Freelance Traveller

Referees’ Guide to System Building

by Ken Pick

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2025 issue.

Introduction

In the original Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society issues #10 and 11 (circa 1981), J Andrew Keith and William H Keith had a two-part article “A Referee’s Guide to Planet-Building” where they took the world of Craw in the Spinward Marches (Glisten 0309, C573645-3) and fleshed out the UWP into a playable system mainworld.

Yet a planet – even a system’s mainworld – does not exist in isolation; planets belong to solar systems, which in turn influences conditions on the planet.

Though the JTAS article worked out Craw’s culture, history, and native biosphere (including a native minor race), here we will only deal with Craw the planet’s physical characteristics and geography, concentrating on Craw the system and how that system further influences the planet.

Think of this as a continuation/expansion of the Keiths’ long-ago article, a “Referee’s Guide to Planet-Building, Part 3”.

Glossary

AU (Astronomical Unit):

Earth-Sun Distance, the main unit of measure for planetary systems. Approximately 150,000,000 km.

Earth-equivalent distance:

The distance from its sun where a planet receives the same solar energy as Earth. Distance (in AU) = square root of star’s luminosity (in Sols [1 Sol is the luminosity of Earth’s sun]).

Frost Line:

The distance where volatiles remain solid (ices) and Gas Giants can form. Inside the Frost Line, solid planets and moons will be rockballs; outside, iceballs. Usually considered to be about 4.85×Earth-equivalent distance.

Orbit (capitalized) or Traveller Orbit:

Traveller nomenclature, an artifact of Book 6: Scouts where planetary orbits are in numbered zones based on the spacing of Sol System.

“-bis Orbit”:

Expansion of Traveller nomenclature; Orbits intermediate between the whole-number Traveller Orbits. From “System Generation/Adaptation from ACCRETE”, Freelance Traveller #78, Nov/Dec 2016.

Roche Limit:

Distance from a planet where tidal stress will tear apart a solid moon or prevent such a moon from forming; varies with density and composition of planet and moon, but for inner-system rockballs it averages 2.5× the planetary radius. All moons of any size will be outside the Roche Limit; only rings will be inside.

Very Large Gas Giant (VLGG):

Gas Giant of more than 600 Earth masses (two Jupiter masses), the size where surface gravity (5-6 gees) makes fuel skimming impossible.

Craw the World

The Keiths’ Craw was a small arid world, only Size 5 but with a surface gravity close to Earth’s holding onto a Standard atmosphere Tainted by low oxygen partial pressure.

“Now a planet the size of Mars with an Earth-like atmosphere is interesting… The planet has roughly the same mass as Earth packed into a smaller diameter.”

What the Keith Bros are describing is what is called an “iron planet”, with an oversized metallic core like Mercury. Assuming a density of 1.5× that on the Standard Worlds table (The Traveller Book, p.79) Craw has a mass of 0.37 Earth-masses and a surface gravity of 0.94 gee.

Both parts of the JTAS article include a Mercator-projection sketch map (Fig.1) giving the geography of Craw, a Dune-type desert world with one major difference: a Hydro of 3, concentrated entirely in a Polar Sea at the world's North Pole extending down to around 60° North Latitude with a wide “bay” extending further down to around 30-35° N for about 60-90 degrees of Longitude.

The map shows the shores of the Polar Sea as the only habitable region, a belt a few hundred kilometers deep with many short rivers flowing North into the Polar Sea. (And one longer one flowing West.) This implies rainfall and a water cycle along the polar coast.

South of this hab zone, a very irregular belt of “badlands” extends down to (and sometimes past) the Equator, except for a large gap South and West of the bay. Everything South of these badlands is one huge waterless sand sea, broken only by occasional barren mountains.

The atmosphere is tainted by low oxygen content (filter masks not effective) and secondarily by blowsand in the vast sand seas of the equatorial regions and Southern Hemisphere (filter masks effective).

In the words of the Keiths:

“...vast expanses of water-carved badlands, dotted with lonely mesas, fragile natural bridges, and delicate rock sculptures that howl and moan when the wind blows...

“...great salt flats, blinding to unshielded eyes and ruinous to unprotected equipment...

“...open Sahara-like desert, with wave upon wave of dunres rolling into the distance, breaking against the feet of crumbling mountains.”

“Rich in minerals, but with a harsh climate and a lot of unpleasant real estate...”

