Museum Town
A 'museum town' is a space colony or terrestrial settlement set aside by the Cobalt Protectorate to serve both as a biological and cultural reserve for human-adjacent species who fall under their protection and as a diplomatic expanded to the proportions of an entire town or even city.
A culture need not expressly be part of the Protectorate to recieve a museum town of its own. While the Protectorate takes few immigrants and generally prefers to help would-be refugees in situ rather than taking them into its own territory, the requirements of the Code of Evermorn and the final decree of the legendary Wurth Harkin require the Protectorate to make good faith efforts to preserve humanity and its relatives wherever they may be found. The Evermorn Strategic Colony Initiative serves to help preserve the Protectorate and the Evermornan peoples; museum towns serve to help preserve everyone else.
The inspiration for the concept of museum towns actually dates back to the Protectorate's entry into the Valleybridge Consensus. Populations from most spacefaring species are gathered at the rogue planet Valleybridge to serve as lifetime appointees of their respective species' diplomatic corps because, otherwise, important decisions which affect the Sealed Kingdoms Region as a whole would take forever to hash out if doing so were even possible. The speed of light limits communication speed as well, and in the Sealed Kingdoms, being over 100 light years across, latency would be extremely high. Having a permanent diplomatic mission on Valleybridge that operates on a system of subsidiarity with respect to the home state reduces this problem somewhat, and museum towns are an extension of this logic.
Demographics
While the diplomatic mission from a given state is a mandatory inclusion within the population of a museum town, the initial civilian population is as close as possible to a representative sample of that state's culture. The actual makeup of the museum town's population will tend to fluctuate over time as a result of emmigration and intermingling between social strata over the course of generations. Because a museum town is considered the sovereign territory of the origin culture despite its location somewhere in Protectorate space, movement between the museum town and the surrounding territory requires a visa and, in the case of immigration, requires that one undergoes the full naturalization process.
Government
As with the Protectorate Periphery, museum towns are granted an extensive level of autonomy within their own boundaries and with few exceptions relating to the proscriptions found in the Code. The Protectorate will not abide chattel slavery, but otherwise intervenes only to protect life and limb; the entire purpose of a museum town is to preserve not only a people, but their unique culture and, to the extent possible, their native ecosystem.
Infrastructure
Even the portion of museum towns created on the surface of Evermorn feature facilities with sealed environments. These chambers, whether greenhouses, underground vaults, or towers, are intended to simulate environments native to the town's culture and preserve staple crops or wildlife important to the milieu of that culture. The sealed nature of these environments is maintained primarily to ensure that invasive species from either side of the barrier are not permitted to cross and cause ecological damage that cannot easily be repaired. Often, efforts will be made before the construction of a museum town to choose an isolated region that already possesses the average environmental qualities of the region from which the resident population hails - though, for planet- or system-spanning cultures, this may prove more difficult than it is worth. For example, the League of Lepidosian City-States sponsors the museum town Tash Al Nanat located on the equatorial Onpetra Frontier, an arid region similar to the Great Ilmenite Desert in the northern hemisphere of Lepidos.
As the name implies, museum towns are expected to aid in their cultures' own preservation through the construction of numerous museums and archives. These facilities are open to the local public and to visiting tourists alike. This, in turn, necessitates efficient transportation infrastructure and customs system, including roads, rail lines, airports, and (if coastal) seaports.
Type
Town
Location under
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