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

GJ 325B

GJ 325B | M-type | south_reach

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System Profile

Star	K6 V · 36.9 ly
Bodies	0 habitable · 1 inhabited
Gates	1 aperture · dead_end
Settlement	unsettled
Industries	fusion_fuel, metallic_ore, agricultural_produce, processed_food, hospitality, financial_services, legal_services
Exports	processed_food, financial_services
Imports	electronics, consumer_goods, medical_goods, refined_metals, heavy_equipment, chemicals
Population	—

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GJ 325B has no settlement and no name. The system catalog records it by its designation — a companion designation, implying a binary or wide-associate relationship with a primary that is nowhere near the system's gate aperture, a bookkeeping artifact of old survey conventions that assigned B suffixes to stars that were at one time believed to share a moving group or loose association with another designated object. The "B" means nothing operationally. The star itself is a K6V — a mid-K dwarf, orange and dim by the standards of systems that host human settlements, sitting at 36.9 light-years from Earth's sun and connected to GJ 3323 through the one aperture its horizon station carries.

What survey teams sent to assess GJ 325B for settlement found was a system whose mass budget had gone almost entirely into a dense intermediate asteroid belt rather than into planet formation. There are rocky bodies: several of them, distributed between the star's inner habitable zone and the outer cold zone, but none large enough to retain a substantial atmosphere, none with surface gravity that would make extended surface habitation practical without full closed-environment infrastructure, and none whose resource profile was significantly better than what could be found at already-settled systems with functioning surface operations. The asteroid belt that took the mass that a planet might otherwise have accumulated is extensive and rich in metallic and silicate material. From a resource perspective, it is valuable. From a settlement perspective — the kind of settlement that requires habitable surface, agricultural potential, or infrastructure that does not need to be entirely imported — it is insufficient.

The wave_3 survey teams passed through on their way to assess GJ 3323 and the systems beyond it. The reports they filed on GJ 325B were brief. The system was designated as a possible future extraction site, which is the assessment category that means "not worth developing now, not worth dismissing entirely." That designation has not changed in three hundred years.

What a transit crew finds when they come through the GJ 3323 aperture into GJ 325B is this: a dim orange star that provides enough light to navigate by but not enough warmth to stand in without supplemental heating. Asteroids in concentrations that show up on standard proximity sensors as scattered returns rather than individual objects — the belt is not a navigation hazard in the precise sense, but it is reason to proceed on careful track rather than fastest course. The horizon station itself is alien construction, self-maintaining as all horizon stations are, its aperture facing the GJ 3323 direction. There is no second aperture. The only way out is the way in.

The station's maintenance protocols keep the aperture operational and the docking infrastructure at minimal function — enough for a vessel to dock, shelter, conduct minor repairs, and access the basic navigational data the station carries. The station has no crew, no resident population, no service beyond what the alien construction's self-maintaining systems provide. A crew that sheltered here in an emergency would find the experience functional but not hospitable: lighting at the low end of the spectrum that the alien design defaults to, temperature regulation that keeps the habitable sections above freezing, and a silence that is particular to empty stations — the hum of the aperture's transit systems, the occasional sound of maintenance systems moving through corridors, nothing else.

The asteroid belt has been surveyed by four independent extraction companies over the past three hundred years, three of which were assessing the belt for commercial development and one of which was conducting a geological survey for academic purposes. The commercial surveys agreed on the resource content and disagreed on the development economics. The academic survey produced a paper on the system's formation history that was cited twice and then largely forgotten. None of the commercial surveys resulted in development proposals that advanced to the capital authorization stage. The belt remains as it was: present, valuable in principle, and addressed by no one.

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Supply Dependency

GJ 325B has no economy and no supply structure. The horizon station's self-maintaining systems require no external input that any human supply chain provides. A vessel passing through requires only what it carries. There is nothing to import and nothing to export.

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Faction Notes

No faction has a presence in GJ 325B. The Lattice Commission's jurisdiction theoretically extends to any system with a functioning horizon station, but the Commission maintains no inspection schedule for unsettled systems and has no record of a scheduled visit to GJ 325B in the last hundred years. The system exists in the gap between the Commission's jurisdiction and its operational capacity — claimed in principle, unvisited in practice.

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Silence Topic

The four extraction surveys are in commercial databases as filed documents, but the third survey — conducted approximately eighty years ago by a company that no longer exists under that name — produced a resource assessment that, according to a footnote in the academic geological survey, contained a section on a secondary deposit type that the academic team tried to follow up and found had been redacted from the public filing. The commercial survey company dissolved two years after filing. The ownership chain between that company and any currently active entity is not publicly documented.

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Narrative Hook

The redacted section of the third commercial survey covers a deposit type that the academic survey's geological analysis suggests would be associated with the kind of isotopic profile sometimes found in regions of heavy historical high-energy activity — the kind of profile that is neither agricultural nor conventionally industrial, but that certain categories of research operation would find specifically interesting.

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Calibration Note

The M-type header designation is a generation artifact; K6V is the correct stellar classification and governs all lore detail. The dead_end, unsettled combination at hop 7 off GJ 3323 is the expected profile for a system that was assessed and passed over during the wave_3 expansion: the junction at GJ 3323 connected this aperture because the horizon station was already there, not because anyone intended to develop the system. The asteroid belt as primary feature explains the settlement failure without requiring any catastrophic history — this system was simply not good enough to justify the capital required for development when alternatives at comparable or shorter hop distances were available.

Celestial Bodies

Orbit	ID	Name	Type	Inhabited	Pop	Mass	Gravity	Year (d)	Day (h)	Atmo	Biome	Hydro	Economy	Settlement	Industrial
1	GJ325Bb	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.41g	38	22.4	none	barren	—	—	—	—
2	GJ325Bc	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.68g	190	27.0	thin	cold_arid	—	—	—	—
3	GJ325B-belt	—	asteroid_belt	no	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	mining	—	—
4	GJ325Bd	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.52g	580	30.0	thin	frozen	—	—	—	—
5	GJ325Be	—	gas_giant	no	—	—	—	1800	11.8	gas_giant	—	—	—	—	—
↳ 5.1	GJ325Be-m1	—	moon	no	—	dwarf	0.13g	5	124.8	trace	frozen	—	—	—	—
↳ 5.2	GJ325Be-m2	—	moon	no	—	dwarf	0.08g	11	259.2	—	barren	—	—	—	—
6	GJ325Bf	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.46g	4200	36.0	trace	frozen	—	—	—	—
7	GJ325Bg	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.38g	7800	44.0	trace	frozen	—	—	—	—
8	GJ325Bh	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.29g	14200	57.0	trace	frozen	—	—	—	—
9	GJ325Bi	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.21g	25600	72.0	trace	frozen	—	—	—	—
10	GJ325B-oort	—	oort_cloud	no	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—

Stations & Facilities

ID	Name	Type	Orbits	Population	Economy	Governance	Docking	Gate	Districts
GJ325B-oort-S1	GJ 325B Horizon	horizon	GJ325B-oort	—	transit	—	major	yes	1

Topology

• Hop Distance from Gateway: 7
• Adjacent Systems: GJ 3323