feat(docs): add Ferreira Monteiro and Stalownia Kowalski corporation docs

Trade arbitration firm (Matamba) and heavy equipment manufacturer
(Nowa Huta). Updated corporations index with both entries.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

wiki/corporations/ferreira-monteiro.md

@@ -0,0 +1,109 @@
+---
+title: "Ferreira Monteiro"
+description: "South_reach's premier trade arbitration and commercial law firm — four centuries of precedent that defines how cooperative and Assembly commercial frameworks interact when transactions go wrong"
+slug: ferreira-monteiro
+category: corporation
+status: canonical
+created: 2026-03-15
+updated: 2026-03-15
+scope: south_reach primary, reach-wide reputation
+faction_type: economic
+headquarters: Matamba (GJ 884)
+tags: []
+decision_refs: []
+cross_refs: []
+---
+
+# Ferreira Monteiro
+
+**Type:** Corporation — Commercial Law and Trade Arbitration
+**Also Known As:** FM; "the firm" (in south_reach professional circles, without ambiguity)
+**Status:** Canonical
+**Scope:** South_reach primary; reach-wide reputation for cross-framework precedent
+**Headquarters:** Matamba (GJ 884) — 3-aperture junction, 5 hops from Gateway
+**Classification:** Major commercial interest; Perpetual-class founding partnership
+
+---
+
+## Overview
+
+Ferreira Monteiro is the oldest trade arbitration firm in the south_reach. It is not the largest legal practice in the Reach by headcount, and it does not have offices in every major system. What it has is four centuries of unbroken institutional continuity and a case archive that constitutes, by volume and historical depth, the primary record of how south_reach commercial law evolved. When a cooperative trade dispute escalates past the point where the Customs Brokers' Guild can resolve it internally, it tends to end up with Ferreira Monteiro. When Assembly commercial standards and Confluência cooperative norms produce an irreconcilable conflict, the precedent that eventually governs the outcome was almost certainly authored here.
+
+The firm's rulings are not technically binding outside Matamba's local jurisdiction. This distinction matters less in practice than it does in theory. Four centuries of consistently applied precedent, accumulated in a system that sits at the geographic crossroads between Crux Station and Confluência — the south_reach's two largest transit nodes — has produced a body of commercial law that corridor operators treat as authoritative because the alternative is arguing against it, which is expensive and rarely successful. Parties who dispute Ferreira Monteiro precedents tend to lose to Ferreira Monteiro precedents.
+
+The founding partners, Amélia Ferreira and Tomás Monteiro, are still alive. They are still senior.
+
+---
+
+## Origin
+
+The Ferreira and Monteiro families arrived in the same wave_2 emigration cohort as the founders of Confluência — Angolan-Portuguese communities with deep roots in cooperative governance traditions and a practical understanding that collective economic structures require institutional dispute resolution to survive contact with the outside world. Confluência's charter was designed to minimize cross-framework conflict within the system. It was less well-designed for what happened when cooperative freight left the system and encountered Assembly commercial registration requirements, customs frameworks, and the particular legal assumptions baked into core corridor commerce.
+
+The disputes this produced were predictable, recurrent, and expensive. Small cooperatives lost money to documentation gaps they did not know existed. Freight held in bonded storage while legal traditions argued about who had authority over what. Cooperative contracts, drafted in good faith under Confluência norms, failing Assembly commercial review for reasons that made no sense to the drafting parties and perfect sense to the Assembly clerks.
+
+Amélia Ferreira and Tomás Monteiro were, respectively, a guild contracts specialist and a transit documentation lawyer. They had both spent years working the same problems from different angles. The founding partnership — established four hundred years ago, formalized in the first years of Matamba's wave_2 settlement charter — was predicated on a straightforward observation: someone needed to create authoritative interpretations of where cooperative commercial law ended and Assembly commercial law began, and to build those interpretations into a body of precedent stable enough that both sides would eventually defer to it rather than relitigate from first principles every time.
