Setting:Cloudburst/Grand Anchor
| System | ||
|---|---|---|
| Galactic Position | Cloudburst Sector, Maskos Subsector | |
Grand Anchor Scrapyard
Description
Building a starship from raw materials alone requires years of work, even in the Imperium of Man. There are ores to smelt, circuits to fabricate, Warp drive cores to consecrate, and cogitators to program, plus all the actual assembly. Sometimes, Captains don’t have time to wait for components to be built to their specifications, or the money to buy new ones.
When that is the case, they come to Grand Anchor. From a distance, the entire affair looks like a miniature solar system. At its heart, travelers can see a gigantic metal frame. Here and there, orbiting the frame, travelers see spherical deep voids, studded with docking clamps and tubes, airlocks and antennae.
Farther out, forming an impromptu asteroid belt, there hangs over one hundred satellites, some cargo-carrying, others loaded with weapons. Beyond that, over eight hundred kilometers from the frame, patrol boats guard derelict starships, fourteen shipwrecks altogether. Hundreds of kilometers beyond that, faint clouds of paint chips and small debris drift and waft, a hazard only for their number.
If paying Mechanicus rates or Navy surcharges is not to the liking of a Rogue Trader, Free Captain, or career Navy Captain, Grand Anchor has their backs. The combination shipyard, breaking yard, scrap heap, and metallurgic recycling plant services any (human) ship, any flotilla, any convoy that comes their way, for a price.
Founded over two thousand years ago in the final days of M39, the Grand Anchor began life as a production facility for the cluster of rare element rich asteroids that the Mechanicus had found drifting through the void of space on the edges of the Maskos Subsector. The asteroids yielded kilotons of the precious ores, and when the work was done, the cluster was abandoned. Within weeks, a gang of Imperial privateers looking for work had taken up residence in the network of hollow rocks. Contracts from the early Cloudburst government were nonexistent, so the privateers turned to simple piracy against non-Imperial primitive worlds to sustain themselves. On one such raid, the privateers stumbled across the partial wreck of an Imperial Endeavour light cruiser, and managed to get its Warp drive operational. They hauled the wreck back to their base asteroid and scrapped it to sustain their ships, but had megatons of leftover parts. They sold them to a passing Rogue Trader, and made more money with that one sale than they had in fourteen years of scavenging and raiding.
A business was born. Slowly but surely, the gang expanded, as shipbuilders, cartographers, retired Navy personnel, broke Free Captains, and non-Mechanicus shipwrights flocked to the scrap business. Scavengers and privateers with ships to sell started taking their vessels to the newly named Grand Anchor, and what began as a hideout for desperate privateers became the largest ship sales yard in Cloudburst outside the Mechanicus. By the end of M41, Grand Anchor has grown from a pocket of asteroids to a complex of heavily guarded ship components and yards over twenty-six hundred kilometers across. In the first half of M41, pirates and Chaos Raiders looking for ships frequently raided the station, but they have not troubled the region for hundreds of years, allowing Grand Anchor to expand.
The Cube
The core of the yard is a massive metal frame made of building materials, mostly I-beams and cast metal, in the shape of a rough cube. Within the cube, held in place by thousands of tiny void shield relays that project a one-way screen between the segments of the frame, are millions of pieces of metal. They range from intact ship components to random alloy ingots, from obsolete cogitator parts to decommissioned land mines; anything too small or delicate to be left to drift in the outer shell. When a customer orders a part, the Grand Anchor staff dispatch a tiny servitor drone to collect the part, which is usually done within minutes. The items inside the cube aren’t free-drifting from the zero-gravity void, but are instead clamped in place on a wireframe of tiny iron bars, which spread out from the massive frame like a fractal. So far, the tiny spindles of containment bars only fill one tenth of the available space, but the Grand Anchor chiefs are nothing if not ambitious. More bars go in daily, ready to be filled with every metallic component mankind has ever built. The command structure of the entire Grand Anchor juts from one corner of the cube, in a space platform made of dozens of hollow asteroids linked together with impermeable tubes of plasteel. These are the original asteroids from which the scrapyard grew, abandoned by the Mechanicus thousands of years before. The tubes and asteroids form a tiny echo of the world-shrouding maze of asteroids and trains that surround Fabique. Some asteroids have sleeping chambers, others have controls for the retrieval drones, and others are mess halls and galleys for the crews.
