The lore of Witchspace

The galaxy as the people in it know it. Everything here is in the game or in an agreed design; anything not in the game yet is marked (planned). For the tone and the naming rules, read the worldbuilding guide first; for the detail, follow the links to each design.

Eight galaxies of 256 worlds each: 2,048 systems, joined by witchspace, the jump between stars that is fast, mostly safe and occasionally not safe at all. Every world has a Coriolis station turning slowly over it, and every station has a market, a bar and a law of some kind. Space is huge and doesn't care. Commerce holds it together, more or less.

Every commander starts the same way: 100 credits and a Cobra Mk III at Lave, docked at Cambridge Orbital, named for the town where it all began in 1984. Where they go from there is one of four lives.

The powers that be

The Galactic Co-operative is the closest thing the galaxy has to a government. It issues the credit, keys every police transponder, and stamps the police markings (beacons, hull band, transponder) that can't be bought, copied or painted on, in any system however corrupt. It owns the core Coriolis stations, so a fair, rules-bound station is never more than a jump or two away. It is also the safety net: lose everything and the Co-operative will give you a bare Cobra, no questions and no upgrades.

The Bureau of Continuity is the Co-operative's quiet intelligence office. It sits on Hexon's board (an empty seat, though every vote goes its way), it buys from Vorg, and it chartered the Carriers' Mutual. Nobody is quite sure whose side it's on. That's how it likes it. Your Hexon file carries one redacted line: Bureau of Continuity interest: noted.

Governments run from the safe and orderly to the lawless: Corporate States, Democracies and Confederacies; Communist worlds and Multi-Governments; Dictatorships, Feudal worlds and Anarchies. The lower the order, the higher the profit and the risk. Lawful worlds fine you fairly and inspect your hold. Corrupt ones take bribes and may "lose" some of your cargo. Anarchies check nothing and protect nobody.

Even the bars follow the government. Most worlds have a saloon (The Long Drop, Last Orders, The Docking Light, The Slot, The Spin, the Witchspace Arms). Corporate States have a club (The Ledger Room, The Members, Clearance, The Quarterly). Dictatorships and Communist worlds have a tea room (The Approved Kettle, Rest Room Seven, The Quiet Cup, Tea and Papers). Anarchies and Feudal worlds have a shebeen (Nobody's, The Hole, Back of the Hold, The Leak).

Stations are named for the dead who earned it: scientists, explorers and pioneers, never the living without their agreement. Kepler Highport, Lovelace Ring, Shackleton Dock, Noether Terminal, Hypatia Orbital. A few honour nobody: Anchorage, Lighthouse, Waypoint, Meridian.

Trade: trader to trading house

The four companies

Four companies move the freight that keeps 2,048 worlds alive. They supply the cargo, you fly it there, and they pay on delivery. Each keeps a file on you. A company is people, and people are driven by feelings, not strategy.

Hexon Holdings · Continuity of care · the safe core (Corporate States, Democracies, Confederacies)

The biggest outfit in the galaxy, and the most polite: the villain in a clean white coat. It began as two things. Hale & Ostrander, carriers older than most stations, held the Co-operative's Charter of Carriage: the right to carry its freight, collect its tariffs and keep order on its routes. They built warehouses, then ports, then in some systems the police. Hexagen Biologics began as Project Lantern, the Bureau's vaccine stockpile after the Grey Fever emptied three colony worlds in a year; it was spun off "to bring its benefits to market", and the Bureau kept its seat. When the Charter came up for renewal, Hexagen bought Hale & Ostrander, and Hexon Holdings was born.

Its mark is two H's back to back inside a thin hexagon; officially they stand for nothing. Old hands say Hexagen–Hale. Older hands say Heads, Hexon wins; tails, Hexon wins. Its hulls are gloss black with thin white bands and cold cyan lights.

Hexon carries medicine, luxuries and anything that must arrive on time, and it doesn't forgive lateness. Its sealed containers of class-4 biologicals are never opened or scanned; customs officers who ask are thanked, and transferred. When a plague breaks out, Hexon's medicine is somehow already on the way. People who tried to prove it was in the warehouse a fortnight before are hard to find. When a delivery goes wrong: Hexon Holdings thanks you. This delivery did not take place.

Vorg Industries · We build. You survive. · the frontier (Anarchies, Feudal and Multi-Government worlds)

The villain who gives speeches. Aurelius Vorg started with a scrapyard in an anarchy at the edge of the old frontier wars, paid salvage crews in cash with no questions, and rebuilt wrecks into armed haulers. He has outlived three attempts on his life and two of his sons, and every year he gives a speech, always about freedom and always very long (the original runs to four hours).

