Mars

Mars is the fourth planet in the Sol system and humanity's oldest interplanetary colony. Although the planet has a tumultuous history, it has developed into an industrial powerhouse and one of the most important worlds to the United Nations Space Command as it houses the headquarters of key military-industrial contractors such as Misriah Armory and Reyes-McLees Corporation alongside commercial megacorporations like Traxus Heavy Industries. As one of the earliest and most developed human colonies, Mars is also one of the few worlds outside Earth to have significant clout in the United Earth Government.

Early days
For millennia, Mars held a lofty position within the cultures of humanity, though it was not until the 20th century that clear images of the planet were broadcast to the citizens of Earth. Throughout the later decades of the century, human space exploration blossomed into a myriad of unmanned satellites orbiting the planet conducting surveys and scans of all kinds - preparing for the inevitability of a human colony on the red planet. This answer came in the late 2010s and early 2020s, with the launching of three manned missions in 2018, 2021 and 2023 aimed at conducting scientific expeditions. Each mission consisted of roughly 15-35 personnel, slowly expanding in scope per successive mission as each rocket brought with it more infrastructure and supplies to slowly build up the colony base located inside the lava tubes of Arsia Mons. These missions were short duration in nature, lasting only a few weeks each before returning their crews to Earth.

Scramble for Mars
As the 2020s continued in earnest, more contracts for space exploration were granted to the various corporations of Earth - establishing vital space infrastructure in orbit in preparation for continued scientific and industrial interest in space travel. More pioneer groups began to land across Mars as the decade continued, until the discovery of a lifetime was announced. On May 3, 2027, Firegrove Industries' CEO Christopher Leto announced the discovery of what was believed to be a microorganism native to the Martian underground permafrost; life outside of Earth. The discovery lit a fire on Earth, and effectively overnight, trillions began being poured into fledgling space programs and industries the world over. The boom of Mars landings was effectively uncontrolled, and as such any hope by the scientific community of a slow and ordered approach to exploring the planet were ignored. Settlements were scattershot across the planetary surface in a cluttered effort to cover as much area as possible and recover more samples for study. Such samples proved extremely difficult to find, and after the first five years of searching almost no further traces of Martian life were found. Claims arose that Leto's announcement was a fake, or that his team had misidentified Earth life brought to the planet as an example of interplanetary contamination. In 2042, these claims were proven correct as anonymous sources within Firegrove leaked a series of documents proving with no doubt; the Martian bacterial samples claimed by the company were not only mis-attributed Earth life, but that the samples had been genetically engineered and tampered to appear more convincing to the scientific community. The hoax had increased Firegrove's profits tremendously, and seen a huge investment in Earth's space programs - at the expense of Martian contamination and scientific integrity. The scandal blew up and Firegrove was practically dismantled overnight.

The legacy of what would later become referred to as the "Martian Gold Rush" was a mixed one, with long-spanning effects on Mars' development. The disorderly nature of settlement on the planet (and the subsequent abandonment of these sites) meant that much of the planet's surface was littered with human artificial waste. A number of small nonviolent clashes over land rights on the planet had also given rise to an effective sense of "frontier justice" - many Martian explorers routinely carried firearms for their own self-defense - though none had yet to be discharged in anger. Perhaps most of all, the microbe which had been "discovered" on Mars by Firegrove back in 2027 had proven well-adapted to the Martian environment, and was beginning to slowly but surely spread across the surface - effectively destroying all chances for a search for native Martian life. With a multitude of corporations and nations pulling out of Mars in the wake of the Firegrove scandal in favour of alternatives such as Luna, interests in Mars fell and investment in the planet took a nosedive.