+
+The first published Ferreira Monteiro ruling was filed forty-one years after the partnership's founding. It concerned a disputed consignment of agricultural processing equipment, a cargo manifest drafted under Confluência cooperative standards, and an Assembly customs office at Crux Station that had declined to clear it. The ruling established that cooperative production records, when accompanied by specific attestation formats, satisfy Assembly invoicing requirements — a holding so technically narrow that neither party particularly objected, and so structurally significant that it is still cited in cross-framework documentation disputes today.
+
+---
+
+## Operations
+
+**Arbitration practice:** The core business is cross-framework commercial arbitration — disputes that arise at the intersection of cooperative trade norms and Assembly commercial standards. This is the work the firm was founded to do and the work that has generated its precedent archive. Cases arrive from across the south_reach corridor and, at the high end of commercial significance, from anywhere in the Reach where a south_reach cooperative is a party to a dispute. The firm does not advertise. It does not need to.
+
+**Advisory and documentation review:** Beyond arbitration, Ferreira Monteiro provides pre-transactional advisory services: reviewing cooperative trade contracts for Assembly compliance risk, drafting attestation formats, advising on cross-framework documentation structures. This work prevents the disputes rather than resolving them after the fact. It is, by volume, the larger part of the practice — every Customs Brokers' Guild certification that touches south_reach cooperative freight eventually passes through a documentation framework that Ferreira Monteiro helped design.
+
+**The precedent archive:** Four hundred years of case files, rulings, advisory opinions, and dissents, maintained in a physical archive at the Matamba offices and in indexed legal databases accessible to credentialed commercial practitioners across the south_reach corridor. The archive is organized by case type, jurisdiction, and commercial framework — a structure designed by Tomás Monteiro in the firm's second generation of operation and maintained with enough consistency that cases from a century ago are indexed in ways that practitioners today find intuitive. The archive is the firm's product as much as its rulings are. The Reach has other legal archives. None of them have been continuously organized by the same institutional hand for four centuries.
+
+**Matamba presence:** The firm employs a significant fraction of Matamba's professional legal class. The system's character as a junction between Crux Station and Confluência made it, for the founding generation, the obvious place to establish a practice whose clients would be coming from both directions. Four centuries of institutional investment have made Matamba's legal and commercial services sector among the most developed in the south_reach outer ring, which is itself a product of the firm's presence.
+
+---
+
+## Political Relationships
+
+**Confluência's Guild Delegate Council:** The foundational client relationship. The Guild Delegate Council is not itself a party to commercial disputes — it is a governance body — but the cooperative guilds that fall under its umbrella structure are the primary constituency that Ferreira Monteiro's arbitration practice serves. The relationship is one of institutional complementarity: the Council governs the cooperative structure; the firm handles the legal interface where that structure meets the outside world. They have been doing this together for four hundred years. The Council treats Ferreira Monteiro precedents as baseline commercial law for outbound cooperative trade. The firm treats the Council's interpretations of Confluência's founding charter as definitional inputs to cooperative commercial norms. Neither institution has ever needed to formally acknowledge the other's authority because neither has ever seriously challenged it.
+
+**The Customs Brokers' Guild:** The Guild resolves cross-framework documentation disputes through its certification framework and internal review processes. Most disputes that arise in south_reach cooperative commerce never reach Ferreira Monteiro because the Guild has already handled them. Ferreira Monteiro exists for the cases the Guild cannot or will not resolve — parties who have exhausted internal Guild channels, disputes where the Guild's institutional interests are themselves at stake, situations where one party does not recognize the Guild's authority. The relationship is functional and slightly wary: the Guild prefers internal resolution and views Ferreira Monteiro arbitration as an escalation path that implies Guild failure. Ferreira Monteiro views the Guild's preference for internal resolution as, in some fraction of cases, a mechanism for suppressing unfavorable outcomes. Both institutions are professionally courteous. Neither entirely trusts the other's independence.
+
+**The Concord Assembly:** Assembly commercial law is one of the two bodies of law that Ferreira Monteiro's practice exists to adjudicate between. The Assembly does not formally recognize Ferreira Monteiro rulings as binding within its administrative framework. In practice, Assembly commercial compliance officers cite Ferreira Monteiro precedents when they need guidance on cross-framework interpretation — not because they are required to, but because the precedents are usually more useful than anything the Assembly's own legal archive provides on cooperative commerce questions. The relationship is one of acknowledged utility without formal acknowledgment.
