The Fray · Gate system

Meridian's Drift

“The Drift provides.”

Character

A scrappy shipbuilding, repair, and salvage hub, built up around a Precursor gate that works, but not quite right — it's real and functional, just imprecise, occasionally producing “drift” arrivals that show up off-target, early, late, or all three. The local culture has absorbed this into a fatalistic, adaptable shrug.

Economy

Exports ship repair, refits, and salvage parts; imports raw ore (mostly from Vosk), food, and replacement components. Nothing here was ever new, and everyone's fine with that.

Wealth

Middling, self-made, unglamorous.

Rumors & mysteries

Nobody has ever explained why this gate, specifically, drifts when none of the others do. Salvage Downs occasionally turns up wreckage that, as far as anyone can determine, never passed through a gate connected to anywhere near here.

System chart

Star Planet Moon Station Ruins Gate / wake route

Diagram is schematic — orbits are not to scale. See distance and measurement.

Places

Who lives here

Driftworks

Capital: No separate capital — a rotating council of shipwright guilds

A sprawling shipyard-station complex built around the unstable gate. If it can be welded, patched, or talked into working one more time, someone at Driftworks will do it for a fair price.

Salvage Downs

Capital: None — informally overseen by Driftworks

A small rocky moon serving as scrapyard and ship graveyard. Salvage rights disputes here are a local sport. Wreckage turns up that never passed through any gate connected to anywhere near here.