Concerning Terra in the New Era (hey, it rhymes!):
Earth probably weathered the Collapse and the Virus better than just
about any other world. Consider: Earth is the only planet in the Galaxy
where humans can survive with absolutely NO artificial help. Even Vland had
to have that weird food-preparation guild to make the plant life edible. On
Earth you can eat stuff right out of the ground. With primitive TL 6-7
agriculture, it can support five billion people.
And Earth has an incredible amount of low-tech infrastructure already
in place. Surface railroads dating back thousands of years; vast highway
systems for groundcar traffic; alternating-current power grids; copper-cable
voice phone networks. By way of illustration, the city of Rome in the 1990s
still uses some of the aqueducts built by the Roman Empire, and in New Mexico
farmers still use irrigation systems built before Columbus reached the New
World.
Quite a lot of obsolete technology would still exist in historical
preserves, since history/tourism was probably a big industry on Terra before
the Collapse. The facilities at places like the Krupp Steel Museum, or
Silicon Valley National Park, or the Baikonur Cosmodrome Living History Center
would be very useful when all the high-tech gadgetry goes blooey.
Terra's location is also a bonus. All of the Solomani worlds would be
separated from the Virus by a belt of devastated systems where the Sols and the
Imperium were fighting. The Solomani planets may have had some advance warning
of the Virus, and could take steps to protect themselves from its worst
effects -- no grav city crashes, or fusion power plant explosions, or planetary
defense weapons going berserk.
It's quite likely that Terra is the capital of a rather large Pocket
Empire, possibly claiming to be the one-and-only Solomani Confederation. Their
attitudes would be interesting; one might imagine a "back to the soil"
movement railing against high technology. Since the Solomani were always into
biotechnology and genetic engineering, they might use lots of biotech-based
equipment in place of computers.
Jim Cambias
Who Suspects Lucan was a K'kree Agent
Misusing His Wife's Internet Account
At Duke Bio