+
+**Crown's Hollow — the chancery parallel:** Crown's Hollow's chancery court is, in its own domain, what Ferreira Monteiro is in the south_reach: an ancient legal institution whose precedent depth exceeds anything the Assembly can match. The chancery operates under a continuous tradition of commercial law that predates the Reach itself. Ferreira Monteiro's oldest precedents are four hundred years old; Crown's Hollow's are older. Both institutions are aware of each other. Both have occasionally dealt with cases in which the other institution's precedents were cited by one of the parties. Neither has formally acknowledged the other's jurisdictional authority. Neither has formally disputed it either. The relationship exists in a productive silence: two very old legal traditions that have developed parallel authority in different corridors of the Reach, each entirely capable of acknowledging the other's existence while declining to establish a hierarchy between them. Commercial practitioners who need to operate in both corridors spend considerable time managing the ambiguity.
+
+---
+
+## What They Don't Talk About
+
+The case archive is a commercial intelligence asset that no one at Ferreira Monteiro describes as a commercial intelligence asset.
+
+Four hundred years of arbitration files contain the commercial histories of every significant south_reach trade relationship: the actual terms of cooperative supply agreements, the documented margins on cross-framework freight contracts, the internal financial positions of parties who disclosed them under arbitration confidentiality, the patterns of which cooperatives dispute which counterparties and why. This is not the passive data accumulation of Mercado's procurement database or even the transaction registry at Nová Tržnice. Arbitration files contain what parties reveal when they are trying to prove a legal point — which is often the most candid commercial disclosure a party ever makes. The aggregate picture, across four centuries of south_reach commercial disputes, is a map of the corridor's economic relationships at a depth of specificity that no other institution, commercial or governmental, possesses.
+
+Attorney-client privilege has protected the individual files since the firm's founding. Ferreira Monteiro has enforced that protection against Assembly information requests, Commission inquiries, and at least two occasions in the last two centuries when the enforcement came with significant political cost. The founding partners regard the protection of case file confidentiality as foundational to the firm's authority: if parties cannot trust that their disclosures remain confidential, they will not make the disclosures that allow disputes to be resolved, and the institution collapses. This is correct. It is also the reason the archive is what it is.
+
+The second silence is about the founding partners themselves. Amélia Ferreira and Tomás Monteiro have been the firm's senior principals for four hundred years. They have watched the south_reach change around them, watched the Assembly develop commercial law that incorporated, without attribution, principles their rulings had established a century before, watched the cooperative guilds they advised grow into institutions of regional significance. They have also watched the disputes that arise within Perpetual-class families, within institutions, within the structural fabric of a civilization that has had a long time to develop its grievances. Four hundred years of privileged access to the south_reach's most consequential commercial conflicts leaves a particular kind of knowledge. Ferreira and Monteiro are, by any measure, among the best-informed living humans about how the south_reach actually operates beneath its institutional surface. They do not share this. It is not the kind of knowledge one shares.
+
+---
+
+## Gameplay Relevance
+
+Ferreira Monteiro is not present in the v0.1 slice at Van Maanen's Star. It operates five hops from Matamba, in the south_reach corridor. Its relevance to the vertical slice is as institutional background: commercial disputes that a player might encounter involving south_reach cooperative freight — documentation questions, contested manifests, cargo seized under cross-framework legal ambiguity — reflect a legal landscape that Ferreira Monteiro helped build. Players in the wider game who operate in the south_reach corridor will encounter the firm's precedents as the operating framework for commercial dispute resolution, whether or not they ever interact with the firm directly.
+
+For investigation, Ferreira Monteiro represents a potential intelligence pathway at high access thresholds. The case archive is protected by four centuries of enforced confidentiality. There is no casual route through it. A player who has earned significant trust within south_reach commercial networks — or who is investigating something that one of the parties to a historical dispute would prefer remain sealed — has found an obstacle that is genuinely formidable. The firm will not cooperate with informal inquiry. It will cooperate with something that clears the bar it has set over four hundred years of practice.
