is the Garrison more or less the same as canon?
The Garrison in canon is... a lot of a mess. It's a military base, a space exploration program, and also seemingly a specialized boarding school for *checks notes* 14-18 year olds.
In Cosmic Dust it has more of a structure, the Galaxy Garrison is a research facility and a training facility for teens hoping to go into various fields for NASA. Because it is a subsect of NASA, shocking I know. All the kids, yes including the pilots, are absolute nerds. They study astronomy, physics, astrophysics, aerodynamics, all that fun stuff.
Then of course are the pathways students could take, the ones the story's mostly concerned with (because of the paladins) being communications technicians, engineers, cargo pilots, and fighter pilots.
Cargo and fighter are holdover labels from when the world still had Wars happening frequently (the way canon ignores exploring how a society who thinks they've finally gotten rid of war would react to being invaded and instead goes "teehee usual military stuff!" is lowkey infuriating), but have taken on a less battle-focused meaning instead.
Fighter pilots are the ones piloting spaceships and aircrafts that need to be nimble. They're most used to low-weight, low-capacity ships. On Earth their jobs are less shooting things and more investigative, they run scans of the earth, collect samples, "smaller" things that can realistically run with only three crewmates. On space missions, they're the first ships to go anywhere. They scout out, get small samples and readings of what we're dealing with, and are usually the first to see any new discoveries.
Cargo pilots are the ones piloting spaceships and aircrafts that are high-weight and high-capacity. They (along with their crew) are the resource gatherers, the ones who stay on planets for research and testing, never the first to be sent out but usually the ones to stay the longest. They're distinctly not considered a "second class pilot", just a different specialty. On Earth their jobs tend to be porting resources that would be too difficult to travel by land from one base to the other. Most Cargo ships need a large crew to make sure everything is operating correctly.
Students are dormed two to a dorm, and most teachers live on-campus.
The Garrison only returns to being a military base when the Galra invade earth, before that it was decades of a space exploration base. It had remnants of the military in it, but its ultimate purpose was created for space exploration.
Oh also it's in Texas fuck you canon how would Keith get from Arizona to his childhood home in Texas in one night
