Database of Charted Systems

The Database of Charted Systems (DOCS) is a compendium of star systems within the Milky Way galaxy, created by the Collective of Autonomous Systems in 623 stemming from a desire to combine the star charts of the Sco'volun and Karyru civilizations after establishing contact and forming an alliance with one another, representing the beginnings of the Collective. Alongside its statistical purposes, it also catalogs planets and the lifeforms of these planets, if applicable. A requirement for new races to join the Collective was, among many others, to provide their own copies of star charts to correlate and add to the Database.

As of the last year the Collective existed, 2943, the Database of Charted Systems had cataloged 91,372,998,192 star systems, with 106,982,212,355 planets -- 37,291,622 of which had life, 8,746,910 of those with sentient life, and 128,362 of sentient lifeforms founding distinct civilizations ranking at least 1 on the Kardashev scale, 9,274 of which were recognized by the Collective as candidates for membership and/or 'high potential' races. There exists 172 known races that have independently attained Tier 2 and formed interstellar societies -- these are the most prominent members of the galaxy, such as Humans, Sco'volun, K'dul, Karyru, Edenians, Lazvyn, Anthrucites, and Maq'un. However, the extent of these races's star systems are not entirely known, as many of them were hostile towards the Collective at one point or another and bordered the fringes of Collective space, particularly the K'dul. Even if the civilization was considered an ally of the Collective but not a member, or on terms of neutrality, this does not necessitate that they gave their own star charts to the Collective, meaning that there could be thousands, millions or even billions of uncharted systems that the races of the Collective do not have particular knowledge of. These systems, and the particular areas where they are located, is known as the Uncharted Sector.

The format of every system and planet in the DOCS was represented by the Collective's official name for the system, followed by a numeral indicating the body's order of orbit around its parent: Earth, for example, would be known as Sol-3, being preceded by Venus (Sol-2) and Mercury (Sol-1) in distance to Sol. Moons are treated in the same fashion, and can be represented by its parent body or that body's star (denoted by a colon). Luna, Earth's sole natural satellite, may thus be represented as Sol-3:1 or Terra-1. To simplify the sheer amount of data contained in the DOCS and so as to not overwhelm the navigational computer of a typical spacecraft in that era, the systems were condensed into their clusters and then further expanded into individual systems when approaching the epicenter of the particular cluster. However, receiving information from the DOCS in real time, depending on how far one was from a transmitting station, was highly inefficient, and most spacecraft opted for preloaded star charts to navigate in a particular area, especially those which had no use for navigation beyond more than a few systems, such as freighters and peacekeeping vessels.

The database was housed in a subterranean server on the planet of Hyxia in the Gagur System, taking up several thousand square miles of space underground despite the technological breakthroughs that went into creating it, with a server whose design prompted the creation of one of the galaxy's finest works of engineering through a sophisticated quantum supercomputer that was able to generate a map of the known galaxy in staggering detail, down to the scale of planetoids. It was also able to retrieve the names of planets, star systems, and constellations and give a considerable insight into each one, drawing from all known sources provided to the Collective, at which point an AI linked to the database would synthesize them and then communicate with visitors, allowing them to ask open-ended, abstract questions about various systems and planets that would otherwise be difficult to query.

It is known that the database was intended to be expanded to include intricate details about the cultures of every sentient race and extensive background into the realms of chemistry, physics, and astrobiology, effectively making it a galactic encyclopedia, but this would have been a much more intensive undertaking -- from acquiring the data, transferring the data, and allocating space for said data -- and was not even close to completion when the Collective collapsed. It is now believed this database server was destroyed or rendered inactive, as the Gagur System now falls within Lazvyn space, and no Collective-remnant republic has been able to establish contact with the server as of 2987. Fortunately, many republics made backups of their quadrant's star charts and local data and have retained most of the data that could have been lost otherwise, but some argue that the server was being utilized for other purposes unknown to the galactic community, and the loss of the Hyxian database represents the loss of an unknown and potentially incomprehensible amount of information that the Collective did not disclose the nature or existence of.