feat(docs): write final 4 core system wiki pages

Parallax (GJ 280A) — media world, narrative manufacturing
Lu Ban (GJ 15A) — failed corp mixed industrial bazaar
Keid (GJ 166A) — garden world, ecological reservation
Ross 128 (GJ 447) — ocean world, fishing/research/tourism

Written by Miri agents, reviewed by Paula with fixes applied:
star type headers corrected, silence topics sharpened, MVG
territorial language made precise, Institute timeline clarified.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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2026-03-14 10:29:47 +01:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 4.6
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# Lu Ban
**GJ 15A** | binary-type | core
**GJ 15A** | M-type | core
---
@@ -15,19 +15,40 @@
---
## Supply Dependency
<!-- Required for manufacturing/transit_logistics base and narrative_notable systems -->
Lu Ban manufactures finished goods at a volume that belies its single-aperture position. Clothing, consumer electronics, vehicle components, prefabricated residential modules, the category of everyday industrial output that no settlement can produce for itself at reasonable cost — these move through Lu Ban's freight yards at rates that make the system the Reach's most productive dead-end by most commercial measures. The system does not specialize. It produces everything that small manufacturers can produce efficiently, across hundreds of independent operations, each too small to dominate the market and collectively large enough to define what affordable goods look like across the systems they supply.
The import ledger is heavier than a cursory assessment would predict. Raw material inputs — metals, polymers, rare-element feedstocks — arrive in volume through the single aperture from GJ 764. The system has no extraction base to speak of. It fabricates; it does not mine. GJ 764 is the operating base for MVG's primary logistics operations, and MVG's freight infrastructure handles the dominant share of the inbound supply chain. The distinction between "the only available route" and "controlled by MVG" is one that Lu Ban's manufacturers have never needed to press, because the practical difference has not yet materialized.
The gate topology creates leverage that both parties understand and neither discusses explicitly. There is one aperture. It connects to one system. Everything Lu Ban produces either enters the gate network through MVG or does not leave at all. MVG does not need to threaten this. The structure is self-enforcing. Lu Ban's manufacturers have, over three centuries, built their pricing and their production volumes around the assumption of continued gate access, which means their working capital reserves are sized for operational continuity, not for disruption. MVG does not hold Lu Ban. It simply holds the door.
## Faction Notes
<!-- Significant local factions not covered by standard columns -->
The Syndicate presence at Lu Ban is constitutionally fragmented. There is no dominant commercial house — the corporate structure that would have produced one did not survive the secession. What exists instead is a dense mesh of small manufacturing combines, family operations scaled to medium enterprise over generations, trade associations that negotiate collective terms for inputs and Commission certification without having the legal structure to enforce those terms on their own members. The result functions less like a market in the standard sense and more like a bazaar in the sociological one: prices are negotiated, relationships matter, the enforcement of informal agreements depends on the same networks through which the agreements are struck.
The Guardians of Autonomy are popular here in the way they tend to be popular wherever the workforce is skilled, independent-minded, and aware that its practical leverage is constrained by structural factors outside its control. Independent manufacturers who have been building the same product lines for two or three generations do not readily accept the argument that their interests are best served by external corporate coordination. The Guardians provide a political vocabulary for this instinct and occasional legal support for the disputes that arise when the instinct collides with Commission compliance requirements. The relationship between the Guardians and the bazaar economy here is old enough that several Guardian organizers have family in the manufacturing districts and several manufacturing families have members who have done organizational work for the Guardians. The overlap is not tracked. It does not need to be.
The Lattice Commission's Lu Ban operation is, in practical terms, the system's connection to the gate economy. Commission certification is required for any product entering the gate network under standard commercial classification. A manufacturer without certification sells locally or does not sell. Lu Ban's Commission office processes more individual product certification applications per year than any comparable installation in the Reach, which is a function of having hundreds of independent producers each submitting separate filings rather than a handful of consolidated corporate portfolios. The staffing levels this requires have historically been inadequate. The backlog is a permanent feature of doing business here. Manufacturers who move product regularly maintain informal relationships with specific Commission officers, which the Commission's internal protocols describe as inappropriate and which the Commission's operational reality makes inevitable.
