Travel technology & beacon network — Sun Chronicles compendium¶

Beacon classification¶

Beacon systems carry a prime number of beacons (or one), each anchored to a body¶

Tier: canon

— US ch. 42

Persephone's network-vision narration lays out the full taxonomy. A system holds a prime number of beacons (or one), each gravitationally anchored to a body such as a planet. Classes by beacon count:

Class	Beacons	Named example(s)	Role
terminus	1	Landfall	line endpoint; no onward beacon travel
janus	2	the Mishirru trunk line	"backbone" line systems
cerberus	3	Troia	routes begin to branch
scylla	5	Chaonia, Molossia, Thesprotis	the Chaonian core
hydra	7	Karnos	major multi-region hub
(unnamed)	11	Yele System, Anchor System (Phene)	greatest hubs; only two left after the collapse

The eleven-beacon class is given no name in the source¶

Tier: inference

The named classes track the prime sequence: terminus = 1, janus = 2, cerberus = 3, scylla = 5, hydra = 7. The same passage (US ch. 42, above) describes eleven-beacon systems but assigns them no class name — even though the two eleven-beacon systems are now identified (Yele and Anchor; see Yele System in systems.md, FH ch. 15). Inference: either an eleven-beacon class name exists elsewhere in canon and simply isn't in these passages, or none exists in-world. Recorded as a naming gap — do not coin a term.

A beacon is a spiral-coil artifact tethered to its anchor planet like a far-flung moon¶

Tier: canon

— US ch. 4

Physical form of a beacon: a spiral-coil artifact held at the outer edge of an anchor planet's gravity well, a control node on the coil's rim managing arrivals and departures. A working beacon's coil glows with a pulsing phosphorescence — a visible tell separating operable beacons from dead ones (the text repeatedly notes "not all were still operable" within a given system, and dead beacons appear as inert artifacts; see Tsurru in systems.md).

A beacon is named for the system it links to¶

Tier: canon

— FH ch. 4

Beacons are conventionally named for their destination system (Karnos's "Aspera Beacon" links to Aspera System, and so on). Two consequences for the data model: a beacon name is effectively an edge label, and a beacon whose paired system is unknown — like Karnos's dead seventh — therefore cannot be named. Where two linked systems each host a beacon toward the other, the same physical link appears under two names (the Karnos↔Sleepless edge is the "Sleepless Beacon" from Karnos and the "Karnos Beacon" from Sleepless). This is the edge-identity/deduplication problem flagged in the schema notes.

Living beacons are lethal on contact; dead beacons emit infectious auras¶

Tier: canon

— FH ch. 66

— FH ch. 12

Two physical properties of beacons beyond the prime-class taxonomy: living beacons are lethal on direct contact — you keep your distance; dead beacons emit toxic auras that infect their anchor planet plus nearby habitats and factories. The Odrysa dead beacon contaminated its previously habitable planet, rendering it uninhabitable. Part of why broken outer-rim corridors became dead in stretches after the collapse — and why caravan routes detour around such systems.

The Apsaras Convergence "invented, or discovered" the beacons¶

Tier: canon (the uncertainty itself)

— US ch. 42

— FH ch. 76

The text deliberately hedges on whether the Apsaras engineers invented beacons or rediscovered them. FH ch. 76 sharpens the question: the Apsaras "plundered" the Mishirru Gyre Archives and took navigational charts they never returned. The charts implied predecessor knowledge — possibly Celestial-Empire-era beacon physics already worked out and stored in the Archives. So the canonical position is uncertain: the engineers may have recovered a Celestial-Empire technology, repurposed it as an anti-Argosy infrastructure, and made it their own.

The original Apsaras network — eleven radial routes from She Who Bore Them All¶

Tier: canon (mostly Persephone's reconstruction)

— FH ch. 15

The first beacon was a single-hop proof of concept (Persephone's reconstruction from the Tjeker map, FH ch. 76). The original network was eleven radial routes from the home system She Who Bore Them All — every trip passed through the centre. The prime-number class hierarchy (cerberus = 3, scylla = 5, hydra = 7) emerged later, as the engineers added cross-links between the original radial lines: "At some point the engineers connected those original, separate lines to each other to make the network efficient, starting with three-beacon cerberus systems and five-beacon scylla systems" (FH ch. 86). The seven-beacon class (Karnos, Destiny, Auger, Axiom) and the eleven-beacon class (Yele, Anchor) marked successive generations of network densification. The construction of the twelfth and thirteenth beacons at She Who Bore Them All is the leading on-page hypothesis for what eventually overloaded and crashed the network ~800 yrs ago (see open-questions.md).

Ships¶

Yele ship design — the original template for corvettes and corsairs¶

Tier: canon

— US ch. 1

Yele shipwrighting is an influential design lineage: corvettes and corsairs (atmosphere-landing-capable craft) derive from "the same original Yele design," the corsair distinguished by an extra comms bulb for hunting alone. "Yele-style frigates" turn up in Phene service (FH ch. 33) and a Yele contingent (the Larissan Centaur Division, a heavy frigate division) fights alongside Chaonia under the treaty (US ch. 24) — so "Yele-style" denotes a recognised hull school used across polities, not only League-flagged ships.

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