+
+The founding partners are a different resource. Amélia Ferreira and Tomás Monteiro have been alive long enough to know things that are not in any file. Whether they share what they know depends on the player, on what they are being asked, and on what the founding partners have decided, over four centuries of careful judgment, is worth protecting.
+
+---
+
+**Cross-References:**
+- [Matamba](../star-systems/GJ-884/index.md) — Headquarters system; geographic crossroads between Crux Station and Confluência
+- [Confluência](../star-systems/GJ-566B/index.md) — Primary client corridor; founding cultural heritage
+- [Crux Station](../star-systems/GJ-1061/index.md) — Adjacent south_reach transit node; Assembly commercial interface
+- [Crown's Hollow](../star-systems/GJ-661A/index.md) — Parallel ancient legal tradition; unacknowledged jurisdictional counterpart
+- [Mercado Travessia](mercado-travessia.md) — South_reach corridor peer; handles the commerce that FM adjudicates when it fails
+- [Nová Tržnice](../star-systems/GJ-105A/index.md) — East_reach parallel: transaction registry as passive commercial intelligence vs. FM's privileged case archive
+- [Customs Brokers' Guild](../star-systems/GJ-1156/index.md) — Preferred internal resolution body; FM handles escalations when the Guild fails or cannot act
+
+---
+
+**Status:** Canonical
+**Created:** 2026-03-15
+**Updated:** 2026-03-15

wiki/corporations/index.md

@@ -11,6 +11,8 @@ Major commercial entities operating at civilizational scale in the Settled Reach
 | [Prometheus Labs](prometheus-labs.md) | [Prometheus](../star-systems/GJ-702B/index.md) (GJ 702B) | Longevity hardware, implants | Every Perpetual |
 | [Adams & Ford Publishing](adams-ford-publishing.md) | [Parallax](../star-systems/GJ-280A/index.md) (GJ 280A) | The Drifter's Guide to the Reach | Every data terminal |
 | [Mercado Travessia](mercado-travessia.md) | [Travessia](../star-systems/GJ-1156/index.md) (GJ 1156) | Grocery and household goods chain | Hop 2 to hop 7 |
+| [Stalownia Kowalski](stalownia-kowalski.md) | [Nowa Huta](../star-systems/GJ-896A/index.md) (GJ 896A) | Heavy mining and construction equipment | South_reach primary, extraction sectors reach-wide |
+| [Ferreira Monteiro](ferreira-monteiro.md) | [Matamba](../star-systems/GJ-884/index.md) (GJ 884) | Trade arbitration and commercial law | South_reach primary, reach-wide precedent |
 | [Calloway Distillery](calloway-distillery.md) | [Calloway Reach](../star-systems/GJ-3325/index.md) (GJ 3325) | Single malt whisky | North reach export, cult following |
 | [thrds](thrds.md) | [Braemar](../star-systems/GJ-475/index.md) (GJ 475) | Cold-weather technical clothing | North reach and beyond |
 

wiki/corporations/stalownia-kowalski.md

@@ -0,0 +1,118 @@
+---
+title: "Stalownia Kowalski"
+description: "South_reach heavy equipment manufacturer — drilling rigs, excavation platforms, ore processing machinery, and habitat construction systems for three centuries of extraction and settlement"
+slug: stalownia-kowalski
+category: corporation
+status: canonical
+created: 2026-03-15
+updated: 2026-03-15
+scope: south_reach primary; west_reach secondary; reach-wide in extraction sectors
+faction_type: economic
+headquarters: Nowa Huta (GJ 896A)
+tags: []
+decision_refs: []
+cross_refs: []
+---
+
+# Stalownia Kowalski
+
+**Type:** Corporation — Heavy Industrial Manufacturing
+**Also Known As:** Stalownia, SK
+**Status:** Canonical
+**Scope:** South_reach primary; west_reach secondary; reach-wide presence in extraction sectors
+**Headquarters:** Nowa Huta (GJ 896A) — 3-aperture junction, 6 hops from Gateway
+**System Holdings:** Nowa Huta (GJ 896A)
+**Classification:** Syndic-tier commercial interest; family-owned, generational succession
+
+---
+
+## Overview
+
+Stalownia Kowalski builds the machines that dig, build, and process. If the Gate Corporation builds the gates and MVG builds what passes through them, Stalownia builds what gets installed at the destination: drilling rigs, excavation platforms, ore processing machinery, habitat construction frames, station structural components, and the full array of heavy equipment that extraction operations and settlement construction require. This is equipment that does not move between systems. It arrives at a site and stays there, working.