## Silence Topic
<!-- Required for narrative_notable and Institutional Core / Diplomatic Periphery zones -->
What Lu Ban does not discuss in any official register: the first decade.
The secession severed every Earth-origin corporate charter that had not already reorganized under Reach jurisdiction. The corporation that founded this system — its name is preserved in the system's engineering archives and almost nowhere else in active use — was headquartered on Earth. Its local management, its workforce, its physical infrastructure, and its outstanding supply contracts were all stranded when the gate closed. Earth's end held the ownership documentation. The Reach's end held the factories.
What happened between the local management and the workforce in the years before any functional governance structure was established is not in any archive that is publicly accessible. There are hints — certain family names that appear prominently in the early combine structures and not at all in the corporate personnel records from before the secession; certain facilities that changed their registered purposes during that period without the paperwork that would normally accompany a change of use; the specific absence of any unified account of who decided to dissolve the Earth charter and reconstitute the operations as independent concerns, as opposed to the distributed practice that emerged of simply proceeding as if that decision had been made. The people who were there are not mostly alive anymore. Three centuries of bazaar economy have produced a civic identity that looks continuously forward. What was done to get here is not a question the current population raises. The bazaar does not require the answer, and the answer would not change the prices.
## Narrative Hook
<!-- Required if narrative_notable = true. One sentence. -->
The corporation that founded this system has no successor, no claimed legacy, and no official history — only a bazaar that appeared, functionally complete, sometime in the decade after the Earth gate closed.
## Calibration Note
<!-- Unusual column combinations requiring justification -->
`dead_end` topology for a `wave_2` system in the core sector is unusual. Wave 2 settlement generally followed the gate connections that already existed — systems settled in the Trade Expansion wave were selected partly because they were well-connected. Lu Ban's single-aperture configuration reflects the alien-determined aperture count at this horizon station, which has been 1 since the first human survey. The founding corporation selected this system despite the gate topology because the physical conditions suited industrial development, and because at the time of Wave 2 settlement, the connection to what would become MVG's home system was understood as a reliable transit lane, not a structural dependency.
Whether the founding corporation's executives, had they known they were building a system that would be permanently accessible only through a single neighbor, would have made the same selection is a question the historical record does not preserve. The system is here. The aperture count is what it is.
The secondary stellar component is a distant companion that does not significantly affect habitable zone conditions. The M1V primary is a red dwarf — dim, stable, and unremarkable as a host star for industrial operations. The habitable body's engineering was optimized for manufacturing infrastructure from the outset, and the stellar environment imposes no constraints that five centuries of continuous investment have not resolved. The cultural and institutional weight of the name — Lu Ban, patron of craftsmen in the Chinese tradition carried by the founding workforce — operates independently of the stellar configuration and is not expected to change.
## Topology
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# Keid
**GJ 166A** | M-type | core
**GJ 166A** | K-type | core
---
@@ -15,19 +15,42 @@
---
## Supply Dependency
<!-- Required for manufacturing/transit_logistics base and narrative_notable systems -->
Keid does not export protein, ore, or manufactured components. What it exports is access to itself, and it does this slowly, deliberately, and in quantities determined not by market demand but by the carrying capacity calculations of the Keid Conservancy.
The system's habitable body supports a biosphere that has been accumulating five centuries of scientific return without exhaustion. Every year of uninterrupted ecological development produces novel findings — evolutionary trajectories, biome interaction patterns, atmospheric chemistry — and the research community that operates here has built a stable economic model on the certainty that the next grant cycle will be justified by what the previous one found. The supply dependency is therefore inward: equipment, consumables, researcher salaries, specialized instrumentation that the system cannot produce locally. Everything Keid needs comes through the one aperture. Everything Keid sells — research access, institutional affiliation, specimen data — goes out the same way, through arrangements the Conservancy approves.
