The Fray · Gate system

Meridian's Drift

“The Drift provides.”

Character

A scrappy shipbuilding, repair, and salvage hub, built up around the one Precursor gate in the Fray that does not cross cleanly. Every other gate puts you through instantly; the Tanager gate here sometimes lands you an hour or two late, occasionally an hour before you left, and very rarely somewhere it has no business connecting to at all. 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, crosses badly when every other gate in the Fray crosses perfectly. Salvage Downs occasionally turns up wreckage that, as far as anyone can determine, never passed through a gate connected to anywhere near here — and at least one hull nobody has been able to match to any registry in the sector.

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 (Station)

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.

Span
9 km
Mass
180 million tonnes
Gravity
0.75 g (spun)
Orbit
42 km from the Tanager gate, at 1.15 AU
Orbital period
1 hours around the ring
Interior
Nitrogen-oxygen, recycled
Interior pressure
101 kPa
Signal lag
9.6 min from the star

Salvage Downs (Moon)

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.

Diameter
6,380 km
Mass
0.075 Earths
Gravity
0.30 g
Orbit
900,000 km from Meridia-b
Orbital period
7.8 days
Day
7.8 days (tidally locked)
Atmosphere
None
Average temp.
-100.1 °C