“There are heavy metals to be sought, survival situations where crashed adventurers must overcome nature, rescue missions...”

Repercussions – Polar Sea: The Polar Sea is the only drainage sump on the planet. Its salinity equilibrium will be higher than Earth’s oceans (3.5%), possibly up  to the point of the Dead Sea (34%) or Utah’s Great Salt Lake (up to 27%). This is typical of low-Hydro habitables, whose seawater is better described as “saturated brine”.

• Craw seawater is denser and more buoyant than Earth seawater.
• Raw fuel from the Polar Sea would be Contaminated fuel, one step below Unrefined, normal fuel refining would result in Unrefined fuel. Better to get raw fuel from one of the relatively-freshwater rivers flowing into The Polar Sea.
• If Craw has a biosphere of more than extremophile algae (as per the JTAS article), the salinity cannot be too high. The fact that Craw’s atmosphere is breathable argues for a somewhat-extensive biosphere/some intermediate level of salinity.
• All native life will have high salt tolerance.

Repercussions – Iron Planet: The above Keith quotes describe Craw as “rich in minerals”, specifically-mentioning “heavy metals”.

• Heavy Metals are toxic – think Lead, Arsenic, Mercury, Thallium… Heavy metal poisoning would be a definite hazard to any humans on Craw. Make sure to wear a filter mask during desert dust storms, and test and filter any water before drinking.
• Heavy Metals are more often slow poisons than quick, with the metal concentrations in the body building up gradually from exposure/ingestion.
• Heavy Metals would be part of the native biochemistry; native life would not only be immune from the toxicity, but actually contaminated with heavy metals. And the higher up the food chain, the more concentrated the contamination. Native life would be inedible, slowly poisonous.
• And with the exception of Radon (a gas), most natural Radioactives are heavy metals; Uranium-level radioactives eventually decay into Lead with a lot of intermediate stops along the way. Craw’s background radiation level would definitely be higher than Earth’s, with long-term radiation damage an additional hazard to chronic heavy metal poisoning.
• There might even be “natural nuclear reactors” in the habitable zone near the Polar Sea where there’s actual groundwater that could saturate veins of high-grade uranium ore. Earth’s only example is a fossil natural nuclear reactor at Oklo in West Africa; With Craw’s higher metallicity, there’d be a good chance for more than one, some of them still cooking away.
• The highest concentrations of these heavy metals outside of actual high-grade deposits would be in Polar seawater, leached out of mineral deposits and carried to the planetary drainage sump by the polar rivers. Polar Sea Salt would be toxic. Heavy metal poisoning would be a constant hazard, possibly reduced by distillation or filtration; rivers would be a much safer source of water, but residual toxicity could vary from river to river and place to place. With the low Tech Level, expect any settlements (including farmland) to be in areas of minimum contamination.
• If the locals (colonist descendants or natives) tell you a place is “bad” or “cursed”, believe them! I can very easily see offworlders dismissing the locals as “superstitious low-tech rubes”, pooh-poohing their warnings, entering a “do not go” Bad Place, and ending up dead or permanently disabled not from cryptids or paranormal entities but from long-term heavy metal and/or radiation poisoning.
• An iron planet with a day-night cycle will have a strong magnetosphere and a strong magnetic field. Native life (including the natives of the Keiths’ Craw) would probably have a magnetic-field sense giving them a near-infallible sense of direction. And since magnetic lines of force have a vertical component as well as horizontal, a low-resolution “natural GPS” of not only direction to the magnetic pole but rough distance. Much cruder than GPS, but probably able to give a general area to navigate by specific landmarks. This sense could be disrupted by an interfering magnetic field from electrical technology, depending on the strength of the two fields.

That is Craw the planet.

Craw the System

Yet Craw does not sit there on the subsector hex map in isolation; Craw is part of a system with a higher percentage of heavy elements than Sol, what astronomers call “high metallicity”. And there is a real-life system which fits that description: 14 Herculis, a high-metallicity orange dwarf 18 parsecs from Sol with two Super-Jupiters in eccentric orbits at and past its Frost Line.

Herculis RL coordinates:

Right Ascension	16h 10m 24s
Declination	+43° 49' 3.5"
Magnitude (Apparent)	7
Magnitude (Absolute)	5
Distance	59 ly/18 pc

Because of 14 Herc’s high metallicity (2.7×Sol), any rockballs insystem would be large cored “iron planets” like Craw; because of the gravity wells of the Super-Jupiters sweeping up most of the volatiles, said rockballs would be low hydro – like Craw. A good fit.