The charter restrictions on development serve the research mission directly. A dead-end system with controlled access and a governing body empowered to limit commercial traffic produces a research environment that cannot be purchased elsewhere in the core. The Conservancy's leverage is not agricultural or industrial. It is the leverage of scarcity deliberately maintained: this is the only place in the Reach where this biosphere exists, and the Conservancy decides who studies it.
## Faction Notes
<!-- Significant local factions not covered by standard columns -->
The Keid Conservancy is the governing body in the formal sense and the dominant faction in every practical sense. It was established under the original charter at settlement, funded by a combination of Concord Assembly heritage designation and the research licensing fees the Conservancy itself collects. It has spent five centuries operating without a meaningful political challenger. The system does not produce conditions under which challengers develop — there is no industrial workforce, no transit traffic generating competing interests, no commercial combines operating outside the charter's scope. The Conservancy governs by consensus among its member research bodies, which means it governs by the slow institutional processes of academic communities. This is slower than a colonial administration and considerably more difficult to corrupt.
The Veil Institute maintains a biological research station at Keid that predates the current Conservancy charter structure. The station's original authorization predates the charter by a meaningful margin — it was established in the decades immediately following first settlement, during the period when the conservation framework was being formalized but had not yet issued its first licensing cycle, and the Institute has maintained the position that the station's operating authority derives from that original settlement-period grant rather than from the Conservancy licensing framework that was codified afterward. The Conservancy does not contest this publicly. The Institute does not press the distinction. Both parties have maintained a working relationship for five centuries that is cooperative in output and carefully non-specific in its formal terms. What the Institute's biological research at Keid is actually oriented toward — pure ecological documentation, something comparative, something with a longer horizon — is not specified in any published research summary the Institute has released.
There is no Syndic presence at Keid in any organized form. The charter restrictions on commercial activity make the system structurally unattractive for combine operations. Individual brokers occasionally obtain transit access to facilitate the supply logistics the Conservancy itself requires, but these are contracted arrangements, not sustained presences. The Lattice Commission has no chapter at Keid. There is nothing here to regulate in the Commission's terms — no significant freight transit, no labor disputes, no information infrastructure that requires oversight. Commission agents visit periodically as part of the aperture administration, which is a function Gateway manages on Keid's behalf given the single-connection topology. The arrangement is administratively convenient and structurally significant: the Conservancy has no independent aperture administration capacity, which means any question about transit access to Keid passes through a system that the Conservancy does not control.
The Guardian organization has no formal chapter at Keid and no active organizing presence. The system's workforce is almost entirely research staff operating under Conservancy employment terms, and the terms are, by Reach standards, favorable. This does not mean the Guardians have no interest in Keid. It means the interest is currently theoretical.
## Silence Topic
<!-- Required for narrative_notable and Institutional Core / Diplomatic Periphery zones -->
What Keid does not discuss: the residential compounds.
The original settlement charter includes a set of development exemptions that predate the formal Conservancy structure. These exemptions authorize residential construction in a small number of designated zones that fall outside the charter's general development restrictions. The zones were identified in the founding survey as having minimal ecological sensitivity — areas where the research mission's preservation requirements could be satisfied without prohibiting all human habitation. The exemptions are in the charter. The charter is a public document. What is not public is the identification of who holds the residential grants within those exempted zones, and what those residences look like after five centuries of quiet development under a framework that restricts everyone else's construction.
The Perpetual-class families who have maintained compounds at Keid since Wave 1 are not hiding in any simple sense. They are present in the founding documentation as participants in the original settlement decisions — decisions made by people who are still alive and still, in several cases, occupying the positions they occupied when the decisions were made. The ecological charter they designed preserved the biosphere. It also preserved, through those exemptions, a specific relationship between a small number of individuals and one of the most inaccessible and scientifically guarded environments in the core Reach.
