Cyra Asteroid Belt
Darkhold Station - Belters Guild
The Cyra Asteroid Belt is a vast field rich in heavy metals. Scientists have theorized that the field was formed by the collision of two sizeable planetary bodies. Both of them disintegrated and their debris has become scattered evenly along their original orbits over the past few million years.
Mining the belt is one of the most profitable and most dangerous jobs in the Verge. A man can make himself rich if he puts his mind to it. A one-month jaunt into the belt can earn over 10,000Cr in cash. It is also likely to get a person killed. The large asteroids are easy to spot and avoid, but the belt is filled with smaller rocks and derbies that are still large enough to punch a hole through the hull of a mining ship. The second major danger comes from Tendril. The star is very active, even during periods of relative quiet, it can have solar flares that will play havoc on communications and navigation equipment. Perhaps the most heinous danger facing miners is other men.
Greed, avarice, and spite kill many men each year. The wealth of the belt draws a few pirates hoping to capture a mining ship with its cargo holds full. Add to that a number of greedy mining captains who are willing to use violence to take over a rich claim. Each year there are a number of incidents of ship to ship combat and a number of ships that simply disappear. A typical mining ship carries more armaments then any civilian ship of its class. Miners have been known to use space mines and attack satellites to stack out particularly valuable claims.
Customs and Immigration
Darkhold Station is an open port, but there are a number of
restrictions on travelers. Members
of the Belters Guild are allowed to carry non-military personal weapons into the
station. All others are prohibited
from carrying weapons of any type into the station and possessing them while
they are there. Visitors to the
station are required to state their reasons for coming and are limited to
staying no more then 60 days. Those
wishing to stay longer must apply for residency status.
Members of the Belters Guild are automatically considered residents.
The use of mindwalking powers are strictly prohibited outside of those mind walkers who are employed on the station or by the Belters Guild. All Mindwalkers are required to register when they enter the station. Psion detectors are in use in several areas of the station and unauthorized use of powers is considered a serious criminal offense punishable by steep fines or jail time.
The men and women who mine the Cyra Asteroid Belt are called Belters. By many reckonings they are a breed apart from normal humans. It is a strange person indeed who day in and day out spends their life cooped up in the claustrophobic crew spaces of a mining ship or floating in the perpetual gloom of the outer solar system. It was greed that drove them there in the first place. A Belter stands to make a good living if they can resist the temptation to gambling and drinking it away at the nearest spaceport. Now some 200 years after the Cyra Belt was first charted, mining it has become a storied tradition and its miners see themselves as a distinct brotherhood separate from the planet clinging humans who dwell in the rest of the system.
Belters typically fly small 100-ton ships that offer little in the way of modern comforts, but pack all the necessary equipment for mining. None of their ships are equipped with StarDrives. Instead they have increased the size of the gravitonic engines to allow them to haul massive ore loads attacked to the outside of the ship. Mining ships are equipped with a vast array of sensors and probes to both analyze the asteroids and to navigate the perilous sections of the belt. Claim jumping, piracy, and hot tempers are a common enough threat so all Belter ships carry armament such as missile batteries and laser canon. It’s a good bet too that the crew knows how to use these weapons first hand if they have been working the Belt for any length of time.
Mining of the Cyra Belt involves frequent trips into the inner system. Belters calve sections off asteroids using carefully placed demolition charges. The asteroid fragments are carefully collected and towed to the Gladstone Ore Refinery located in orbit around the planet Sperous. The refinery processes the ore and ships raw metal to the shipyards and factories of Alaundril. Some ore is exported to other Verge worlds and to the Core Worlds.