jpmschweitzerandClaude Opus 4.6
a853e1ccb4
Complete Drifter's Guide coverage for the East Reach corridor. 50 new entries from hop 4 (Nová Tržnice) to hop 9 (Xa Vời), plus updated gttr-east.md index with all 54 east systems. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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THE DRIFTER'S GUIDE TO THE REACH — P ERIDANI
P ERIDANI is named after what is in the star catalog, because three founding groups spent two generations failing to agree on anything better, and by the time any of them had enough local standing to impose a preference, the catalog designation had become the community's identity by default.
The Naming Votes
Renaming votes have been held. Names have been chosen. The names appear in official documents for a few years and then the community drifts back to p Eridani, because that is what the gate charts say and gate charts are what ships use. The most recent renaming vote produced a name that was in official use for eleven years before the drift completed. The system's governance committee does not regard this as a failure. They regard it as the community expressing a preference through behavior rather than procedure, which is admittedly a generous interpretation of what is essentially collective indecision hardened into tradition.
The three founding groups — Finnish mineral surveyors, a Chinese-heritage transit firm, and a mixed-heritage agricultural community that significantly overestimated the K2 habitable zone's farming potential — have long since blended into a general population. Their descendants hold no formal privileged governance positions. What persists is the pattern: factional negotiation, competing blocs, informal norms for managing disagreement that are deeply opaque to outsiders. p Eridani's committee has spent centuries developing elaborate systems for not reaching conclusions quickly.
The Freight Levy
The system's three gates connect to Novaya Zarya, to Hwaseong, and to Korhonen — the dead_end extraction system whose sole external freight connection runs through p Eridani. This gives p Eridani's transit operators structural pricing leverage over Korhonen that has been a source of resentment for three generations.
The Korhonen transit fee schedule has been revised upward three times in forty years, each revision justified by infrastructure maintenance costs that the committee's records show are real and that independent analysis would reveal to be a fraction of the fee increase. The gap between documented cost and collected revenue flows into p Eridani's general operating fund, unlabeled. Korhonen's council has filed formal correspondence. p Eridani's committee has responded with infrastructure cost documentation that is accurate and incomplete. Neither party has invoked the Assembly dispute mechanism that would require both to open their full accounts, apparently for different reasons.
Practical Information
p Eridani is five hops from Gateway with three gate apertures connecting to Novaya Zarya, Hwaseong, and Korhonen. The K2 primary provides a habitable zone that the founding agricultural community found disappointing, which is why the system is a transit junction rather than a farming cooperative. The committee runs efficiently when it agrees, which it manages approximately half the time.
Adams of the Guide rates p Eridani: Democratically Named. Arithmetically Priced.