Visiting researchers who have worked at Keid's stations for years occasionally describe, in personal accounts rather than institutional publications, glimpsing infrastructure in the exempted zones that the charter's construction records do not fully account for. The Conservancy's public registry of development activity in those zones is current. The Conservancy has no statutory obligation to external audit, and no body with jurisdiction over Keid's internal governance has requested one. Whether the registry and the actual state of the exempted zones agree is a question that would require physical access to answer, and physical access to Keid is a resource the Conservancy controls.
## Narrative Hook
<!-- Required if narrative_notable = true. One sentence. -->
The charter that has protected Keid's biosphere for five centuries was written by people who still live there, in residences the charter's public documentation declines to describe.
## Calibration Note
<!-- Unusual column combinations requiring justification -->
`dead_end` topology for a wave_1 system at 2 hops from Gateway is unusual. Most wave_1 systems with this proximity accumulated additional gate connections through the normal process of network expansion — other systems connecting through them as the Reach expanded outward. Keid's single aperture reflects the alien builders' original configuration, not any human decision to limit access. The horizon station was built with one aperture. The Conservancy has not campaigned for additional connections, and the Commission has not prioritized Keid for routing purposes, because the system's economic activity does not generate the transit volume that would justify the routing investment. The dead_end topology and the conservation mission reinforce each other: controlled access via a single gate is structurally easier to administer than a junction system. Whether this is an outcome the Conservancy prefers, or simply an outcome the Conservancy has adapted to, is not distinguishable from the available record.
`wave_1` settlement with the preserved biosphere designation produces a combination that would, in most systems, indicate a failed or minimal colonization — wave_1 systems that never developed industrial capacity are typically resource-poor or governance-failed. Keid is neither. The minimal footprint is the product of a deliberate policy choice made at settlement and maintained continuously. Five hundred years of choosing not to develop is its own kind of institutional achievement, and the framework's standard calibrations do not fully capture what that choice costs and who benefits from it.
## Topology
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# Parallax
**GJ 280A** | M-type | core
**GJ 280A** | F-type | core
---
@@ -15,19 +15,40 @@
---
## Supply Dependency
<!-- Required for manufacturing/transit_logistics base and narrative_notable systems -->
Parallax does not mine anything, fabricate anything, or grow anything at export scale. What it produces is harder to put in a freight container: the Reach's account of itself. The major news syndicates operating across the Reach maintain their editorial headquarters here. The reputation management firms that service Perpetual-class individuals — keeping a century-long public record coherent, managing the documented contradictions that accumulate over decades of visible professional life — are concentrated here in numbers found nowhere else. Cultural production houses that distribute serialized narrative content across the gate network run their commissioning operations from this system, even if their production infrastructure is distributed. Parallax arrived in Wave 4, which means it had no founding prestige to trade on, no claim to the institutional gravity that Wave 1 systems built over three centuries. It made itself essential by doing something the older systems needed but could not credibly do for themselves: it became the place that tells everyone else's story.
The import ledger is unremarkable. Food, consumer goods, the standard inputs of a service-oriented system without significant agricultural or industrial base. The dependency runs the other direction: any system whose public standing matters — which is most systems — depends on how Parallax-headquartered syndicates represent it. This leverage does not appear in any Commission trade register. It does not need to.
The proximity to Renaissance is functional. The Gate Corporation's public communications apparatus is managed from Parallax, one hop away. Renaissance produces the Reach's physical infrastructure; Parallax manages the account of what that infrastructure means and who benefits from it. The two systems do not discuss the arrangement formally. They do not need to.
## Faction Notes
<!-- Significant local factions not covered by standard columns -->
The commercial syndicates — media houses, distribution networks, the combined editorial and production enterprises that have been operating here for over a century — are the dominant institutional fact of this system. They are not unified. Competition among the major syndicates is genuine, occasionally acrimonious, and the source of most of the visible political activity in Parallax's governance structures. What they share is an interest in the system remaining the place where the Reach's narrative is managed, which is a shared interest substantial enough to produce cooperation on the underlying infrastructure questions even when editorial competition is active.