Vorg makes hulls, lasers, missiles and mining gear, and carries alloys, machinery and radioactives where the law is thin, with danger pay and pirates included at no extra charge. Some of its crates are irregular cargo. They may tick. Do not worry about the ticking. It sells weapons to both sides of every civil war, and freight insurance to both sides too. Its pest-control division answers Thargoid incursions very quickly. Some say before.

Its ships are dark grey riveted plate with orange hazard stripes and a stencilled V, no two alike: half of them were someone else's once. Do Mr Vorg a favour and he'll mention your name in a speech.

The Carriers' Mutual · No hauler flies alone · almost everywhere

The honest ones. When Hale & Ostrander pulled out of the frontier routes and stranded their independent haulers, twenty-eight captains met in a station bar and agreed three rules: share the risk, share the work, and come when called. The Co-operative chartered them, partly out of principle and partly to annoy Hale & Ostrander. One member, one ship, one vote. The pay is fair, the meetings are long, and someone always comes.

The Mutual carries food, textiles, water and furs, answers its members' distress calls, and remembers who else answered. Its tenders bring fuel to the stranded; its tugs tow home the beaten. The treasurer, never named, always finds the money. Its mark is a carrick bend inside a ring of 28 dots. Its newsletter is where awkward truths get published. Its members are honest, broke and always arguing: one faction wants to take on Hexon, the other wants Hexon's contracts.

Every Mutual meeting keeps an empty chair. Ask who it's for and you'll get more than one answer (see the canon notes).

Wexley-Yorozu · Better worlds, built to order · thinly settled worlds with moons

The villain with a twenty-year plan. Edmund Wexley built atmosphere processors, mountain-high towers that make a poison sky breathable in twenty years. Haruki Yorozu built the ships and stations to carry them. Together they made worlds pay for themselves, through the colonists.

Joining a W-Y colony is free. The passage, the housing and the air are on credit, repaid over a generation; some colonies are still paying four generations on. A few stopped answering. The company sent ships. The reports were sealed. Clause 214 hands a defaulted colony, its world and its people to the company. Nobody has read page 214.

The Science Division pays more than anyone for survey data, and keeps standing special orders: certain finds come home intact, whatever the cost to the crew. Its oldest survey files have pages missing, and some say W-Y knew about the Thargoids before anyone. Its ships are off-white and pale grey with construction-yellow markings, scuffed like heavy plant. W-Y files read: Your file has been updated.

Between them: Hexon and Vorg need each other and despise each other in public. The Mutual carries for both and trusts neither. Wexley-Yorozu owns the colonists' debts; Hexon sells the colonies medicine, Vorg sells them protection, and the Mutual carries for them at cost and asks awkward questions. Lose a company's special cargo and its rival will be glad to buy it.

Markets, news and the back room

Every station market is an exchange, with an order book and a feed of trades. Prices move with what each world makes and needs, and with the galaxy's events: famine, drought, plague, booms, mining strikes, civil war, pirate blockades, police crackdowns and Thargoid incursions. Some events are never chance: a station lockdown ("containment breach", docking suspended) or a strange bloom across a world's crops happens only when someone's company case was opened, or fell.

News travels at the speed of ships. The further away it happened, the later you hear it, and once a shortage is on the board the local traders are already buying. Whoever knows first, wins.

The back room is a door off the exchange, and another at the back of the saloon, in every system with a law to break. Smugglers come and go, some buyers are police, and the fence takes cargo you shouldn't have at about 60% of its worth. Anarchies don't ask. Slaves are on the old list, as they were in 1984, and the game is clear which side is heroic: in lawful worlds, abolitionists buy them to free them.

The saloon

Every station's bar has its regulars: haulers, miners, freight brokers, dock hands, tanker skippers, salvagers, ore assayers. They come and go every couple of hours. Buy one a drink and they talk. What they know is real, or it isn't, and how they look is the only clue:

• Glad ones are buying rounds and telling the bar about a good week. Their tips are true, and on the board already. "You'll have seen it on the board, mind. Everyone has."
• Sad ones are counting coins on the bar. They know something early and need paying for it. "I'd tell you where, but I need it more than you do."
• Mad ones are jabbing the bar about their broker, who knew first and kept it quiet. They'll tell you for free, out of spite.
• Bad ones are immaculate, unhurried, and very interested in your ship. "Between us? It isn't on any board yet." It isn't on any board because it isn't true, and their friends are buying what you'd have carried.

