settled-reach/wiki/star-systems/GJ-325A/index.md

Purnima

GJ 325A | K-type | east_reach

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System Profile

Star	K5 V · 36.9 ly
Bodies	0 habitable · 2 inhabited
Gates	1 aperture · dead_end
Settlement	wave_3
Industries	fusion_fuel, metallic_ore, lattice_grade_material, hospitality, financial_services, legal_services
Exports	lattice_grade_material, financial_services
Imports	processed_food, electronics, consumer_goods, medical_goods, refined_metals, heavy_equipment
Population	—

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Purnima is a tide-locked world. The star it orbits — GJ 325A, a K5V red-orange dwarf — holds it in gravitational lock at a distance where the illuminated hemisphere bakes and the dark hemisphere freezes, and the habitable zone is a band of perpetual twilight a few hundred kilometers wide at the planet's terminator line. The settlers who came three hundred years ago in the Bengali-Indian Wave 3 expansion knew this from the survey data. They came anyway, because the survey data also showed something the summary reports described as "anomalous mineral richness in the twilight-band regolith," and someone had read far enough into the underlying assay tables to understand what that meant.

The twilight band of Purnima is settled along its entire accessible length: a chain of connected habitat clusters, agricultural terraces, and processing facilities that follows the terminator like a thread wrapped around a ball. The light is permanent orange-rose, the angle shallow and unchanging — not sunrise, not sunset, but something that is both and neither, held in place by orbital mechanics. Residents describe it as beautiful without qualification. Visitors tend to agree and then find, after two or three days, that the unchanging quality of it becomes strange in ways they cannot fully explain.

The agricultural system works because of the precise light conditions, not despite them. The twilight band receives consistent, low-angle illumination that is unusually good for photosynthesis in crops selected for those wavelengths; three centuries of breeding work has produced food plant varieties that grow nowhere else with the same productivity, and a handful of these varieties are exported as specialty agricultural products in their own right. But the thing that gave Purnima its corridor reputation is not the food.

The geology of the twilight band is the product of long-cycle thermal gradients — the same heat-flow dynamics that make the zone habitable create specific mineral precipitation patterns in the upper rock layers. Three pigment minerals occur in commercial concentrations in the twilight-band regolith and nowhere else in the system: an iron-rich compound that produces a deep burnt-orange when refined, stable across heat and light exposure without fixative; a manganese-derived mineral that produces a saturated violet of unusual depth, the most expensive of the three; and a calcium-bearing grey material with a faint shimmer in indirect light, useful as a base preparation that changes the surface character of fabrics before the color minerals are applied.

The textile workers of Purnima named these the sandhya dyes — sandhya meaning the twilight hour in Bengali, the moment the dyes visually reference. Sandhya Red, Sandhya Violet, Sandhya Ash. The three work in combination or singly. They bond to natural fibers at a molecular level in a way that synthetic equivalents have never reproduced with the same result — off-system attempts have produced colors that are close but not identical, and textile specialists can identify the origin of a genuinely Purnima-dyed piece in comparative testing with consistent accuracy. The reason for the bonding difference involves the trace mineral matrix of the regolith preparation process, which Purnima's dye cooperatives have not attempted to patent and have not disclosed in full.

The result is a small-batch export trade of considerable prestige. Purnima textiles — dyed in the twilight-band workshops, sewn to specifications that the cooperative maintains standards for — move through Novaya Zarya (GJ 137) to the broader east reach and inward. They are not cheap. They are recognized.

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Supply Dependency

Purnima is a dead-end system entirely dependent on its single aperture to Novaya Zarya (GJ 137) for manufactured goods, medical equipment, technical components, and a portion of its food supply that the twilight-band agriculture cannot fully cover. The dye export and textile trade generate sufficient income to sustain this dependency without structural deficit in most years. The system is exposed to Novaya Zarya's economic conditions in ways that make local governance sensitive to political shifts in that system.