+
+The name means Kowalski Steelworks. The Kowalski family founded it three hundred years ago, and three hundred years of family succession — not Perpetual-class continuity, but genuine generational handoff, parent to child to grandchild — have produced an institution with the specific character that comes from earning institutional knowledge rather than simply retaining it. What the Mastroianni family in Nova Roma remembers from three centuries ago, the Kowalski family has had to write down, transmit, and teach. The archive is the memory. Stalownia's internal documentation is the most thorough in the heavy industrial sector, and everyone in the sector knows it.
+
+In the south_reach extraction corridor, Stalownia equipment is the default. In systems where the rock is being pulled out of the ground and the ore is being processed and the habitats are going up, the machinery doing that work was almost certainly designed and built in Nowa Huta. The maintenance contracts that follow that equipment create a permanent operational presence across the corridor that is less visible than the Gate Corporation's transit infrastructure but comparably structural within the sectors where it operates.
+
+---
+
+## Origin
+
+Nowa Huta was settled in the Wave 3 expansion — three hundred years ago, the same founding cohort that established the south_reach extraction corridor as the Reach's primary industrial resource zone. The settlement wave that reached GJ 896A brought settlers with Polish-South African heritage, part of the broader cultural mix that shaped the south_reach's early working character. The founders of what would become Stalownia Kowalski were engineers and fabricators from that cohort: practical people who looked at the extraction operations springing up across the corridor and saw that the equipment being shipped in from Core systems was expensive, slow to arrive, and designed for environments that were not the south_reach's.
+
+The original proposition was simple. Build the equipment here, from materials extracted here, by people who understand the conditions here. The first Stalownia contracts were with south_reach mining cooperatives that were buying on price and local availability because they could not afford Core delivery timelines. Stalownia's early designs were not sophisticated. They were robust, maintainable in the field, and sized for the kinds of deposits the south_reach was extracting. The equipment worked. The cooperatives came back.
+
+Three generations of the Kowalski family managed that growth through the consolidation period when south_reach extraction shifted from small cooperative operations to larger organized mining programs. Each succession transferred not just ownership but operational knowledge — hard-won understanding of which geological formations demanded which equipment specifications, which failure modes appeared in which environments, what margins the industry actually needed versus what it told itself it needed. By the time the fourth generation inherited the company, Stalownia had contracts with operations across the corridor and a manufacturing base at Nowa Huta that had grown around those contracts.
+
+The name of the system tells you something about who got there first and what they built.
+
+---
+
+## Operations
+
+**Extraction equipment:** The core product line. Drilling rigs for hard-rock extraction, excavation platforms for low-gravity surface mining, ore processing systems that integrate with site logistics rather than requiring purpose-built infrastructure around them. Stalownia's extraction equipment is known for field maintainability — the design philosophy across three centuries has consistently prioritized the ability of an on-site crew with standard tooling to perform maintenance and repairs without waiting for specialists from Nowa Huta. Extraction sites are not near hubs. Equipment that requires a specialist to fix is equipment that sits idle while the specialist transits.
+
+**Construction systems:** Habitat frames, station structural components, pressurization infrastructure for newly settled systems. Stalownia's construction product line grew out of extraction — the same sites that needed mining equipment needed somewhere for the workers to live. The construction systems are modular and designed for assembly with the same crew and tooling that operates the mining equipment. This is not elegant engineering. It is engineering for the conditions that actually exist at the edge of the Reach.