The Guardians of Autonomy maintain a presence here that is, relative to the Guardians' typical deployment profile, unusually visible. Most systems where the Guardians operate find them functioning as a quiet constituency — labor advocates, civil liberties monitors, an institutional counterweight to Commission overreach. At Parallax, their concerns are structural in a different way. The question of what it means to construct public identity — for individuals, for factions, for entire systems — is not theoretical on a world whose primary industry is identity construction. The Guardians here argue, with varying degrees of success, that a system whose commercial apparatus runs on narrative manufacture requires a particular kind of scrutiny. The syndicates treat this as an occupational hazard. Some syndicate editors have been writing about Guardian concerns for sixty years. Several of those editors are Perpetual-class.
The Lattice Commission maintains a content regulation presence. Meridian content standards — the framework governing what can transit the gate network under unrestricted classification — requires Commission review and certification for any syndicated material that moves between systems. The Commission's Parallax office is the largest single-system content compliance operation in the Reach. Its officers develop fluency in the syndicate operations they regulate that is, over time, difficult to distinguish from capture. The Commission does not publicly track how many former Parallax officers have taken positions with syndicate legal divisions. This is not a gap in Commission reporting that anyone has formally requested to close.
## Silence Topic
<!-- Required for narrative_notable and Institutional Core / Diplomatic Periphery zones -->
What Parallax does not discuss: the structural position of Perpetual-class journalists.
A reporter who has been working for a hundred and fifty years is not a reporter in any sociological sense that the profession's traditional frameworks were designed to analyze. They have relationships with the individuals they cover that predate those individuals' current positions by decades. They have, in some cases, covered the same public figures through multiple career arcs, multiple institutional affiliations, multiple self-reinventions. They know things about sources that the sources know they know. The trust their bylines carry was built over a timespan that no contemporary could replicate and no institutional policy can dissolve, because the trust is not in the institution — it is in the person, and the person is not going to retire, and the person's relationships are not subject to any journalism ethics framework that was written before longevity extension made century-long careers routine.
This is not identified as a problem at Parallax because the Perpetual-class journalists identify it as a feature. Their longevity is, in their own framing, what makes their coverage reliable. They remember. They have context. They have sources no younger reporter could cultivate. All of this is accurate. It is also an accurate description of a power structure that is indistinguishable from the one it covers.
## Narrative Hook
<!-- Required if narrative_notable = true. One sentence. -->
The journalists who have been trusted voices for a hundred and fifty years have personal relationships with everyone they report on, and the profession's ethics frameworks — written before longevity extension existed — do not provide a category for it.
## Calibration Note
<!-- Unusual column combinations requiring justification -->
`wave_4` settlement at 2 hops from Gateway in a core-sector system requires comment. Parallax was not settled late because the aperture configuration was unavailable — this system's three-aperture junction was present and accessible. It was settled late because the first three settlement waves did not identify it as a priority. Agricultural worlds, manufacturing bases, transit nodes — those were the early priorities. A system whose comparative advantage would prove to be information management and narrative production was not identifiable as such until there was a Reach large enough to require that service. Wave 4 timing is, in this reading, the correct timing: Parallax arrived when there was already a distributed civilization that needed someone to narrate it.
The `junction` topology at 2 hops from Gateway means Parallax is well-positioned to receive content from core systems and route it outward, and to pull in perspectives from three directions simultaneously. This is not incidental to the system's function. Syndicate editors describe aperture access as their primary operational concern ahead of local infrastructure quality. Content that can reach anywhere from here, and be reached from anywhere, two hops from Gateway, at the same core-network distance as the Gate Corporation's own manufacturing base — that is what the syndicates' business model requires. The alien builders did not intend this. The syndicates located here anyway.