About one regular in five is a liar, always. The rest are honest in whatever mood the week has left them. You remember who was right.

(planned) Ma Reyes, a retired trader who is glad of the company and sad that nobody asks any more, teaches one trick at a time: reading the book, spotting the smart money, timing the news. (planned) Insiders, a station clerk, a company contact and a port official, sell what's coming before it comes, until the Co-operative's market inspectors catch up.

Money

The credit is the Co-operative's money, accepted everywhere and steady day to day. It is also the money that can be taken from you: fines, insurers' excesses and debts come out of your credits whether you like it or not, because the Co-operative can print more and decides who pays.

Bitcoin belongs to nobody. Twenty-one million coins, ever; the same price at every station, live from the network; nobody can print it, and it weighs nothing. It isn't cargo, so scans can't find it and pirates can't scoop it. It can't be fined, seized or written off, and it survives your ship: your Bitcoin is safe: the keys were in your head. A sat at Lave is a sat at Riedquat, which makes it the one yardstick that means the same thing everywhere. When the network goes quiet, trading pauses until it speaks again. And Witchspace Bitcoin stays in Witchspace: it can't be bought or cashed out for real money.

(planned) System currencies. Every world will have its own money, run the way its government runs everything: Corporate States peg theirs safe and dull; Democracies inflate it gently by rule; Confederacies are the Bitcoin-standard worlds; Communist worlds fix the rate and ban Bitcoin (smuggling sats out becomes a career); Dictatorships print it, so people spend it fast and run to Bitcoin; Feudal worlds hold an algorithmic peg that works until it doesn't; Anarchies quote everything in credits and trade Bitcoin freely, no questions. Stablecoins pegged to the credit will be issued by states and companies, and their issuers can freeze them. Bitcoin can't be frozen. That's the trade.

(planned) The Meridian Compact is a currency union: polished, persuasive and very hard to leave. Its Meridian starts as just another stablecoin, and its benefits are real; then come the entry criteria, the tariffs and docking surcharges on holdouts, the "assistance" to systems in crisis, and Compact patrols that are not police. The Compact hates Bitcoin most of all. Bitcoin against the Compact is the galaxy's long story.

(planned) The Bankers' Guild keeps neutral accounts, lends, rates credit and clears station scrip: like the Marshals, but for money. It has no branches in anarchies, which is exactly where the Vane Syndicate, the loan sharks, thrives. Merrow & Daughters lends at modest interest to commanders with a clean record.

While you're away

Your Cobra sits in its berth with the comms array still listening. When a Bitcoin order fills or your clips find an audience, the ship's log finds you: one quiet message, never at night. (planned) Later the array will also hear the lanes and the galaxy: a Falcon working Riedquat, a yard opening by Leesti I.

Fight: Harmless to Elite

The law

Every ship carries a transponder, and every commander a record: Clean, Offender or Fugitive. Run dark and nobody can read you, which is a crime in itself where anyone checks. Feudal worlds and anarchies don't; Fugitives dock there.

System police fly Vipers: cheap, fast, numerous and everywhere a station wants order kept. If one is on your scanner and your record isn't clean, it's already turning towards you. Police hail you by your hull: Unidentified Cobra Mk III, this is Lave police. Switch on your transponder. A second-hand Viper is just a Viper.

The Co-operative Marshals are the law above the law: meant to be incorruptible where a system's police are not. They come for serious crimes (attacking a station, killing clean ships), organised crime, pirate gangs and Thargoids, and their warrants follow you across the galaxy. They never go into anarchies, except, perhaps, after their most-wanted.

When a Marshals warrant comes due, there's a witchspace disturbance first, then a rift, kilometres wide, dark-centred with a cool thin rim and space bending round it. A Bastion carrier, eight hundred metres of it, slides out side-on to Semper Fidelis, and the rift shuts behind it with a soft inhale. It doesn't chase anyone. It holds off at a distance like a second moon, opens the bay in its bow, and launches its wing of eight Lancers, two at a time. When the Lancers are gone, the Bastion withdraws to witchspace.

Insurance covers everyone, for an excess, unless you're a Fugitive, committing a crime, or self-destructing (that's fraud). When you're destroyed, the insurers' assessors recover your flight recorder and rebuild the fight from it: always labelled a reconstruction. Our assessors have reconstructed the incident.

