View source for Comm-Link:Portfolio - Imperial Cartography Center

Humanity’s first maps were of the stars. Created millennia ago, they were dots charting the night sky painted upon cavern walls on Earth. One wonders if those original mapmakers ever imagined that one day their descendants would get to visit those stars?

Though the methods have drastically changed, the [[Imperial Cartography Center]] (ICC) carries on that proud tradition of charting celestial objects. This UEE government agency is best known for their Deep Space Scanning & AstroGraphical Stations that search for [[jump points]], and for the elite [[Stellar Surveyors]] unit that assesses newly discovered [[systems]]. Yet, the responsibilities and reach of the ICC extend far beyond those two departments. From working with the [[Ark]] to keeping the [[Starmap]] current, to tracking the [[Baer comet]] as it crosses the [[Stanton System]], the Imperial Cartography Center is essential to modern space travel.

== Expanding Space ==

Once [[Nick Croshaw]] successfully piloted his ship through the first jump point, aspiring explorers flooded the stars, obsessed with helping Humanity expand its reach ever farther. However, the nascent days of space exploration were fraught with danger. Experimental and unreliable equipment paired with a vast, uncharted expanse led to the tragic disappearances of many.

Humanity grappled with how to govern their growing domain. The various national institutions had not yet unified, so there were few protocols in place to deal with the discovery of new systems. That led to [[Nemo system|Nemo’s]] [[2364]] discovery date coming into question during a famous legal case where two companies argued over who owned the coordinates for the jump into the system from [[Fora system|Fora]]. Meanwhile, the government hid the discovery of [[Banshee system|Banshee]], in [[2317]], from the public for years out of fear that its [[Banshee (star)|powerful pulsar]] was a safety concern.

After the [[United Nations of Earth]] finally formed in [[2380]], they incentivized explorers to report their discoveries to the government, but left the private sector to chart new systems. This occurred because a contingent of prominent and powerful politicians was dedicated to keeping the new UNE government as lean and efficient as possible. They believed an industry within the private sector would rise to fill the gap, and they were right.

For a few centuries, this arrangement worked relatively well. Initially, there were numerous cartography companies with the ships and technology to chart systems. However, it wasn’t long before conglomerates acquired the most promising firms and slowly pushed out the rest. A few non-profit and academic institutions survived the culling and continued to provide detailed maps to the public for free or at a nominal cost. But due to a lack of funding, their products often took years to reach the market after a new system was discovered.

== For the Public Good ==

Over the years, the government received an increasing number of complaints against cartography companies for egregious inaccuracies or tiered pricing schemes that made detailed maps unaffordable to many consumers. One particular heinous example was when the Monroe Mapping Concern left a whole asteroid field off a map of Hadrian since they had promised exclusivity to a mining company. This led a number of politicians to lobby for increased oversight. It finally reached a tipping point with the Pallas incident. After discovering [[Pallas system|Pallas]], [[Gaia Planet Services]] failed to properly scan the system before attempting to terraform [[Pallas III]]. Only then did they discover it was already occupied by the [[Xi’An]], an unknown species at the time. Realizing regulations were needed to govern the charting of new systems, the [[Government Cartography Agency]] (GCA) was created in [[2531]].

Initially, the GCA was tasked with charting and scanning all new systems and ensuring that the most current geospatial information was available to the public. When [[Ivar Messer]] empowered himself as [[Imperator]] in [[2546]], he realized that the GCA was in a key position to control the knowledge of the known universe. Not long after he was sworn in, private mapmakers got word to shutter their operations. Mapmaking was nationalized, and the GCA renamed the Imperial Cartography Center.

Under Ivar Messer, an astronomical amount of credits was poured into the ICC. Companies with strong ties to the Messer regime received massive orders for top-of-the-line scanning equipment and were granted no-bid contracts to construct deep-space scanning stations. The ICC quickly embedded itself into a number of government agencies and organizations including, most importantly, the military. Deep-space scanning stations kept an eye on [[Perry Line]] systems and, eventually, helped monitor [[Vanduul]] clans on the western front. Without any private sector competition, the ICC became an essential agency and earned a degree of autonomy not afforded to other agencies under Messers’ rule.

Eventually, the ICC put that political independence to use. In [[2715]], three years after the fall of [[Orion]] to the Vanduul, [[Messer VIII]] ordered the system and all jumps to it removed from the UEE’s non-military maps for the public good. ICC Director [[Loretta De Biasio]] refused, claiming that it would be more dangerous for people in systems connected to Orion not to know exactly where a clan of Vanduul might suddenly appear.