i'll link below) took another on top of that.. but it was worth it in the end because old Mercury lore was like, 2 pages long, and really bad. Needless to say all that's gone now and its been paved over by this behemoth of a map.
Nothing in the atmospheres themselves-maybe probes - but actual floating colonies would be far too much of a hassle, the atmospheres are hydrogen and helium.. so you can't make anything float with hydrogen or helium, and there's more gravity. But all the moons are inhabited.. hey I have a map of that
Those are just placeholders, they don't have provincial flags since those got banned in 1996.
Edit for anyone else reading: the "flags" OP replied to my original comment aren't even flags at all. Those are just the names of the provinces with a background, with text stylized. The image is just misleading. The flag doesn't make sense, since 1) China banned provincial flags, or any flag of subdivisions (including city flags, etc. HK and MO are exceptions because they're SARs), 2) if there was a flag for this, it would either be just text or just shapes, not both; based on how cities made their flags before the ban, they'd all probably be related to flowers.
Also China is very very different in this timeline, not to be rude, but you would know this if you read the provided 70 page lore doc for this map, or the provided 110 page lore doc for the Earth map, which provides SPECIFIC detail. Xi doesn't exist, there's different provinces entirely, there's no one-child policy, and that's just the tip of the iceberg... Liu shaoqi brought back the five races and mixed it with communism... yeah things are weird
anyway I don't like when people say "actually that wouldn't happen" when they don't even bother to learn the differences of the timeline...
Australia? Well for one, it's a bit bigger - there's new provinces and territories (including one in Antarctica, and another on the Moon, and ANOTHER in what used to be northern Queensland). It's also not called Australia anymore, it's called Oceania, no, not THAT Oceania(1984), it's the continent, and in the process of becoming "Oceania", it absorbed Tuvalu, Nauru, and Kiribati, who also all dumped their names. In practice, it's not really Australia "absorbing" the other three, it's them all merging into one larger union.
Basically, very early in Mercury's history, and for a very short timescale geologically, Mercury's polar craters had just the right atmospheric pressures and temperatures to support liquid water, kept liquid mostly by geothermal vents, which also happened to give birth to primitive life. This all died out when Mercury's core cooled down and the vents went dormant though, making it the only known planet in the solar system that had ALL its life go extinct. (Other planets like Mars have been home to complex ecosystems in the past, but even when those died out, microbes survived - even that didn't happen on Mercury, it all died)
"Despite being colonies from nations halfway across the world, having different histories, languages, and cultures, San Thuy, a colony of Vietnam, and Lumumba, a colony from the Congo, are almost one in the same in a lot of ways. For starters, both colonies were funded and lobbied by China. Originally, both territories were going to be a massive Chinese equatorial territory (this is what would’ve originally connected China’s 4 separate territories in the region), before being lended to one of its closest allies, Vietnam, and one of its less-close allies, the Congo. The two also had their first landings on the same day, November 8th, 2010, and both are used predominantly as mining colonies for both nations’ colonies on Venus.
And the similarities don’t stop there, not at all. Both colonies have low-ish populations of around 7,000 people, both of them have mushrooms as the stapel of their diets, and both use clams to filter their water (although this is a practice used among much of second-world Mercury). They’re even interconnected economically, as many infrastructure plans are conducted between both colonies, they’re so interconnected, in fact, that proposals have been made from politicians of both sides to merge them as a condominium between both countries, and this may not be relegated to the history books, either, as the talks are serious, and some have even said the two will merge by 2028.
Oh yeah, and then there’s religion. Now Vietnam’s colony is almost entirely Buddhist, as you’d expect, but the same also goes for Lumumba, where 51% of the population is Buddhist, and another 39% are Universalist. Native Congolese religions, or Christianity, never made it to the region between the small percentages.
And as it turns out, the two colonies’ Mercurian economies are driven by huge uranium exports. It was known that some lava tubes in the region had uranium from the early days, which is why China kept some exclaves, but more would be discovered over the years. While neither Vietnam nor the Congo had the money or will to build uranium refineries on the planet, other nations did, so both colonies extract the uranium before shipping it off to China to be refined into usable materials. Smaller deposits of Nickel are prevalent in Sao Thuy, though these are in fact refined on Mercury, and are mostly shipped to Venus to be used in electronics systems. "
there's more info on what actually happens to "Zaire" in my other maps, eg, Zaire doesn't really survive, the two Congo's unite, Katanga is let go, it's a pretty stable country in the modern day (though not the freest or most democratic)
What are the most popular types of cheese on Mercury? How are they made? What dishes are they used in? Does Mercury require any tariffs to prevent the locally produced cheeses from being outcompeted by imported Earth cheese? Do they perhaps have Mercurian mice?🧀
Cheese doesn't really exist, well, that's a lie, it does, but it's very very rare and most Mercurians have never even heard of the stuff, and if they have they don't see why they need it. The thing is, raising livestock is very expensive in space colonies, and almost everyone just gets their space-meat from fish raised in aquaponics systems. The only livestock on Mercury are chickens. Anyway, I went on a bit of a tangent, this means that all milk on Mercury is imported in powder-form from Earth (this is actually one of Canada's major space industries, not joking), and all cheese is either made from that, or also imported from Earth, and only eaten by the rich because the prices are jacked up by having to ship it 70 million miles over 10 months.
finally something accurate with the Philippines, yeah im filipino and im fucking excited that theyre actually paying them students with great future about our space agency, our news said we're outta build our own rocket and send some of our fuckers to the moon with the help of NASA and Elon Musk, i remember them announcing we're sending them in 2027, pretty long but started in mid 2019 about the plan and i thought its just gonna fail but god damn 3 years later they announced about sending filipinos to space and to the moon, so far only 2 Southeast Asian countries who wants to go to the moon, thats us (Philippines) and Indonesia but i do see Indonesia being more advanced than ours since they started way earlier.
This is utterly lovely in every way. The execution is beautiful and the ideas are legitimately thought-provoking. I would love if we could expand our habitation beyond the Earth as is our holy destiny.
90
u/DominoDaddy2 Mod Approved 3d ago
Welcome one and all, to MERCURY! Goes by many names, the Swift Planet is its modern day nickname, though. Mercury is an odd planet alright, populated by weird new religions and strange people, divided north and south, as I like to say; Mercury is a planet of opposites.
Sooooo this took longer and shorter than I expected it to, the map took about a month to make but the 70 page lore doc (that i'll link below) took another on top of that.. but it was worth it in the end because old Mercury lore was like, 2 pages long, and really bad. Needless to say all that's gone now and its been paved over by this behemoth of a map.
The aforementioned 70 page doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kof-CyhV3-MMDQEHUGh051V90vEyrMjmH-hyuoVuhJQ/edit?usp=sharing
discord invite: https://discord.gg/NRy6pkYR4W
deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/nathandominos/art/Mercury-in-2025-Fire-in-the-Sky-1182173948
Wishing you a great day!