settled-reach/wiki/star-systems/GJ-775/index.md

Randsholm

GJ 775 | K-type | west_reach

---

System Profile

Star	K4V · 41.9 ly
Bodies	0 habitable · 2 inhabited
Gates	2 aperture · through_route
Settlement	wave_5
Industries	fusion_fuel, metallic_ore, refined_metals, hospitality, financial_services, legal_services
Exports	refined_metals, financial_services
Imports	processed_food, electronics, consumer_goods, medical_goods, heavy_equipment, chemicals
Population	—

---

Supply Dependency

Randsholm is a young system on the outer edge of the Compact of Westphalia's reach, connected inward to GJ 302 and outward to GJ 395, which continues on to Alshain. Its two gates make it a waypoint rather than a destination — a through_route that exists because something further out needed a path to somewhere. The something is Alshain, a wave_3 system that has been out there alone for a long time and whose supply lines run back through GJ 395 and Randsholm.

The local economy is early-stage extraction: the habitable body has a reducing atmosphere that requires full closed-system infrastructure, and the founding population's current priority is establishing the surface and orbital facilities that will eventually allow secondary processing. Randsholm is not yet at the point where it exports finished goods. It ships raw consolidates inward to GJ 302 for processing and receives manufactured essentials in exchange. The transit margins are unfavorable, as they always are for young through_route systems dependent on a larger hub's pricing.

The founding settlement was established forty years ago by a cooperative syndicate from deep inside the Compact zone — primarily from Freiholt and GJ 302. The founders brought their home systems' governance traditions with them: cooperative ownership, sector councils, elected executives. They also brought a working familiarity with the Compact's principles, because that is the political culture that shaped them.

Faction Notes

Randsholm's relationship with the Compact of Westphalia is the system's most defining political fact. The founding cooperative signed a letter of provisional affiliation with the Compact at the time of settlement — not a full treaty signature, which requires an established governance body and a ratification vote, but an expression of solidarity and intent. The ratification vote was held twelve years after founding and passed by a margin the historical record describes as "decisive." Randsholm is a Compact signatory.

The significance of this for a wave_5 system at hop 9 is primarily symbolic but not only symbolic. Compact affiliation provides Randsholm's founding cooperative with commercial access to the internal tariff arrangement that makes the Compact's trade network function. Without that arrangement, Randsholm's extraction output would be priced through Hansestadt's external tariff schedules, which would make the early-stage economics even more marginal. The Compact, in other words, is not just a political alignment for Randsholm — it is a survival mechanism.

The Assembly has not established a formal presence in Randsholm. Wave 5 settlement typically comes with Assembly infrastructure grant discussions, but Randsholm's Compact affiliation made those discussions short. The founding cooperative made explicit that it was not seeking Assembly support and was not accepting Assembly assessment obligations. The Assembly registered the refusal and moved on. There is no Assembly representative, no fleet presence, and no Lattice Commission office. The gate maintenance contract is with the Gate Corporation, which is the one institution in the Reach that Randsholm's council has no interest in antagonizing.

Silence Topic

What Randsholm has not resolved internally: the question of what happens when the through_route character of the system becomes more relevant — when Alshain's traffic volume grows, or when something further out uses Randsholm as a path to somewhere.

The current governance structure was built for a self-sufficient cooperative community. It does not have a framework for managing transit traffic that it did not generate. The founding council's deliberations on this question, which have been ongoing for eight years, have produced draft governance protocols that have not been ratified because the council cannot agree on the fundamental question: if outside traffic uses Randsholm's gates, does Randsholm have the right to levy tariffs on it, and if so, who administers that right. The Compact's mutual recognition framework does not resolve this because the Compact's commercial treaty was designed for member-to-member trade, not through-traffic from outside the zone. The council has sent a formal query to the Compact's rotating council. They have been waiting fourteen months for a response.

Narrative Hook

The young cooperative that settled this waypoint on principle is discovering that being a through_route means you are eventually transit infrastructure for decisions other people made, and its governance framework has no answer for that.

Calibration Note

wave_5 at hop 9 is consistent with late frontier-push settlement in the deep west, where the Compact zone's expansion created new economic rationales for systems that would previously have been too marginal to justify. The K4V star is similar to GJ 453 — stable, moderate, unremarkable — which suits a system defined by its position rather than its environment. through_route topology with two gates makes Randsholm a waypoint, not a destination. The name "Randsholm" is Scandinavian in construction — "holm" meaning island or small landmass, "rand" meaning edge or margin — an original compound that communicates frontier position without being a literal Earth place-name.

Celestial Bodies

Orbit	ID	Name	Type	Inhabited	Pop	Mass	Gravity	Year (d)	Day (h)	Atmo	Biome	Hydro	Economy	Settlement	Industrial
1	GJ775b	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.38g	16	384.0	none	barren	—	—	—	—
2	GJ775c	Ytterkant	planet	yes	4K	terrestrial	0.92g	160	24.8	reducing	cold_arid	—	mining	urban_concentrated	mining_refractories
3	GJ775-belt	—	asteroid_belt	no	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
4	GJ775d	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.50g	480	25.6	thin	frozen	—	—	—	—
5	GJ775e	—	gas_giant	no	—	—	—	1600	12.2	gas_giant	—	—	—	—	—
↳ 5.1	GJ775e-m1	—	moon	no	—	dwarf	0.10g	5	129.6	—	frozen	—	—	—	—
6	GJ775f	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.40g	4200	32.8	trace	frozen	ice	—	—	—
7	GJ775g	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.32g	9600	40.6	trace	frozen	ice	—	—	—
8	GJ775h	—	planet	no	—	terrestrial	0.24g	22000	47.6	none	frozen	ice	—	—	—
9	GJ775i	—	planet	no	—	dwarf	0.11g	44000	26.4	none	frozen	ice	—	—	—
10	GJ775-oort	—	oort_cloud	no	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—

Stations & Facilities

ID	Name	Type	Orbits	Population	Economy	Governance	Docking	Gate	Districts
GJ775-oort-S1	Randsholm Horizon	horizon	GJ775-oort	240	transit	—	major	yes	1

Topology

• Hop Distance from Gateway: 9
• Adjacent Systems: GJ 395, GJ 302