14 Herc is a K0v orange dwarf star, a type two to three times as plentiful as an early G-class like Sol. Interpolating from the tables in Book 6: Scouts, a K1v adjusts the habitable zone more into line with Traveller Orbit nomenclature:

Mass	0.9 Sol
Diameter	0.85 Sol
Luminosity	0.36 Sol
Earth-equivalent distance:	0.6 AU (Orbit 1bis)
Habitable Zone:	0.54 to 0.83 AU (Orbit 1bis-2bis)
Frost Line	2.9 AU (Orbit 5)

Source for Mass/Diameter/Luminosity: Habitable Plants for Man, S.A.Dole, Table 11, “Characteristics of Main-Sequence Stars”

Craw’s Outer System

This is copied directly from 14 Herc’s known planetary system (Source: Wikipedia):

14 Herc b	(Very Large Gas Giant)
Mass	4.6×Jupiter (1500×Earth)
Year	1773 T-days (4.85×Earth; 4 years 10½ months)
Semimajor Axis	2.3 AU
Eccentricity	0.37 (1.8 to 3.8 AU; Orbit 4-5bis)
14 Herc c	(Very Large Gas Giant)
Mass	2.1×Jupiter (650×Earth)
Year	6900 T-days (18.9×Earth; 18 years 11 months)
Semimajor Axis	6.9 AU
Eccentricity	Unknown (Assuming 0.2 = 5.5 to 8 AU, Orbit 6-6bis)

Both planets are Very Large Gas Giants, probably with larger cores, more internal heat, stronger radiation, and more extreme “weather conditions” than Jupiter, with many more storms pockmarking their cloudtops – “Jupiters with smallpox”. Both are the same diameter as Jupiter; once a gas giant becomes that massive, adding more mass does not increase the diameter; the planet’s gravity only crushes itself denser. Result: Neither is skimmable for fuel; b’s surface gravity at the cloud tops is a full 12 gees and c’s is 5.

These two huge gravity wells in eccentric orbits would have either scooped up most all remaining matter in the protoplanetary disk or flung it out of the system – no asteroids here.

The only place for rockballs would be a “Traveller Compact” inner system extending out maybe to 0.7 AU (Orbit 2). Since the liquid-water habitable zone starts at 0.54 AU (Orbit 1bis), Craw the world is probably the outermost planet of the inner system, and smaller than the others.

Craw’s Inner System:

So how do we place Craw and its sister rockballs in the inner system?

Enter an orbital mechanics phenomenon called “Three-body Laplace Resonance”, where adjacent satellites’ orbital periods are in a 1:2 ratio, each satellite’s orbit taking twice as long as the next one inward. This becomes stable when there are no three-body conjunctions, only two-body. The classic example is three of Jupiter’s Galilean moons – the 1:2:4 resonance of Io, Europa, and Ganymede.

This 1:2 ratio in periods translates to a 1:1.414 ratio in orbital distances, so once any of the three  planetary orbits is placed, the other two can be calculated from it.

A 1:2:4 resonance (like Io/Europa/Ganymede) counting out from Traveller Orbit 0 (approx .2 AU) with Craw as its outermost (constrained between 0.54 and 0.7 AU) gives us the following:

Planet	Distance		Year
I	0.21 AU	(Orbit 0)	0.09 T-Year	(33 T-days)
II	0.34 AU	(Orbit 0bis)	0.18 T-Year	(66 T-days)
III (Craw)	0.55 AU	(Orbit 1bis)	0.36 T-Year	(133 T-days)

Three planets, each with a year of one, two, or four months respectively, putting Planet III up against the inner edge of the habitable zone; more on that later.

Inner System Planet Sizes: Planet III (Craw) is Size 5. Attempts to random-roll I and II first came up with two Size 5 “Mercuries with just enough gravity to hold some atmosphere” and second with a Size 5 and Size 8 “Mercury, Venus, Craw” combination. Both of these sounded too conventional.

