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+# Faction Territory Target
+
+Date: 2026-09-19
+
+Status: target, operator direction only. No map, no schedule. This document owns
+the ends; a cut map will own the means.
+
+## Why
+
+A faction's territory today is a set of zones carrying a Markov-generated name.
+`Galaxy.cs:340` feeds one chain per faction from its `GeonameFile` (a massaged
+GeoNames extract), `:348` stamps the result on each owned zone, and `:352` gives
+everything unowned an `EAC-####` serial. Nothing else distinguishes one faction's
+space from another's. A Zhestokost sector and an Alakrita sector differ only in
+the phonotactics of a string.
+
+Operator, 2026-09-19: "Namefiles were how we fed Markov chains to generate
+faction-flavored names, the limitations of the geonames database I massaged to
+create them were reflected in the naming choices. We can do much better with
+generative models, even giving sectors and their stations roles in a faction's
+colonization timeline and supply chain, with names and backstories that match.
+Giving each faction such a mapping will also gives each faction a recognizable
+shape to their territory."
+
+## Ends
+
+- **A place has a job.** Every owned sector, and every station in it, carries a
+  role in its owner's supply chain — extraction, refining, fabrication,
+  logistics, administration, defence, research, disposal — and a position in that
+  faction's colonization timeline: founding wave, expansion, boom, retrenchment,
+  whatever that faction's history was.
+- **Territory has a shape you can read.** The role map is spatial, so a faction's
+  space looks like what it does. Lightsail is corridors between other people's
+  markets; Zhestokost is a fortified frontier with depth behind it; Adrasteia is
+  scattered deniable nodes with no obvious centre; Aeronautics Unlimited is an
+  extraction belt feeding a few refineries. A player who has flown two sectors of
+  a faction's space should be able to guess the third.
+- **Names and backstories match the job and the era.** A founding-wave refinery
+  and a late boom-town dormitory do not sound alike, and neither sounds like the
+  other faction's equivalent. The name says which faction, which era, which role.
+- **The supply chain is real, not decorative.** Roles connect: an extraction
+  sector feeds a refinery, which feeds fabrication, which feeds a market. Those
+  links are data, so the economy's backward generation
+  (`docs/item-provenance-target.md`) can walk them, a lot's `Produced` origin can
+  name the station that made it, and piracy has routes worth interdicting rather
+  than an abstract risk number.
+- **Generation stays deterministic.** A galaxy seed produces the same territory
+  every time. Nothing calls a model at runtime.
+
+## Constraints
+
+- **Authoring happens ahead of play, into the catalog.** Generative models write
+  typed catalog data that the operator reviews, exactly like roles and product
+  text; the game then reads authored data. No runtime inference, no network
+  dependency, no per-run variation that the seed does not explain.
+- **Volume has to be honest.** A galaxy has many sectors. Whatever is authored
+  must either cover the count or compose deterministically from authored parts;
+  a bank of a hundred hand-written names behind a thousand sectors will repeat
+  visibly, and that has to be a decision rather than an accident.
+- **The faction record owns its territory rules.** Today `Faction.GeonameFile`
+  points at a `NameFile`; whatever replaces it belongs on the faction, and
+  `NameFile` and `MarkovNameGenerator` go when the last consumer does.
+- **Unowned space needs an answer too.** `EAC-####` is a placeholder, and
+  unclaimed sectors are most of the map in some galaxies.
+- **Zone generation already has settings and a seed** (`ZoneGenerationSettings`,
+  `StableHash`); territory roles hang off the same generation, not a second pass.
+
+## Open questions for the map
+
+- Authored bank versus composable grammar versus a hybrid, and what repetition
+  rate is acceptable at real galaxy sizes.
+- Whether a station's backstory is authored text, a few typed facts the UI
+  renders, or both — and where it is shown, since a name nobody reads is
+  cheaper than prose nobody reads.
+- How a faction's colonization timeline interacts with galaxy generation's
+  existing spatial logic (megaplex, boss zones, entrances).
+- Whether roles are assigned to sectors, to stations within them, or both.
+- What happens to a sector when its owner changes hands, and whether the
+  history it carries survives the change.
+
+## Not in scope
+
+- Runtime model calls, for anything.
+- Rewriting galaxy topology. This assigns meaning to what generation already
+  produces; it does not redesign the map.