The mid-2040s were bereft with the Kasimov Crisis - an event in which settlers on the Martian surface refused to pull out and return to their homes on Earth, attempting to declare themselves independent of their home nations and encourage a Martian independence movement. The seven colonists were ultimately subject to a four-week siege conducted by corporate security forces, before their shelter supplies ran out and they surrendered themselves to return home and face arrest. The following year, a dedicated colony site was founded at Arsia Mons at the site of the initial Mars landings 25 years prior, marking the start of what is now considered to be a "true" Mars colony. Unlike previous efforts, the Arsia colony was to be a dedicated effort organised by the Chinese government hoping to lead the way in Mars exploration. In the following decades, American and European efforts would crop up in the Mariner Valley, Tharsis region and Hellas Basin, with a myriad of small mining and industrial operations beginning to develop to support the burgeoning population. The relative lack of investment and the ordered nature of the colony efforts - hoping to avoid the chaos of the 2030s - saw a time of relative quiet, as scientists and explorers were to keep primarily to the regions surrounding their home bases.

The Sino-Russian War of the 2050s and 2060s saw the Chinese development on Mars take a much larger acceleration, as increased tensions back on Earth saw the Chinese government begin to invest in their Mars settlement to serve effectively as an offworld bunker - well out of range of Russian nuclear missiles. This acceleration of development would see the Chinese begin to install hidden nuclear missile silos on Mars, disguised as underground VTOL rocket maintenance, storage and launch facilities. This was soon followed up by the NATO coalition's own equivalents in the years after due to emerging tensions back on Earth, though neither side would publicly acknowledge any of these facilities' existence - due to their breach of the Outer Space Treaty. Mars was later a victim of the 2075 asteroid economic crash following the rapid development of the Belt as an industrial hub, with most Mars-based export industry suffering greatly for several years. The economic crash's long-running affects on the United States would ultimately contribute to the Second American Civil War throughout the 2080s, leading to a great deal of unrest and turmoil in the offworld Martian colonies. The end of the civil war in 2093 put an end to much of this unrest, though the disturbance ultimately saw some American settlements on the Martian surface declare their own independence. Due to the turmoil on Earth, these settlements were mostly a footnote in the news broadcasts of the time, and they would be left to their own devices for the next few years without interference.

Second wave of colonisation
The growing presence of the bacteria unleashed by Firegrove back in the 2040s continued to be a nuisance on Mars throughout the later stages of the 21st century, with much of the planet's surface coming to be covered in a thin coating of the organism. By the 2090s, definitive alterations to the planet's atmosphere could be proven without a doubt to be traced back to the bacteria. Nonetheless, the growing issues of population and climate change back on Earth did little to stop increased waves of colonist import to the planet, fuelled by the emergence of cities such as Mombasa competing for valuable space launch industries. Many of these colonists were now sourced from poorer and more destitute regions of Earth, hoping to leave to make a better life on Mars. Over the final decades of the 21st century and the first years of the 22nd, the Martian landscape once again underwent rapid development particularly spurred by an import of cheap labour from the Philippines and India - in particular focused on the regions surrounding Argyre Planitia.

By this time, corporate interests were once again becoming very predominant on Mars, with many such corporations funding the settlement of these second-wave colonists in exchange for extended work contracts in often-hazardous conditions. As the 2100s began in earnest, Mars was an increasingly diverse scattering of competing settlements of varying political, economic, religious and corporate goals. The lack of oversight by the powers of Earth - busy with ongoing cold war and a movement for independence on Earth's moon saw intra-colony conflicts begin to break out more and more often. The lack of major firearms or military production on Mars meant that such conflicts were small-scale in nature and often consisted of single-digits numbers of firearms (often themselves smuggled onto the planet) between rival worker settlements over land rights and supposed-territorial breaches. Strikes against the working conditions of the colony settlements became increasingly common, and tensions began to rise. As colonisation drives increased, Mars soon began to find itself bearing a higher unemployed population of migrants the increasingly-hostile Earth, desperate for any work they could find.