Being how Craw’s system is adapted from a RL system, let’s instead try something based on RL and pick up some Super-Earths in the bargain:

• Planet III (Craw) is in a similar position to Mars, the outermost rockball before the gas giants, smaller than the other inner planets due to material shortages from the VLGGs’ gravity wells.
• Giving planets I and II the same density as Craw (III) and the proportional Size of Venus, Earth, and Mars results in both inner-zone planets (I and II) being large-cored Super-Venuses; I is Size 9 and 2.1 Earth masses, II is Size 10 and 2.9 Earth masses.

Craw System so far

Body	Orbit	Description
Craw Sun	Primary	K1v orange dwarf, high metallicity
Craw I	0	Size 9 Super-Venus (2 T-masses)
Craw II	0bis	Size 10 Super-Venus (3 T-masses)
Craw III	1bis	Main World, C573645-3, non-industrial
Craw IV	4-5bis	VLGG (1500 T-masses)
Craw V	6-6bis	VLGG (650 T-masses)

So far, a very astronomically-plausible system that’s already shaping up as a backwater – no skimmable GGs, frontier refueling possible only from the (contaminated) Polar Sea of Craw III and the ice moons of Craw V, and the system is way too low-tech for the latter. The main world is low-tech, arid, and inhospitable with potential valuable mineral resources whose exploitation requires a lot higher tech than the inhabitants have. No asteroids available for easier mining/Belting as the dueling gravity wells of IV and V have cleared them out.

Change of Nomenclature: From here on, the mainworld will be referred to as “Craw III”; “Craw” will refer to the system/sun.

Adding Moons: Satellites/moons of the system are rolled up from Book 6: Scouts with one tweak for moons of rockballs: Satellite Size = [Planet Size] – 2D instead of -1D. Stock Scouts tended to roll up some really large moons; this tweak gives us a better chance of a ring or Small-sized moons.

Craw I and II are inner-zone Super-Venuses, probably tidally locked or almost so (like Mercury’s 3:2 resonance where the day is twice the length of the year). Even the rotational momentum of Iron Planet Super-Earths has problems with tidal braking that close to a sun for so long. And when a planet’s day becomes longer than its moon’s orbital period, tidal braking effects reverse to draw the moon down into a decaying orbit like Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos.

Ergo, no moons for tidal-locked or near-tidal locked worlds including I and II.

Craw III (the mainworld, small and barely surface-habitable), rolled two Size 1 moons, probably formed by the collision that caused the overlapping fossil impact basins of the Polar Sea.

Craw IV (Five Jupiters in One) rolled a ring system and twelve major/regular moons. The fact this is one of two VLGGs insystem whose eccentric orbit carries it inside the frost line also has its effects:

• Because of the dueling VLGG gravity wells, the moons cannot orbit as far out as the average Gas Giant; in Scouts terms, no Distant satellite orbits and cut off the maximum Far satellite orbit at around 45 to 50 instead of 65).
• IV dips inside the frost line for almost half its year; any volatiles will have boiled off long ago, turning the original ice moons into their rocky cores. They would be similar mass, but smaller diameter/Size; rolling under Scouts, use the 2D-6 for Small Gas Giant instead of the 2D-4 of Large Gas Giant.
• This will also affect the ring system. The rings will be rock instead of ice, appearing much dimmer.
• The orbits of the largest moons will also affect the rings; if they orbit closer in (like Jupiter’s four Galileans), they will tend to strip the rings of protoplanetary material resulting in a thinner, fainter ring, If the largest moons orbit farther out (like Saturn’s Titan and Iapetus), the ring will be thicker and brighter.
• Also, the denser moons will reduce the Roche Limit while the greater mass of the VLGG will expand it. Assuming these two cancel each other out, the rings could span only three times the planet's diameter, same as Saturn’s but not as bright/visible.

Craw V (Two Jupiters in One) rolled a ring system and nine regular moons, but unlike IV stays on the far side of the Frost Line.

• The dueling VLGG gravity wells will have the same effect on V’s satellite orbits as on IV’s, i.e. maximum satellite orbits of around 35 to 40 (V is less massive than IV and has a smaller gravity well)
• Safe behind the Frost Line, V’s moons will retain their volatiles and stay iceballs, less dense than rockballs, expanding the Roche Limit by 40 to 50%.; roll 2D6-4 for Size like any Large Gas Giant. Depending on their orbits, the largest moons will have the same effect on V’s ring system as on IV’s.
• V’s Roche limit will be larger due to its same diameter as Jupiter but greater mass; the maximum span of the rings will be over 4 times the diameter instead of the usual 3; no moons can exist within this distance.
• If Craw System has a spectacular ring system, it’ll be around Craw V.

