jpmschweitzerandClaude Opus 4.6
1f3151d8b4
Complete Drifter's Guide coverage for the South Reach corridor. 52 new entries from hop 3 (Travessia) to hop 8 (Punta del Sol), plus updated gttr-south.md index with all 53 south systems. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
3.3 KiB
THE DRIFTER'S GUIDE TO THE REACH — GJ 325B
GJ 325B has no name. The designation is a catalog artifact, the "B" a bookkeeping remnant of old survey conventions that assigned companion suffixes to stars in loosely associated moving groups, a classification that means nothing operationally and has never been corrected because no one who cares about such things lives here.
The Asteroid Belt
What the wave 3 survey teams found when they passed through was a system whose mass budget had gone almost entirely into an intermediate asteroid belt rather than into planetary formation. There are rocky bodies, several of them, but none large enough to retain a substantial atmosphere, none with surface gravity practical for extended habitation without full closed-environment infrastructure. The belt is extensive and rich in metallic and silicate material. It has been surveyed four times by extraction companies over three hundred years. Three of those surveys were assessing commercial development viability. All three agreed on the resource content and disagreed on the development economics. None resulted in a development proposal that advanced to capital authorization. The fourth survey, an academic geological study, produced a paper that was cited twice and largely forgotten.
The third commercial survey, conducted approximately eighty years ago by a company that no longer exists under that name, contained a section on a secondary deposit type that the academic survey's geological analysis confirmed should exist — and that was redacted from the public filing. The company dissolved two years after filing. The ownership chain between that company and any currently active entity is not publicly documented. The academic survey notes, in passing, that the deposit type in question would be associated with the kind of isotopic profile sometimes found in regions of heavy historical high-energy activity.
The Station
The only way out is the way in. One aperture, connecting to Entroncamento at GJ 3323. The horizon station is alien construction, self-maintaining, aperture facing back toward the junction. The docking infrastructure functions at minimal level — enough to shelter, conduct minor repairs, access navigational data. The habitable sections are lit at the low end of the spectrum the alien design defaults to. Temperature stays above freezing. The hum of the aperture's transit systems, the occasional sound of maintenance systems moving through corridors, and nothing else.
The Lattice Commission's jurisdiction theoretically extends here. The Commission maintains no inspection schedule for unsettled systems and has no record of a visit to GJ 325B in the last hundred years. The GJ 325B Survey Consortium, registered at Entroncamento, manages access permissions for transit to this system. Its membership is not public. The vessels it schedules for "maintenance and inspection" visits return heavier than they left. This is measured but not formally noted.
Practical Information
GJ 325B is seven hops from Gateway with one gate aperture. The K6V primary provides enough light to navigate by. The asteroids are there if anyone wants them. Nobody has, so far, wanted them in a way they were willing to file publicly.
Adams of the Guide rates GJ 325B: Rich in Theory. Empty in Practice. Busier Than It Looks.