(planned) A Marshals career for Dangerous commanders, with a Lancer of your own (lose your standing and they want it back). The Marshals don't hire Fugitives. (planned) Disabling, capture and boarding; bounty hunters in unmarked ships; flags of convenience.

Pirates

Pirates fly what they can afford: the Sidewinder, cheap enough to lose and quick enough to catch a laden trader, the first ship of half the pirates on any frontier; and the Mamba, built for racing and bought for raiding, whose owners rarely ask where the last one went. They hunt in packs, they name a price on the radio, and the better you get, the better the pilots the gangs send after you. Word gets round.

The rating

Harmless, Mostly Harmless, Poor, Average, Above Average, Competent, Dangerous, Deadly, Elite. Elite means a combat pilot, as it always has. The rating counts how dangerous your opponents were, never goes down, and gives nothing for crimes: killing traders and police makes you a criminal, not a better pilot. Every so often the galaxy agrees with you: Right On Commander!

The Falcons

The haulers warn each other about her in every bar on the frontier: a long, low blade of a ship in pirate red, radiator vanes swept forward like talons. She comes in dark, an unidentified contact, until the hull read: FALCON · the one the haulers warn you about, and the Witches' Sabbath begins. She doesn't kill. She disables you, takes her price and leaves you your life.

"Nothing personal. The Solos have bills too."

"That's my price. The rest is yours, and so is your life. Fly safe, Commander."

Beat her off and she drops gem-stones for your trouble and jumps away. "You fly like a Mutual pilot. That's a compliment." She lets Carriers' Mutual haulers go: give the treasurer our love.

She is a Falcon of Solo & Sons, a shipyard of five: Iver Solo and his four sons, building fast hulls on contract in the lawless systems. Iver flew with the young Carriers' Mutual. He answered a call nobody else would, and didn't come back. "My father built this ship to leave fights like this one."

(planned) There's one Falcon to each pair of galaxies, each flown by a son, each with his own feeling and style:

• Bram, the eldest (mad): cold and precise. He flew escort for the Hold Fast, robs Wexley-Yorozu first and Hexon second, and is colder still to anyone who sold the Ninefold report.
• Kit (glad): races you before he robs you, laughs on the radio, and lets you keep half if you nearly win.
• Jory (sad): takes food, medicine and water first, and apologises. He kept his father's Mutual card.
• Tobin, the youngest (bad): sells what he takes to Vorg, takes more, and isn't kind about it. His brothers don't like it.

The sons hide and feed the forty-one, the people the Hold Fast carried away from the Ninefold (see Explore), and they keep Wexley-Yorozu away from them with the ships they built for themselves.

(planned) A Debt. After enough meetings, a Mayday comes on a Mutual channel nobody has used since Iver Solo's day: the Marshals have caught her, a Bastion through its rift, Lancers closing. Save her and she never fights you again, hails you by name, and sometimes drops in to watch your back. Turn her in and every Solo son learns your name. Fly away and she remembers that you didn't come.

Explore: Tourist to Voyager

The explorer's road

Homebody, Tourist, Wanderer, Surveyor, Pathfinder, Trailblazer, Pioneer, Voyager. Explorers survey planets low, moons close and stars hot, and sell the data at any station: the further it travels, the more it's worth, and the Science Division pays best of all. Be first and your callsign goes on the chart: Charted first by CMDR Nova. Reach Pathfinder and the Science Division has special orders for you. Reach Voyager and the Legends will find you first, when they come.

What's out there

Around most planets are signals: derelicts, beacons and wreck fields. The wrecks have names: Long Odds, Quiet Margin, Second Wind, Halcyon, Persistence, Lucky Strike, Mother's Ruin, Brass Neck, Night Heron. Their logs stop mid-sentence, or say we've cut everything and gone dark (they never did), or keep a crew list scratched out by hand, one name at a time. Some beacons are older than the stations. One memorial reads only: They held the lane. One beacon answers your hail by name. It shouldn't know your name.

Wreck fields are cover: inside them you're in the clutter, and hunters search where they last saw you.

Moons are graded by Wexley-Yorozu: Barren, Marginal or Candidate, because every system's planet is already home to someone. Candidate moons become colonies, with the first finder's name on the charter.

The trails

Every trail is somebody's story, told only in what they left behind.