Effects of All the Above on Craw III

Now, how does all the above affect the system mainworld, the newly-renamed Craw III?

Closer in to a dimmer sun, Craw III will have its rotation braked by suntide to a 36 to 40-hour day, half again as long as Earth’s. This is long enough to mess up human cirdadian/sleep-wake cycles and cause more extreme daily temperature variations, but short enough (in combination with the large iron core) to produce a strong magnetic field/magnetosphere protection against the solar wind.

Most important, Craw III orbits at the inner edge of the habitable zone. If the planet was larger, had a denser atmosphere, or more hydro than just the Polar Sea, it would have become a “Mini-Venus” through runaway greenhouse effect. Once native life began in the Polar Sea, “Gaia Effect” feedback loops would have started regulating its temperature, heading off future global warming. As it is, Craw III is balanced close to the edge. What this means is...

Repercussions – Craw III is hot. As in right at the edge of human habitablity, and  even then only in its polar regions. Judging from a table in a cross-genre quickie climatology source (AD&D2 World Builders Guide, TSR 1996), assuming a low-eccentricity orbit, axial tilt of less than 10°, and basic insolation (solar flux) of “Inferno”, here’s what we get :

• Everything within 20-30° latitude of the equator is Uninhabitable, with equatorial daily highs approaching the boiling point of water and nightly lows still well above human heat tolerance. A lifeless wasteland baking under a double-sized orange sun.
• From there to around 30-45° N & S is Supertropical, with daily highs still above human heat tolerance and surface activity possible only between midnight and sunrise, when nightly lows bring the temperature down to just tropical/subtropical levels. Unless you're higher-tech than the local Tech Level or live underground and go topside only at the nightly lows, this area is also Uninhabitable. It is possible to travel across the fringes of these tropics by moving during the nightly lows and burrowing in between sunrise and midnight.
• North or South of this to the coasts of the Polar Sea is Tropical; typical Earth low desert conditions of scorching days and temperate-to-cool nights. The farther N/S you go, the “cooler” the climate.
• On the Polar Seacoast, the water has a heatsink effect, damping out the extreme highs and lows to a general Subtropical climate. The waterless South Polar area still has scorching-but-bearable hot days and freezing cold nights, just like the high deserts of Earth.
• The main exception to this “Latitude determines climate” is that large “bay” of the Polar Sea, extending down to 30-40° N. The ocean currents here flow clockwise, pulling in cooler water from the Pole along the eastern shore, extending habitable temperatures down to around 40°N as long as you stay near the ocean. Near the South end of this coast, the increasing heat sends monsoon storms inland to the East, further carving out the Badlands.
• Unfortunately, the opposite it true with the north-flowing current of the western shore; here the water starts out almost boiling and reverses the heatsink effect; carrying the heat up from the equatorial region and shifting the Uninhabitable/Supertropical zone north almost to the 60° N where it rejoins the Polar Sea. There are few clouds in this area as the temperature is too hot for clouds to form, but if the prevailing winds should shift, the land along this coast could be hit by hot-water monsoon rains from ephemeral clouds.
  • The combination of extreme heat plus ocean heatsink would also result in “Coriolis Storms”, commonly called Hurricanes… severe hurricanes (Category 3+), given the size of the heat engine on such a hot world.
  • These would form preferentially in the southern/hottest part of the Great Bay and make landfall along the Eastern or Southern shores. (Yes, a serious Hurricane Coast on a desert planet.) This explains the water-carved Badlands of the Northern Hemisphere and that river system/valley extending a thousand kilometers inland from the Eastern shore.
  • The Southern Hemisphere would also have its Coriolos Storms, but these would be less severe (Category 1-3) because of the lack of surface water – water is a much better heatsink than sand. However, these “Dry Hurricanes” would still be bad – “Sand Hurricanes” whose winds would scour everything in their path like a high-powered sandblaster, carving giant yardangs and dreikanters the size of mountains, revealing and covering the underlying bedrock in an ever-changing pattern. (Explains all the wind-carved formations of the Southern mountains.) Do not get caught in the open.
  • Because of this, the world’s habitable area is only along the Polar Seacoast, between the water and the Badlands, plus an extension about halfway down the eastern shore of the Bay. With a corresponding too-hot-for-humans supertropical area from where the Western bayshore meets the Polar Sea and extending hundreds of kilometers west where the hot current dissipates.