+
+**Ore processing machinery:** The intermediate step between raw extraction and saleable material. Processing systems are Stalownia's most technically complex product category and the one with the longest maintenance cycles. A processing installation at a south_reach extraction site will run for decades. The maintenance contracts on those installations — routine service, component replacement, system upgrades — are the backbone of Stalownia's recurring revenue and the mechanism by which the company maintains a continuous field presence across the extraction corridor.
+
+**Nowa Huta manufacturing base:** The GJ 896A system's junction topology — three apertures, positioned at the junction of the south_reach corridor with routes toward the west_reach and inward toward core-adjacent systems — makes it a functional logistics hub for heavy equipment shipment. The manufacturing facilities at Nowa Huta are not the largest in the Reach, but they are specialized for the kinds of large-form fabrication that extraction and construction equipment requires, and they are positioned to move product into the south_reach extraction systems efficiently. The adjacent Kraków Junction (GJ 1116B) anchors the primary logistics corridor that carries completed equipment outbound and raw material and components inbound.
+
+---
+
+## System Holdings
+
+**Nowa Huta (GJ 896A)** — 3-aperture junction, 6 hops from Gateway. The system's name is a deliberate invocation of the historical steelworks district in Kraków — the founders were not being subtle about what they were building or who they were. The industrial identity is worn plainly: Nowa Huta is a manufacturing system, organized around the Stalownia facilities, and the population has the character that comes from three centuries of working in heavy fabrication.
+
+The system is not beautiful and does not try to be. The orbital infrastructure has the utilitarian density of a place that moves large objects regularly. Fabrication yards, component warehouses, outbound equipment marshalling areas. The settlement patterns reflect the workforce's origins — Polish-South African heritage is visible in the naming conventions, the architectural styles of the older residential districts, and the particular form of labor organization that the south_reach extraction corridor developed and Nowa Huta exemplifies.
+
+What the system is, more than anything, is thorough. The Stalownia archive — the institutional memory that accumulated because the family could not rely on biological continuity to preserve it — is housed here. Three centuries of equipment specifications, site geology records, maintenance histories, and engineering margins documentation. The archive is not advertised. Most people in the Reach do not know it exists. The people who do know it exists understand that it is, in its way, as valuable as anything Stalownia manufactures.
+
+---
+
+## Political Relationships
+
+**Mastroianni Vehicle Group:** The division of territory between Stalownia and MVG is clean enough to be workable and blurry enough to require periodic negotiation. MVG builds what moves through gates. Stalownia builds what gets installed at the destination. The line is clear for canonical cases: a transit carriage is MVG; an ore processing facility is Stalownia. The line is less clear for mobile extraction platforms — equipment that moves within a system but does not transit gates — and for mining vehicles that operate at extraction sites. Both companies have designs in this space. The competition is professional rather than existential: the market is large enough to accommodate both, and they collaborate on integrated systems where a mining installation requires both fixed processing equipment and mobile haulers. The contracts governing these collaborations are carefully structured.
+
+**The Gate Corporation:** Stalownia builds the installations; Gate Corporation builds the gates that connect them. The relationship is straightforwardly complementary and rarely produces friction. Gate Corporation maintains the transit infrastructure through which Stalownia ships equipment. Stalownia's construction systems build the habitats and station structures that Gate Corporation's span gates then connect to the broader network. Different links in the same chain. The relationship is professional and without the technical interdependency that makes the Gate Corporation-MVG dynamic so loaded.
+
+**South_reach cooperatives and extraction operators:** Stalownia's oldest and most fundamental relationships. Three hundred years of contracts have produced a procurement culture on the south_reach extraction side that defaults to Stalownia equipment without necessarily requiring competitive bids — not because there is an agreement to this effect, but because the institutional familiarity and the maintenance infrastructure already in place make switching costs real. A cooperative that has run Stalownia equipment for two generations has Stalownia-trained maintenance staff, Stalowsia-specification tooling, and Stalownia service relationships. The competitor offering a better price has to overcome all of that.