The F5IV-V primary is moderately luminous — warmer than Sol, with the habitable zone situated at correspondingly greater distances. The stellar environment does not affect Parallax's function in any commercially significant sense. Media production and content management do not require particular atmospheric chemistry. The sun here is brighter and whiter than core-sector norms, which is occasionally noted in syndicate-produced content as a location aesthetic rather than a material constraint.
## Topology
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# Ross 128
**GJ 447** | binary-type | core
**GJ 447** | M-type | core
---
@@ -15,19 +15,44 @@
---
## Supply Dependency
<!-- Required for manufacturing/transit_logistics base and narrative_notable systems -->
Ross 128's primary export is protein. The habitable body is predominantly ocean, and the marine harvest operation that has run here for five centuries is one of the older continuous food-production enterprises in the Reach. It does not produce at the scale of the major agricultural worlds — this is not a system that feeds the capital — but it produces consistently, and the specific varieties of marine protein that the Ross 128 fisheries supply have developed, through five centuries of selective harvest management, a product profile that commands a reliable premium on core-sector food markets. The dependency flows both ways: the harvest infrastructure requires regular equipment import that the system cannot locally manufacture, and the logistics chain to core-sector distribution hubs runs through both gate connections.
The research economy operates on a different dependency structure. The Kensho connection — one hop to the Reach's most significant academic cluster — has produced, over multiple centuries, a research pipeline that functions less like an employment market and more like an extended institutional relationship. Researchers train at Kensho and come to Ross 128 for field postings. Senior researchers maintain affiliations at both systems simultaneously. The marine biology research stations at Ross 128 are, in several cases, formally partnered with Kensho faculties rather than being Conservancy or Commission institutions. The supply dependency this creates is intellectual rather than material: Ross 128's research programs are calibrated to the questions Kensho's institutions are currently funding, which means the research agenda here is partly determined by academic priorities two gate-hops away.
Tourism produces the third economic stream — modest relative to protein export, significant relative to research output. The system receives a consistent population of visitors whose presence in the economy is real enough to have generated a hospitality infrastructure, but not concentrated enough to have produced the Syndic combine density that characterizes systems where tourism is the primary industry. Ross 128 is a destination for people who are going somewhere for reasons they are willing to specify. It is not a resort system.
## Faction Notes
<!-- Significant local factions not covered by standard columns -->
The research community is the closest thing Ross 128 has to a dominant faction, and it is not politically organized in any coherent sense. The marine biology research stations, the oceanographic survey programs, the independent field researchers operating under Kensho affiliation — these share interests and sometimes coordinate, but they do not share governance ambitions. What they share is access: access to the ocean, to the survey data the automated systems generate, to the institutional frameworks that determine what research gets funded and what findings get classified as requiring further study. In a system where access to the primary research subject is the limiting resource, the institutions that manage that access have structural authority that does not require formal political expression.
The Lattice Commission maintains a presence at Ross 128 that is calibrated to the system's actual regulatory requirements: modest. There is no significant industrial workforce, no complex transit logistics requiring oversight, no information infrastructure that has historically generated Commission intervention. The Commission's agents here manage aperture administration — a standard function — and maintain the data quality monitoring that the marine research stations are required to submit under the Reach's standard environmental compliance framework. The compliance requirement is, by Commission standards, not burdensome. Ross 128's research community has operated inside it for long enough that the reporting is institutional habit rather than contested obligation.
The Syndic presence is specifically oriented toward the tourism and hospitality sector. The combines operating here are smaller than those in systems where tourism is a primary economic driver, and they are correspondingly less politically visible. There are no major Syndic logistics operations — the protein export runs through established freight contractors with long-term Conservancy agreements — and the academic pipeline with Kensho operates through institutional channels rather than commercial intermediaries. The combines that do operate here have not found conditions that make organizing for political access worth the investment.