Surface Conditions/Sky Picture

The first thing a visitor will notice is the gravity, just enough lighter to be noticeable.

Then the low-oxygen taint in the atmosphere, low enough to trigger altitude sickness in about a quarter of new visitors and make the others short of breath after any exertion.

Then (except on the Polar Seacoast or the perpetual monsoon season of the East Bay shore) the total dryness of the air.

Then (depending on location) the smells and tastes of salt, dry sand, or alien biosphere; after a while the complete lack of any native vegetation taller than a man; most not even as tall as a man’s waist.

From the habitable strip along the Polar Seacoast, the sun rides low in the southern sky, almost twice “normal” size and with a distinct orange tint that gives everything a sepia tone. The moons are large enough to show disks and some surface detail, but are definitely smaller than the sun; no solar eclipses here, only transits. Skies are mostly blue over the Polar Sea, shading into a perpetually-reddish southern sky like the horizon at sunrise/sunset; this perpetual sunrise/sunset effect becomes more pronounced the farther south you go, until the daytime sky eventually becomes rust-colored.

In the uninhabitable sand seas and mineral mountains near the equator, the sun blazes twice normal size, directly overhead in a sky reddened by both solar spectrum and high-altitude blowsand, baking a lifeless wasteland.

Craw I and II are visible both night and day as morning/evening stars twice as bright as Venus from Earth; Craw IV and V shine in the night sky twice as bright as Jupiter from Earth – IV from its proximity and V from its ring system. Both brighten and dim over periods of several years as their orbits bring them closer and farther from sun and inner system. At its brightest, Craw IV is barely visible in full daylight, changing color from yellowish to white as it brightens at perihelion and back to yellow as it dims at apheilon. Craw V remains yellowish, like a much brighter Saturn, but has the same slow brighten-and-dim cycle.

Hook into the Interstellar Community
(not necessarily the Third Imperium)

So how does a low-tech backwater system of less than six million people not on any regular Jump route merit a full C port?

The Keiths postulated some sort of offworld corporate interest in Craw III’s mineral resources. This does beg the question why such a corp would mine a planet with almost an Earth-sized gravity well instead of the rockball moons of Craw IV. A spacefaring civilization thinks in terms of “going down to surface” instead of “going up into space” (this paradigm shift defines the boundary between the Tech 11 Plateau and Tech 12) and such higher-tech interstellar cultures prefer mining asteroids and smaller rocky moons than a planet proper.

So why are they surface-mining Craw III? Because the other two inner-system planets are Super-Venuses, impossible to exploit. (If the inner system had been the original roll attempts of 5-5-5 or “Mercury, Venus, Craw”, they would have developed Craw I and/or II instead – no atmosphere and no locals to complicate things.) And the dueling gravity wells of two Super-Jupiters in the outer system stripped Craw System of any asteroids. Craw III might have the best concentrations of high-grade “paydirt” in the system; the outer system moons would be lighter, with lower-grade deposits – enough so to make Craw III attractive.

Or Craw IV’s moons might be within IV’s huge magnetosphere, bathed in hard radiation. Better to chance a rockball’s gravity well than a Super-Jupiter’s Van Allen belts.

“We could be dealing with one of those famous treasure trove worlds; platinum, iridium, osmium, who knows what valuable might be ripe for the taking here?”

Apparently enough of a treasure trove to justify going down into that gravity well plus shipping interstellar distances. Possibly so rich that said offworld corp (which the Keiths called “InStarSpec”) wants to keep secret just how rich a treasure trove this world is. In any case, InStarSpec were the ones running the starport as an NGO, securing the right via some serious meddling in planetary politics and enforcing their de facto monopoly by various means.

According to the map, the planetary capital city is built at or near the mouth of Craw III’s longest river, just upstream of the river mouth on the East Bay Shore. Said river extends over a thousand kilometers to the southeast, draining the monsoon rains from the bay. This is an excellent location for the main settled area, the best-watered land on the planet whose heavy metal soil/water contamination has been leached out over the ages, suited for low-tech colonial agriculture. It would be the logical place for the main starport, maybe a D or E.

