Harmony Station · A reader's schematic

The shape of the place

For the reader who asked for a map.

Harmony Station hangs at the Earth–Moon L1 point, 326,000 km from Earth and close enough to the Moon that the Moon stops looking like sky and starts looking like a wall. It is one structure: a stationary central hub, and three concentric rings that rotate around it as a single piece, once every forty-five seconds. The farther out you live, the heavier you are.

This page shows the structure — the rings, the spokes, the gravity. The interiors you'll have to walk yourself.

1.34 rpm — one turn every 45 s (the hub doesn't turn) 100 m 250 m 500 m Outer Ring · 1.0 g estates, five floors deep — yet only ~100 residents Middle Ring · 0.5 g ~2,000 people · 25 football fields of floor everyone, eventually Inner Ring · 0.2 g 300–500 people Hub 0 g zero-g pool Float Café the Walkway Command Corridor Ring 3 gym drawn to scale — the Outer Ring is a full kilometre across
Fig. 1 — Harmony Station, face on. One stationary hub; three rings rotating as a single structure; five elevator spokes to each ring. Note the irony of the bands: the thickest ring is the emptiest, and the thin middle one holds the city.

Gravity is geography

Spin gravity is simple and merciless: it grows with the radius. At the hub there is none. At the Inner Ring you weigh a fifth of yourself. At the Middle Ring, half. Only the Outer Ring — a full kilometre across — pulls like Earth. Where you can afford to stand determines how much you weigh.

No ring connects to another. Every journey between rings goes up a spoke, through the weightless hub, and down again — and because the hub doesn't rotate, the elevator cabin has to shed its spin on the way up before it can dock. There is no such thing as a casual visit to another ring.

axis of rotation 0 g hub 0.2 g 0.5 g 1.0 g Inner Middle Outer 0.2 g 0.5 g 1.0 g the cabin sheds its spin on the climb — ~100 seconds, ring to hub 0 100 m 250 m 500 m
Fig. 2 — Section through the axis. Weight grows with radius; the hub stays still while everything else turns around it.

The numbers

Where

Earth–Moon L1 · 326,000 km from Earth, 58,000 km from the Moon. The Moon looms four times wider than it ever looks from Earth. Earth is a blue disc you can cover with your thumb.

Spin

1.34 rpm. From any window, Earth appears to turn once every forty-five seconds. It's the station turning. It looks like Earth anyway.

Who

About 4,200 people, three years into a station built for 6,500 — run as neutral territory by Earth, Luna, and the African Continental Alliance.

Getting there

Four to five days by cycler ship from Earth. The comm lag home is 2.2 seconds round trip — long enough to make every call feel like a letter.

Made of

Lunar aluminum and lunar concrete, twelve years in the building. Not chosen for elegance — chosen because Luna's mass driver launches it at 4% of Earth's energy cost.

Design philosophy

Resilience over efficiency. Repairability over optimization. It is not finished, and it isn't meant to be.

Five places worth knowing

The station is where Exile to Harmony Station begins — and it's not a backdrop. It changes across every book, the way the people do.

Start with Book 1 on Amazon →

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