+
+**The Concord Assembly:** Stalownia's Assembly engagement is narrower than the Gate Corporation's or MVG's. The company's relevant committees are those touching extraction regulation, construction standards, and the frontier development programs that drive demand for new installation equipment. Assembly contracts for settlement-phase construction in newly activated frontier systems are a meaningful revenue source. The company's lobbying presence is sized to those interests — significant within them, largely absent from the broader commercial and transit policy debates where the Gate Corporation and MVG operate.
+
+**The Cygni B combines:** Overlapping territory on large-scale construction. The Cygni B combines build station hulls and large structural systems; Stalownia builds the internal industrial and habitation infrastructure that goes inside those hulls. The relationship mirrors the MVG-Cygni B dynamic: partners on most contracts, competitors on the specifications that determine where one company's scope ends and the other's begins. Stalownia operates in the south_reach; the Cygni B combines are heavier in the core and north. The geographic separation keeps the competition from being constant.
+
+---
+
+## What They Don't Talk About
+
+The Kowalski family is generational, not Perpetual. This is a distinction that looks like a liability — no Perpetual-class family has ever had to rebuild institutional knowledge from scratch after a founder's death — but the family's response to that constraint has produced something that Perpetual firms tend not to have: a systematic, comprehensive written record of everything the company knows.
+
+The Stalownia archive documents three centuries of extraction site geology across the south_reach. It contains the actual engineering margins on every major equipment installation the company has built — not the specified margins, the actual operating margins, the ones that represent the difference between what the client paid for and what the site's conditions actually required. It contains maintenance logs that show how those margins degraded over time, what failure modes appeared and when, and what the clients were told versus what Stalownia's engineers knew. It documents the succession disputes. There was at least one contested transition in the company's history where the family's internal alignment failed and the company's direction was genuinely uncertain. What was decided, what was conceded, and what remains unresolved from that period is in the archive.
+
+None of this is available outside the company. Stalownia's documentation practices were developed as institutional survival, not as intelligence. The distinction matters to the Kowalski family's legal team. To anyone who could access that archive, the distinction is not the interesting part.
+
+---
+
+## Gameplay Relevance
+
+Stalownia is present in the v0.1 slice as texture and setting context. The mining and construction equipment that built and maintains Station Sova and the Van Maanen's Star extraction operations likely carries SK branding or is documented in system records as Stalownia installations. This is background — the equipment that built the world the player moves through.
+
+For investigation, Stalownia's maintenance contracts create a plausible field presence in extraction systems. A Stalownia service technician is a normal figure at an extraction site; a Stalownia service contract is a normal entry in a system's commercial register. Either can serve as cover, as contact, or as a thread to pull. The company's archive is a potential resource for players investigating extraction site incidents, structural failures, or anything where the original engineering specifications matter. Accessing that archive — or finding someone who has access to it — requires working around an institution that has very specific ideas about what belongs inside the company and what does not.
+
+For the wider game, Stalownia represents a particular kind of reach: not the transit presence of the Gate Corporation or the social network of the Mastroianni family, but the physical footprint of three centuries of installation and maintenance across the Reach's extraction sector. A player who needs to understand what is physically inside a mining installation, or what was built to specification and what was not, is looking at Stalownia documentation. A player investigating why a structure failed, or why it held when it should have failed, may find that Stalownia's engineers knew something the client did not.
+
+---
+
+**Cross-References:**
+- [Nowa Huta](../star-systems/GJ-896A/index.md) — Headquarters; founding system
+- [Gate Corporation](gate-corporation.md) — Complementary infrastructure; Stalownia builds what Gate Corporation connects
+- [Mastroianni Vehicle Group](mastroianni-vehicle-group.md) — Adjacent product territory; mobile vs. fixed equipment boundary
+- [Cygni B Combines](../factions/cygni-b-combines.md) — Construction scope overlap; regional separation manages competition
+- [Kraków Junction](../star-systems/GJ-1116B/index.md) — Adjacent system; primary logistics corridor for equipment shipment
+
+---
+
+**Status:** Canonical
+**Created:** 2026-03-15
+**Updated:** 2026-03-15