I'm having some trouble working out the geography of Canopus IV, and I'm concerned that some of the sources I'm looking at may be conflicting with each other, or may have been rendered obsolete by later publications, but I'm not sure which.
Historical: Reunification War (p. 103-104) says that at the time of the Reunification War, the three largest cities on Canopus - which it defines as Delphi, Astarte and Crimson - were all located on the continent of Salonika, that the battles (with the exception of the battle for a major BattleMech plant) were fought in the Salonikan wilderness, and that a number of battles were fought on/around the Thetis River. The last battle was for Delphi, which is described as being up against the Bay of Altay on one side. It later mentions Crimson becoming the capital in place of Delphi.
Handbook: Major Periphery States (p. 98) and the Inner Sphere Sourcebook (p. 116) share what look like identical entries, and both indicate that the capital of Canopus at the time was Crimson. Both books place Astarte on the Bay of Altay, and describe a large Canopian pleasure industry company named Mindstar as being located between Crimson and the Thistledown spaceport, encompassing a part of the Thetis River. The Inner Sphere Sourcebook also shows a map of Canopus IV, which has three major continents, plus a number of islands of varying size. One of the three continents is noticeably bigger than the other two, and the other two are closer in size although one looks about a third bigger than the other.
Masters and Minions - the StarCorps Dossiers talks about Canopus IV on p. 177-178, and describes Crimon as being on the continent of Alinia, not the continent of Salonika. It places Astarte on Salonika, and describes a "three hundred kilometer square" island called Obio that's largely unknown but used as a dumping ground for criminals and undesireables. I'm not sure if three hundred kilometer square means 300 km2 or 300km x 300km (90,000 km2) but proportionally, a three hundred square kilometer island is about one third the size of Cape Cod, while a ninety thousand square kilometer island is something of a size between that of Iceland and Ireland - substantial, but not as big as something like Australia or any of the major continents.
Objectives: Periphery also describes Canopus IV on page 16, and it gives the continents and capital city as Alinia (Crimson), Salonika and Obio.
The bits I can't reconcile are -
- the location of Crimson. Is it actually on Salonika, as stated by Historical: Reunification War, or is it on Alinia, as indicated by Masters & Minions - The StarCorps Dossiers and Objectives: Periphery? Handbook: Major Periphery States and the Inner Sphere Sourcebook effectively agree with whichever of the others is the dominant source, but if Masters & Minions/Objectives: Periphery are right, then the location of Crimson/the Thetis River as given in those sources doesn't match Historical: Reunification War at all, and the detail on the Reunification War era battles all being fought on Salonika is wrong, because the battles on the Thetis River would all have taken place on Alinia instead.
- the number/size of the continents. From the description of Obio in Masters & Minions, Obio is a middling size island - if the map in the Inner Sphere Sourcebook is right about the number of continents, and Masters & Minions is also right about the size of Obio, then based on the size of the map, if the largest continent looks to be perhaps four times the size of the smallest of the three continents, then the largest landmass on Canopus IV is about half the size of Australia - somewhere between the size of Honshu and Sumatra, or maybe twice as big as Great Britain. That would make Canopus IV a remarkably small planet. I'm not sure if that means that the Inner Sphere Sourcebook map is in error, or Objectives: Periphery/the Inner Sphere Sourcebook are in error about Canopus having three major continents, or if Masters & Minions underestimated the size of Obio, or if there is a third continent and it's also named Obio (as well as the island mentioned in M&M) or something else all together.
I haven't found any other sources that talk about Canopus IV in any significant geographic detail - is it possible to confirm which detail is correct?
