The Terran Empire is in a tight spot at the start of the new year, minerals on both Terra and Mars have been used up, though large stockpiles remain on both planets, the home worlds must rely on mining bases in the asteroid belt and on the inner planets to maintain growth.
In general, the Empire is both militaristic and expansionist, indeed it has to be if it wishes to survive as a reasonable power, for the time being the possibilities of the newly discovered jump points are preventing thoughts of war, but if they prove useless, her gaze may turn to the outer system.
The Terran Empire is ruled by Imogen Scott, only recently ascended to the throne and young for her position at age 21, her father and previous Emperor of Terra Harvey Scott educated her well in the years following the attacks that devastated the planet, but was in poor health due to the stress of welding a nation together out of the disparate factions surviving both on and off Earth, and died shortly after seeing a form of peace come at last. She is still unprepared for ruling the empire, and knowledge of this has lead to some psychological problems and a morose disposition, which her advisers take great pains to hide from the general public.
The population of Terra is just at 350 million, there are a great many installations on the planet but all TN mineral resources have been exhausted. This is a blessing in disguise as due to the recent tragedies there is not enough of a population to man all installations, however with mining shut down that problem is resolved.
Mars is the other manned colony, with 100 million citizens, fully terraformed it is an almost ideal world, though it too is facing mineral shortages, it is ruled by Duke Harvey Spencer, another young individual and peer of the Empress, they were educated in the same classes at university, and he closely supports her policies in public while attempting to help her through severe bouts of depression in private, though his duties on Mars make him unable to do so as much as he would like.
The Empire maintains three automated mining colonies on Mercury, Venus, and the asteroid now known as El Dorado. All currently have unmanned mines only, El Dorado in particular is highly valuable to the Empire as it contains all the TN minerals in multi thousand ton, easily accessible deposits, Mercury has more total minerals, but is missing several important ones and most are at low accessibility, Venus is only good for Corundium, and that at only 0.1 accessibility, the mines there are not heavily counted into the empire production and were established more to "show the flag" than for any practical purpose.