Martian War of Independence
The end of the Lunar independence movement in 2106 was a landmark moment for the emergent direction of Mars. Having emerged victorious, the US was now able to turn its attentions to its errant Martian colonies, many of whom had declared their secession from the United States fifteen years prior. With its freshly-available and now-battle-hardened Marines, the US began the process of officially reclaiming its old colony bases - intending to keep up the momentum it started with its successes on Luna. However, the Lunar independence movement itself had proven a template for many on Mars to begin the discussions of their own allegiance to the flags of Earth, leading to the establishment of the Free Mars Coalition. The coalition was a movement led by several figureheads including one Vladimir Koslov, seeking to unite many of the disparate settlements on Mars in an attempt to form a truly united stance against the Earth. The FMC saw Mars' sheer distance as the major strength the planet held where their Lunar brethren had failed; if control of the planet could be established, all that remained was to hold off the Earthers' response attempts until they were forced to concede.

The arrival of the US Marines in 2108 was a brief flashpoint for Martian history, as the Chinese and US played an intense standoff later known as the Phobos Crisis, in which the Chinese government protested the deployment of an armed military force on the planet. Geopolitical tensions escalated to a level not seen since the Cold War of the 20th century, with the Chinese preparing to use their Mars-bound missile silos to shoot down the American rockets, and the Americans prepared to do the same in kind back on Earth - starting a nuclear war. Cooler heads prevailed and the company was allowed to land, though under the proviso that the PRC were allowed to match the NATO troops man-for-man in any force deployment on Mars.

The remainder of the 2110s were relatively quiet as the military deployments began to forcibly reclaim their old grounds from previous decades. However, the Phobos Crisis did light a spark in the Martian populace, many of whom called for an end to the imperialistic reconquest of the lost colonies by the Americans. By 2112, the US and China had both graduated from simply reclaiming old territory to a land-grab and scramble across the Martian surface, echoing the European colonial conquest of Africa two centuries prior.

2114 saw the outbreak of the Martian War of Independence as the Free Mars Coalition formally declared their independence, prompting an aggressive response by the combined US and Chinese military forces on the planet. The Mariner Valley became home to a long-term low-intensity guerrilla war between Coalition forces and their Earther counterparts. The conflict peaked in 2118 with the Coalition's attempted capture of the Hebes interplanetary ballistic missile silo, prompting an extremely aggressive response from the Chinese military and putting both NATO and Chinese forces on an extremely high alert. Twenty-three days later, events on Earth would see the two powers erupt into a global conflict on and around Earth and its orbit, with the violence spreading to Mars in the ensuing days. The Third World War saw the NATO and Chinese Marine forces on Mars engage in a handful of direct battles, though both sides' low numbers and potential for conflict with the Free Mars Coalition forces saw these firefights result in few serious casualties. Nonetheless, the three-way war on Mars grew in intensity, and a series of assaults on known Coalition strongholds saw the movement's central leadership killed or imprisoned, and the Martian War of Independence officially end

Manufacturing
"Mars is different from Luna. If you need something on Luna, you can get it shipped up from Earth's surface in a month, or a week if you know the right people. Out here, we have to make it ourselves or do without. And I didn't come all this way just to live in abject poverty."

- Brad Illingsworth, early Martian industrialist

Martian industrialization took a sharp turn from the path that Luna took early on in the colonization process. Luna was colonized to support projects in Earth orbit, and so many of her industries were not self-sustaining, and were interdependent on Earth's manufacturing. Mars was colonized for the sake of habitation, and so its industry was meant to support itself. While Luna expanded and declined with the ambitions of Earth, Mars thrived. Habitat-factories sprouted like mushrooms, and the economy grew as fast as colonists could move in and integrate into the workforce.

Phobos
For centuries, Phobos has served as the "gateway" to Mars and the planet's primary orbital port. The moon is hollowed out and almost entirely built up.

Deimos
After plans to convert the moon into a massive intrasolar cargo transport or a slower-than-light colony ship fell through, Deimos was turned into the orbital counterweight for the Tharsis industrial heavy-lift array.