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There's prescription medication that can dull the side-effects. Disadvantage, the body quickly builds resistance to it (eg it can stop working when it needs to).

Roadrunner's of family cuckoo, right? Call it that and challenge your reader's google foo

Edit: Getting kicked off the main is only a minor inconvenience, but it'll hit mid-review which is a nuisance. Especially when I'm on tablet and have written a complex in-line note only to have it vanish into the aether. Periodically leaving a short in-line during the review process helps identify the error state

Also, because I like to give you headaches...

if a precious resource is plenteous in one area and scarce in the others (eg the neutral zone) you end up with either

(a) a "neutral" owner (such as OPEC) or

(b) the slow realization from the neutrals that they are dependent on a non-neutral power. Then you get lots of Sweden / Finland cases.

Imagine, should you, a world with no OPEC where the A was militarily successful but oil poor while B was oil-rich. Now you'd have neutral C charging the A out the nose because A can't exactly make its enemy sell, right? And if A doesn't pay ruinous prices, all its cars (ships) go still. So over 1000 years neutral C drains all the wealth out of A.

So then A should attack neutral C and take its resources. So C better align with B because this attack is inevitable

Here's a completely different angle: The Imperials fuel shortage is a problem of their own making.

Super-heated Atradium (eg portals in use) dive off Atradizene gas which giant harvester vessels collect. This gas is rendered inert when ships fly through it (eg it burns up the same way a jet engine would set off an oil slick if you tried to land in one).

Meaning: The more you use your portals, the less gas you have.

New Bethlehem has fewer ships, so they have more gas.

It's funny bc in my main series, they eventually invent a kind of portal technology and run around the universe seeding them (This takes about 3 billion years to complete because you're getting from place to place using mundane travel initially). Then they die off, effectively becoming a mysterious race leaving behind transportation to the next generation

The heat could be leaking into the wormhole. You basically needn't enforce the principles of a closed system

You made it harder to see but you didn't stop me from flying up to it and hop in a spacesuit and steal some of it. I assume it won't cut easily, but I'll be happy to run an electron microscope on it as well as sonar, p-waves, conductivity etc.

Of course, those microbes find the human body hostile territory as well. Just they may kill the host as they figure that out.

Agreed... colonizing Mars is highly impractical. At least by any measure of current technology. Imagine we have access to thousands of Mars's. Each with myraid variables. Scientists agree Mars could be colonized if it only had an ocean. How many similar planets could be out there? Planets just waiting for a gentle push to become habitable.

The most prohibitive aspect I've heard about Mars is the cost of getting off the surface again. By today's technology, it's basically a one-way trip. Yikes!

To soIve the atmosphere problem, Robinson's characters flew some ice comets through the stratosphere.. You'd need to repeat this every century or so as the sun would start stripping the atmosphere again

Much depends on your view of the universe. In VQ-x I've tackled it that mankind is resilient / resourceful and finds ways to eke out living conditions in unlikely scenarios. So, we get sunlight-rich planets hosting 20billion+ inhabitants and sunlight-dark planets inventing ways to convert energy into sustenance. Let's call this the optimistic view that man can survive without Earth.

The opposite resolves that the species is relatively fragile. We can't ever colonize the moon. There's too much solar radiation there. Let's call it a realist / pessimistic view. If Earth blew up and we couldn't find habitable planets, we'd go extinct.

(Similarly in VQ-x) robots can go manufacture substrate (dust) out of rocks using solar power. Human organic waste (eg that has no other use) can be seeded into the dust to build soil. Basically, for almost zero cost, you can make Mars organic, provided you have a century or two to wait around. Venus is leaps and bounds harder, but the same time principle works. If your surface temperature is 800°C and you can reduce that by 0.1% per year using steel trusses to leak heat into space, you get compound interest on cooling. It's even free if robots are mining asteroids to build the trusses.

Now...

Imagine I've only been talking about our own solar system. Imagine we break the speed of light and can show up at other solar systems. Imagine robots harvesting oxygen from rocks in deep reaches of space and ferrying it to useful places using only solar power and Chat-GPT. Years before humans show up, your robots have already made the planet livable.

Nb: Dune solved this by outlawing robotics.