The Guardian organization has a small chapter at Ross 128 whose activity is largely focused on the harvest management sector — the working conditions of the marine harvest operations, crew safety standards on the deep-survey vessels, the labor terms for the technical staff who maintain the automated survey equipment at depth. The chapter is not prominent in Reach-wide Guardian communications. Its concerns are specific and local, and the Conservancy's harvest management framework is not, by Reach standards, an adversarial operating environment for organized labor. The chapter exists and files its reports and occasionally produces findings the Commission's compliance framework takes three years to act on.
## Silence Topic
<!-- Required for narrative_notable and Institutional Core / Diplomatic Periphery zones -->
What Ross 128 does not discuss: what the deep-ocean surveys have found.
Five centuries of marine research have produced an extensive and publicly accessible body of findings. The shallow-water ecology is documented with the thoroughness that five hundred years of continuous scientific attention produces. The mid-depth zones are similarly well characterized. The deep ocean — the abyssal systems, the zones below the pressure limits of standard crewed research platforms — is documented in automated survey outputs that are partially accessible through the research stations' public archives and partially classified under a research-in-progress designation that the stations' ethics boards have authorized for periods of up to twenty years at a time.
The twenty-year authorization has been renewed continuously for approximately one hundred and forty years. The specific surveys that triggered the initial classification are no longer identified by name in the stations' current archive index — they were consolidated into a program-level classification during a records management reorganization that the stations undertook sixty years ago. What the reorganization produced is a situation in which the fact of ongoing deep-ocean classification is publicly known, the original basis for that classification is not accessible in the current archive structure, and the renewal process occurs through the ethics board's standard administrative cycle without requiring public disclosure of the classified content.
The research community at Ross 128 does not discuss this in terms that suggest concealment. The standard description, offered by senior researchers to visiting colleagues and tourist inquirers alike, is that deep-ocean survey data requires extended validation periods because the operating conditions produce measurement anomalies that require careful interpretation before publication. This is plausible. It is also exactly what the classification record would look like if the anomalies had been interpreted and the interpretation existed in a different kind of document, in a different kind of archive, that the public record's structure does not make visible.
## Narrative Hook
<!-- Required if narrative_notable = true. One sentence. -->
The marine research stations at Ross 128 have been renewing the same deep-ocean classification designation for a hundred and forty years, under an ethics board authorization that requires them to specify, in a non-public filing, what they are still trying to understand.
## Calibration Note
<!-- Unusual column combinations requiring justification -->
`binary-type` designation with `M4.5V` primary reflects the stellar classification of the Ross 128 system. The binary companion is a distant object at a separation that has no significant effect on the habitable body's orbital dynamics or the horizon station's operational parameters. The binary designation is carried in the system header because it is astronomically accurate; it should not be read as indicating the gravitational complexity that characterizes closer binary systems. The habitable body's ocean-world profile is stable on timescales relevant to the settlement record.
`loop_member` topology with two apertures connecting Proxima and Kensho reflects a routing configuration that is commercially functional without being commercially intensive. The loop connection means Ross 128 is not a dead-end, and transit passengers moving between Proxima and Kensho can route through Ross 128 rather than taking a longer path. In practice, the transit volume this generates is modest — most Proxima-to-Kensho routing goes through other systems with lower stop counts — but the loop position provides redundancy that the Commission considers worth maintaining in the network. The system benefits marginally from the transit throughput; the transit system benefits marginally from the routing option. The relationship is not significant for either party.
`wave_1` settlement on a predominantly ocean world reflects a specific pattern in early Reach colonization: the first wave included settlements whose attraction was not agricultural capacity or resource extraction but the scientific interest of the habitable body. The colonists who came to Ross 128 came because the ocean was there and because no human had studied it. That logic has reproduced itself, in the form of the research pipeline, for five hundred years. The settlement is wave_1 in the temporal sense and in the founding orientation — the system was always going to be about the water.
## Topology
<!-- READ-ONLY — regenerated from star-map.json edges -->