The Fray · Gate system
Named, with more hope than accuracy, for peace.
A frontier system of small, struggling, fiercely self-reliant settlements with no system-wide government worth the name. Tough survivalist culture; help arrives slowly if at all, so people mostly help themselves.
Exports rare xenobiological crop strains found nowhere else; imports nearly everything manufactured, since local production covers survival but little else. Genuinely marginal — Halcyon subsists, it doesn't thrive.
Poor, struggling. Old salvaged gear runs everywhere, patched and re-patched rather than replaced.
Halcyon is the jumping-off point for the unreliable Leviathan route to Widowreach — the Sky Watchers are the closest thing the Fray has to experts on that particular Leviathan's pattern, which isn't saying much.
Select an origin and destination
Burn time follows the chosen g; at 1× playback the trip plays in 6.5 seconds.
Diagram is schematic — orbits are not to scale. See distance and measurement.
Places
A heavy world with a thin atmosphere, where a standing adult carries half again their weight. Its settlements occupy a handful of perfectly clear, glass-like Precursor domes that nobody can cut or replace; Last Light is the largest, and home to the Sky Watchers — an informal network of amateur sensor-hobbyists who keep watch for trouble since no one else will.
One face holds permanent day. The quoted temperature is the global average; the terminator is the only comfortable latitude.