jpmschweitzerandClaude Opus 4.6
95c5bebdee
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 — MURCHISON
MURCHISON exists because the frontier push needed somewhere to put supplies, and it has been putting supplies somewhere for two hundred years without attracting much attention to the fact that some of the survey filings in its registry haven't been updated in ninety.
The Depot
MVG's preliminary scouts established a depot here in wave_4 — close enough to the outer fringe to be useful for staging, far enough from inner systems not to compete with established provisioning centers. The depot still runs. It stocks mineral survey equipment, transit consumables, emergency repair components, and bulk stores. The depot manager's institutional culture is aggressively practical about inventory: nothing that has not demonstrably been needed within the past five years. The secondary economy is mineral survey support — geological assessment services, sample processing, survey crew accommodation. The deposits in the system itself are mostly worked out. Murchison helps other people decide whether to mine elsewhere.
MVG's footprint is light: a standard logistics contract, a depot manager with regional authority, and the tacit understanding that MVG's preliminary assessment franchise on any mineral discovery within two hops runs through Murchison's registry. This is not a formal legal arrangement. It is an informal monopoly on information, maintained by being the organization that originally built the survey infrastructure here.
The Old Files
The MVG preliminary assessment records for the outer branch include surveys of systems documented, classified as low-priority extraction targets, and filed. Several of those filings have not been updated since the original survey, approximately seventy to ninety years ago. Whether conditions have changed, whether subsequent unofficial surveys have occurred, and whether the low-priority classification still accurately describes what is out there are questions MVG's registry is not obligated to answer.
The depot manager's personal log contains a note, written six years ago, about a freelance prospector who came through asking specific questions about one of the unfiled systems.
Practical Information
Murchison is ten hops from Gateway with two apertures connecting to Pemberton and Moyale. The K1V primary is mild, the environment unremarkable. The wave_4 founding was mixed — Australian-heritage in the administrative core, frontier-recruited mixed heritage everywhere else — and four generations of frontier life have produced a culture where the Assembly charter is considered useful wallpaper. The depot is functional and well-maintained. MVG's infrastructure standard ensures that.
Adams of the Guide rates Murchison: Well-Stocked. Survey Records Lapsed.