Where exactly in the solar system are imperialists going to go?

I've been looking at the solar system and I noticed that, setting aside the issue of actually getting there, there's no land to colonize.<br><br>Earth has land. Mars has land. The asteroid belt has asteroids. And then you get to Jupiter, where there's 80 or so moons and more space dust, and from that point on it's all gas and dust and ice.<br><br>Which means that any interplanetary empire is going to be an empire of moons. If you're looking for a place for a space opera setting, the solar system isn't it.<br><br>And I want a setting with a solar system empire. Both because it's just not that hard to get to other planets, and also because the solar system is emblematic of what space travel should be. It's the idealized space fantasy vision of space travel, where you travel from planet to planet, exploring and discovering and settling. The reality is that we're going to be stuck within a few light years of Earth for generations to come, and even then we won't be exploring new star systems and colonizing planets. We'll be mining fuel from nearby gas giants and establishing permanent habitats in orbit.<br><br>So what I have to do is find a place in our current solar system where this kind of land is. The asteroid belt occupies exactly what would be Jupiter's orbit if it had no moons. So the answer is pretty clear: expropriate Jupiter's moons into the asteroid belt.<br><br>Here's what I've done:<br><br>Jupiter's orbit remains the same. The body of Jupiter itself has been removed, because the way gas giants work, without a massive solid core, the planet collapses in on itself.<br><br>All of Jupiter's large moons have been distributed throughout the asteroid belt. Io and Europa and Ganymede and Callisto, the four biggest moons of Jupiter, are now the four biggest bodies in the asteroid belt. The remaining smaller moons have been distributed throughout the belt, and comets from the Oort Cloud have also been pulled closer to the sun to add to this.<br><br>Orbital bodies from the Kuiper Belt have also been moved closer to the sun, so that the orbit of Neptune marks the outer boundary of the solar system. Pluto has been left in its current orbit.<br><br>Mars has been given three small moons similar to those of Pluto, to give it some more orbital bodies.<br><br>The result of all this is a solar system with more space empires. The asteroid belt is no longer a collection of asteroids, but a collection of asteroid-sized moons, which can be colonized. Which means that within the solar system, setting aside the issue of travel, there are nearly 100 moons that can be colonized, with the four largest moons of Jupiter forming four major colonies.<br><br>It also allows you to do things that space fantasy settings can't normally do. For example, in Dune, there's a war where all of humanity bands together to attack a particular planet, and they manage to incorporate a large portion of the population of that planet. Or, in Star Trek, the Klingon Empire can conquer Earth and honestly expect the population to be happy about it. These things only make sense if the population of the galaxy is measured in the millions or tens of millions, not in the billions or tens of billions.<br><br>In a space fantasy setting, you can't normally have a large interplanetary empire, because if you have a large population on a planet, then the population of an interplanetary empire is going to be enormous. But in this case, you have a solar system where the asteroid belt has been filled with moons, which allows you to have a large, interplanetary empire that is still relatively small.