jpmschweitzerandClaude Opus 4.6
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Complete Drifter's Guide coverage for the North Reach corridor. 49 new entries from hop 3 (Crown's Hollow) to hop 12 (Rekohu), plus updated gttr-north.md index with all 55 north systems. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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THE DRIFTER'S GUIDE TO THE REACH — STILWATER
STILWATER was named for exactly what its settlers wanted: a world that would hold still and let people farm it. It has been doing that for two hundred years and shows no signs of stopping.
The Still
The name is "still water" in Afrikaans and Dutch, chosen by settlers who found the system's main habitable world unremarkable in all the right ways: no violent weather, no unstable tectonics, no competing interests. The M2V primary is dim and steady. At hop 7, Commission presence is nominal — a charter filing office, a transit log, a medical station open two days a week. Everything else is community-managed and has been for as long as anyone can remember. The original wave_4 settlers were the grandparents of the oldest generation now living here, and the institutional memory of "before we had all this" means something to them, even if what they had before was less.
The population is small and deliberately so. Land is plentiful, neighbors are infrequent, and the stars at night include the glow of Breëvlei one gate back, visible on clear nights as a reminder of the corridor they sit at the end of. Supply runs from the corridor behind them are long and the delays are part of life. The Landbou Raad cooperative network includes Stilwater in its distribution agreements, informally and occasionally slowly.
The Far Gate
Stilwater is a through-route between Breëvlei and GJ 914A, which means there is a gate in the other direction. The transit logs from vessels coming in from that direction show a pattern of missing hours. No settlement has taken root at GJ 914A in the thirty years since the through-route technically opened. The logs are not discussed. Asking about them is not explicitly discouraged, but it does not come up, and when it does, the conversation moves on.
Practical Information
Stilwater is seven hops from Gateway with two apertures connecting to Breëvlei inward and GJ 914A outward. Wave_4 settlement, which makes it older than most hop-7 systems — the Cairn pocket's founding push reached deep before the Reach's expansion slowed. The community council runs everything. Nobody is in a hurry. The farming is good.
Adams of the Guide rates Stilwater: Peaceful. Far Gate Hours Unaccounted.