Cardinal Worlds

The Cardinal Worlds are the eldest, most populous, and extensively developed worlds located within the Unified Vespian Directorate, forming the core of the Directorate's holdings throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. The Cardinal Worlds house the cultural, technological, and economic centers of the Directorate, and wield overwhelming influence over the rest of the galaxy and the Vespian colonies.

Discovery and exploration
When Mikael O'Neill and the first Vespians came to the end of their exodus in n/a NE, they arrived at the edge of the region that would become known as the Cardinal Worlds. Mikael spent close to ten years exploring the worlds of the region, until and the Vespians came upon the planet of Vespia, which they opted to settle following their desire to begin work on building a society that would carry on Mikael's name and ideals. More than six thousand years later, the Vespian astrophysicist James Morgan, developed faster-than-light travel though the use of void space, an extra-dimensional plane that circumvented the laws of physics preventing FTL travel in realspace. This discovery would allow the Vespians to begin exploration of their stellar neighborhood, and make the progress needed to begin charting habitable planets and a program of colonization.

The great houses of Vespia amassed what was then, the single greatest concerted effort by a coalition of powers to fund and oversee the exploration of the local star systems. Together, the seven great houses built and launched the spaceship, VSS Winterblossom, in 6172 NE which was to embark upon a ten-year mission to visit each star within two hundred lightyears of Vespia, and catalogued all of the planets within them with greater detail than that provided by the orbital space telescopes managed by the Vespian households. The crew of the Winterblossom made history when they discovered the habitable planet of Onyx in 6177 NE, sparking the beginning of the Vespian Expansion era, paving the way for Vespian civilization to begin colonizing the region soon to be deemed the Cardinal Worlds.