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Faction Notes

The Sandhya Dye Cooperative controls the extraction, processing, and quality certification of all three mineral pigments. The Cooperative's quality mark on a dye batch is a prerequisite for the premium pricing that makes Purnima's trade balance work. Membership requires operating under extraction quotas that the Cooperative sets annually; these quotas are the subject of the most significant recurring governance disputes in the system.

The Twilight Agriculture Board represents the farming collectives and manages the crop breeding programs that have produced Purnima's specialist food varieties. The Board and the Dye Cooperative have a formally collegial relationship and an informally competitive one over land rights in the twilight band, where farming terraces and dye-mineral extraction sites sometimes want the same ground.

The Terminator Council is the elected governing body, with representation drawn from the entire chain of habitat clusters. The Council's physical geography — habitats spread across a band that takes several hours of transit to traverse — produces a form of politics that is heavily mediated by communication infrastructure, and the Council's sessions are remote-first by tradition and necessity.

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Silence Topic

The extraction quota system that the Dye Cooperative sets each year is based on assay data from surveys conducted by the Cooperative's own technical staff. Independent geological assessment of the twilight-band regolith has not been conducted in over eighty years. At least two Cooperative technical staff are aware of internal survey data suggesting that the Sandhya Violet mineral concentrations in the primary extraction zone are thinner than the current quota model assumes — that the accessible reserves of the most valuable pigment are materially smaller than the public record shows. The Cooperative's board has not been informed. The Terminator Council has not been informed.

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Narrative Hook

A geologist visiting Purnima on an academic permit to study the twilight-band thermal gradients notices inconsistencies between published mineral assay data and what she observes in the field, and begins to understand that the numbers that underpin Purnima's entire export economy may have been quietly understating a depletion problem for decades.

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Calibration Note

The READ-ONLY System Profile classifies GJ 325A as K5V, making K-type the correct header designation; the briefing listed M-type but the catalog data takes precedence. A K5V star is a cool orange dwarf, fully consistent with the tide-locked world character described and with the twilight-band habitation model. Dead_end with 1 aperture and wave_3 settlement matches a community that has been genuinely isolated for three centuries and has built a specific cultural and economic identity around its unusual planetary conditions.

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Celestial Bodies

Orbit	ID	Name	Type	Inhabited	Pop	Mass	Gravity	Year (d)	Day (h)	Atmo	Biome	Hydro	Economy	Settlement	Industrial
1	GJ325Ab	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.31g	12	18.4	none	barren	—	—	—	—
2	GJ325Ac	Purnima	planet	yes	95K	terrestrial	0.88g	140	3360.0	standard	temperate_terminator	liquid_water	manufacturing	dispersed	mineral_extraction
3	GJ325Ad	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.54g	380	32.8	thin	cold_arid	—	—	—	—
4	GJ325A-belt	—	asteroid_belt	no	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
5	GJ325Ae	—	gas_giant	no	—	—	—	1200	13.6	gas_giant	—	—	—	—	—
↳ 5.1	GJ325Ae-m1	—	moon	no	—	dwarf	0.09g	5	129.6	—	frozen	—	—	—	—
6	GJ325Af	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.40g	3400	38.2	trace	frozen	ice	—	—	—
7	GJ325Ag	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.28g	8200	44.6	trace	frozen	ice	—	—	—
8	GJ325Ah	—	planet	no	—	dwarf	0.11g	18000	27.4	none	frozen	ice	—	—	—
9	GJ325Ai	—	planet	no	—	dwarf	0.10g	38000	22.2	none	frozen	ice	—	—	—
10	GJ325A-oort	—	oort_cloud	no	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—

Stations & Facilities

ID	Name	Type	Orbits	Population	Economy	Governance	Docking	Gate	Districts
GJ325A-oort-S1	Purnima Horizon	horizon	GJ325A-oort	280	transit	—	major	yes	1

Topology

• Hop Distance from Gateway: 7
• Adjacent Systems: GJ 137