These colonial settlements and cities would be in areas of minimum heavy metal contamination. InStarSpec would put its mining/exploitation holdings in areas of maximum heavy metals contamination, the richest “paydirt” for exploitable mineral deposits.

The map shows the C port at the edge of the hab strip, butted up against badlands well inland from the west Bay Shore,  where conditions are a lot less hospitable. This implies the C port exists primarily to support InStarSpec’s holdings, a “Company port” providing an in-house offworld shipping terminal close to their mining claims. (There is a “colony city” at the desert’s edge slightly downstream; the JTAS article described this as a breakaway from the planetary government with a little help and a lot of backing from InStarSpec, resulting in a more “cooperative” local government on the other side of the Polar Sea.) The planetary capital might retain its D or E port, possibly run directly by the interstellar government or another NGO (such as the Glavion Cluster’s Starport Guild or even the Travellers’ Aid Society).

This puts InStarSpec’s main corporate presence in the Northern Hemisphere Badlands near their C port, as a competing TL12 Corporate colonial government on a Balkanized-in-all-but-name TL3 world. And at that corporate Tech Level, most of their mines would be open-pit strip mines.

InStarSpec could also have a secondary presence in the Southern Hemisphere, in the mineral-rich mountain “islands” rising from the Great Sand Sea. The corp has the Tech Level to build and maintain installations in the waterless wastes; they may have gotten (though their breakaway colony city) mineral rights to the entire South. How jealously they guard those rights (and how much development they've actually done) is anybody’s guess.

In any case, these Southern Hemisphere installations would be smaller, completely separate, isolated, and self-sufficient, with processing facilities onsite to minimize volume to transport – onsite smelters/refineries as well as open-pit strip mines. In the Supertropical deserts, all personnel could only go Topside at night, getting back under shelter soon after sunrise, before the real heat of the day sets in. (Remember that “Sunrise at the Harvester yard” scene from Dune (2021)? And the obvious space-opera plot of characters caught away from base trying to “Outrun the Sunrise”?)

And don’t forget the hazard of sand hurricanes scouring and blasting everything in their path. Any installation would have to be armored/protected against these giant sandstorms. InStarSpec weathersats would provide early warning, but when one comes in the only thing an installation can do is seal the bunker, ride it out, then after it passes go Topside and repair the damage.

Even without sand hurricanes, blowsand and dust would be dangerous. Remember these installations are in areas of the highest mineral concentrations (and heavy metal hazard). InStarSpec would even put an installation on the too-hot-to-live equator if the strike was rich enough to justify it.

Depending on InStarSpec’s corporate culture and attitude, these isolated sites would be ideal for exploited indentured/prison/slave  labor. Or off-world labor completely separate from the locals. Or “black ops” of various types.

“In these InStarSpec outposts, No One Can Hear You Scream.”

And with the isolation comes the cabin fever pressure-cooker; InStarSpec might have to rotate personnel to and from their corporate C port in the North and the nearby corp-friendly colony city as a “liberty port” to head off cyberpsychosis from Virtual Reality downtime. (Can’t very well “touch grass” in the middle of a Dune desert…)

There is also the imperative to minimize on-world improvement costs; InStarSpec has to make MCr off what could be a marginally-viable presence compared to asteroid/moon mining in other systems. Craw III being surface-habitable would help, but again a lot depends on InStarSpec’s corporate culture, attitude, how important this resource is to their bottom line, and how far they're willing to go to exploit it.

Then there is the problem of transporting the refined metals to the starport and offworld. Mines and processing sites reasonably near the C port could use some form of overland transportation, but others would need their own dedicated private E ports to ship offworld directly, either independent of the C port or loading at the E port and taking a suborbital hop to the C port for refueling/resupply before putting to sky. (Or fueling up at the port, then hopping to the E port to load and leave; the bulk metal shipments are pretty much Empties-In, Loads-Out.)

Given the distances involved, travel between the Southern InStarSpec outposts and the Northern C port would have to be by air, running the gantlet of the uninhabitable equatorial region, either by nighttime stratosphere-level dashes or suborbital ballistic hops outside the atmosphere. A forced landing anywhere in these areas would be bad.

So that's Craw III and its system, further expanded from the Keiths’ Craw in JTAS. More unique variations, quirks, cautions, hazards, and “chrome”, all flowing from its high-metallicity, surrounding system, Polar Sea geography, and InStarSpec’s corporate culture and potential behavior.

 

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