=The Assemblers
Seventeen smaller deep voids orbit the cube. They are roughly spherical and approximately half a kilometer in width, each. Some are slightly larger, and partially hollow. Each has its own life support system, its own power supply, and a copy of the datacore that keeps track of each of the hundreds of millions of components, wrecks, and parts that fill the Grand Anchor Scrapyards. Clients who pass the background check may stay on these stations in remarkable comfort for as long as they wish, while the Grand Anchor crew labor to assemble or locate obscure parts and machines. The stations serve as assembly points for clientele, and each can work independently of the others, or they can pool their resources. Each station holds an array of long-range communication antennae, capable of broad- and precision-casting electronic signals across the whole Scrapyard. From here, the Grand Anchor crews command the thousands of drones and servitors that search the stockpiles for parts, and command the labor-serfs that work in the larger spheres to assemble custom orders. Each station has some defenses, but these are not battle stations, they are commerce platforms.
The Satellites
The primary defenses of the Grand Anchor actually sit well within its perimeter. Orbiting the cube at a distance of over four hundred kilometers are one hundred twenty-eight armed satellites. Some are no larger than a normal planetary traffic buoy, but some are nearly as large as the assembly spheres. Each has its own cogitator-controlled weapons array, powered by tiny plasma cells and batteries in their black hulls. No one satellite would be enough to hold back a pirate fleet, and each is far enough from its neighbor to be unable to provide overlapping fields of fire, but their mere presence allows for the defenses of the scrapyard to slow anything smaller than a cruiser. Their primary function is to feed sensor data to the command platform built into the cube, and light up any passing uninvited guests. Of course, since the Grand Anchor does not orbit a star, the defense perimeter must be a sphere instead of a flat disc, so the satellites are far enough apart that their primary contribution to a firefight would be to act as a speedbump. Unfortunately, they are far enough from a star that solar panels on their hulls wouldn’t serve a purpose.
The Derelicts
Beyond even the satellites, over two dozen ships hang dead in space. These are the true moneymakers of the Grand Anchor, and constitute the largest non-piratical concentration of starships in Cloudburst that aren’t Imperial Navy warships (possibly, if discounting Gorkypark when an Ork fleet passes through). Each starship floats in a pre-determined orbit slot, protected by more satellites and at least one patrol boat. The ships range from junked Imperial freighters to a nearly intact Ork Krooza, and include four Imperial Navy ships damaged beyond repair and sold to the Grand Anchor. Just under half of the ships are technically not shipwrecks, but are instead hulks, vessels prized from a Space Hulk or found abandoned in space and stripped for parts. These tend to be more reparable, and the Anchor is willing to fix these ships up and sell them for the right price.
These derelicts sometimes change hands. More than once in the past, the Mechanicus has brought the remains of a dead ship they found while exploring the Circuit to the Grand Anchor to buy parts to fix it, despite their general preference for fixing ships up themselves. However, by far the largest customer by volume of these dead ships is the Chartist Captain Fleet, which moves cargo and tithes between worlds on behalf of the Senate of the High Lords and the Overlords Sector. Hundreds of Chartist Captains have bought either ships or pieces of ships here, to repair damage to their own vessels or replace them.
Rogue Traders looking to offload salvage patronize the Grand Anchor constantly. Fully one third of the unique items inside the cube came from Rogue Traders offloading archaeotechnological parts after missions to the Circuit or Exo-zone. However, the Grand Anchor council must take care when dealing with Rogue Traders. Unlike Rogue Traders, whose Warrants of Trade allow them to partake of xeno-trade and the looting of ancient human sites outside the range of the Astronomican, the Grand Anchor has no such license. If the Inquisition were to find active xenotech inside the Grand Anchor perimeter, the punishment would no doubt be swift and horrible.
Of course, that does not extend to the materials of xenotech. Not all xenotechnology is crafted of unidentifiable materials. Most races of the galaxy use the same ten dozen basic elements as humanity when it comes time to build things. Scrapping xenotech, including the Ork Kroozer dragged to the site by Lord Captain Crado Zutash in M41.998, is well within their legal purview, if the result is recognizable material. Grand Anchor has disassembled eight alien ships for scrap over the millennia, and is currently doing the same to the Ork ship. The resultant alloys are no different from any other, and can be cast into whatever parts their clients want.
Grand Anchor has the capacity to build ships, but elects not to. So far, normal work keeps all of their berths busy. Some of the larger assembly spheres could theoretically construct vessels of under one half kilometer in length, but avoid doing so to prevent fraying ties with the Navy or Mechanicus. However, the great Merchant House Zhong has bought partially-assembled vessels from Grand Anchor to short-lift backlogged construction schedules in the past.
All Grand Anchor Scrapyard items, from individual rivets to half-built ships, come with varying warrantees of longevity and reliability on their sales. The Grand Anchor takes pride in their capabilities, and any problems their merchandise causes for clients would inevitably feed back on their reputation. They are able to avoid being pushed out of business by Merchant Houses or the Mechanicus because of their refusal to horn in on the larger establishments’ turf, and their willingness to deal with even the shadiest Rogue Traders.