The colony that stopped answering. A Wexley-Yorozu relay beacon repeats All well. All well. All well. on an eleven-year-old timestamp, with a girl's unsent message to her gran stuck in the queue behind it. Follow it: to the tug Hold Fast, forty bunks rigged in the hold and a child's drawing taped to the console ("We were told not to answer. I answered." · Sam Dray); to the survey tender Patience and its untested atmosphere seed, class 4; to a quarantine buoy in W-Y livery with no registration (Asset recovery in progress. Please do not render assistance.), rewired by someone to give you the course anyway; and to the colony ship Ninefold. Lights on, air good, two hundred bunks made, nobody aboard.

The Ninefold report is there for you to find. Agronomist Dr L. Marsh warned that the seed was never tested for this sky; she was reassigned. Corwin Ashe, Regional Director, Colonial Accounts, priced relief at 31,000,000 Cr and recovery under clause 214 at 4,000,000, and signed the cheaper one: Keep the relay running: the families should not be alarmed. Administrator Teodor Vasse sealed his bridge: They call us assets. Anyone hearing this: please come. 158 were taken off for yard work. Forty-one are missing, carried off in the unlicensed tug Hold Fast. Vasse stayed aboard so the tug could leave. And Mira, nine: Gran, did the yellow flowers come up? Ours didn't. Dad says next year.

Read it. Then decide who you give it to. T. Vasse. Sell it to the Science Division, which will go looking for Sam Dray, or give it to the Mutual's newsletter, so the families learn the truth and Mira's message reaches her gran. The game remembers which.

The long way home. Letters on nav buoys from Ada to Noor: nine years away, and coming home. "Put the kettle on." Her escort Sidewinder, Small Hours: "Told her not to wait. She cried, which she'll deny." Her Cobra, Far Horizon, ran out of fuel one jump short. "Tell her I was nearly there."

The lost survey. O. Fenn, chartmaker, losing her sight, finishing a chart of forty systems. "Forty systems left. I can do forty." Wexley-Yorozu offered to buy it unfinished. "It goes to everyone or no one." Her last beacon holds the whole chart: "Done. For anyone who flies."

A debt unpaid. A tally of eleven marks, some crossed out; a gutted Mamba whose captain sold a convoy's route for 300 Cr; three Sidewinders shot from behind. "You think I'm a pirate. I was the twelfth hauler in that convoy." Bel's cache holds eleven envelopes for the Mutual, and some of it the police would like to see.

The lost courier. In every galaxy, a Science Division courier, the Quiet Hand, went dark: no crew, no name on the hull, the bay sealed from inside. In the rack, a prototype stamped WILL-O'-THE-WISP, the marsh light you chase and never catch. It's still warm. Its last order: under no circumstances let this fall into private hands. Wexley-Yorozu will want it back.

The Thargoids

Nobody quite knows what they want. Thargoid incursions empty the lanes, and the news says Thargoids sighted near…; the bars just say something's come out of witchspace. Nobody has written down what one looks like. (planned) Misjumps that drop you between the stars, rifts that open on their own and lead somewhere unmarked, and a sixth kind of deposit that nobody has a name for, are all doors to the Thargoid thread. Who finds it first, and who do they tell?

(planned) Discovery to development

Finds will be named for their finders (Nova's Find, the Okafor Seam) and the companies will come for them in their own ways: Wexley-Yorozu slowly and tidily, with jobs, debt and clause 214; Vorg with an open pit and rough crews; the Mutual with a small co-operative mine the locals share in. Hexon never buys finds. Hexon buys the finder.

Build: contributor to station charter

The makers

The Galactic Co-operative builds the Coriolis itself (a slowly turning cuboctahedron with one slot: match its spin and keep your nerve), and its Armouries make the missiles.

(planned) The classic hulls of 1984 will join the makers' line-ups as tributes, with our own geometry: the Adder, Python, Boa and Anaconda; the Asp and Fer-de-lance; the Krait and Gecko; and the Constrictor, a stolen military prototype whose hunt becomes a Legend's trail. The company hulls, earned by standing: Hexon's Coral (beautiful, bright and deadly, with an unscannable vault that survives the ship), Vorg's Gaboon (an armed freighter sold in kit form) and the Mutual's Garter (common, harmless and everywhere, sold to members at cost).

(planned) The Halloran Sisters run a family yard on an agricultural world's moon, two sisters running what their father started, one bad year from being bought out by Wexley-Yorozu. Nell builds the Dragonflies, signs every wing spar, and still can't believe people buy them. Ide does the books: every Dragonfly sold is another year. They name every hull after an insect, because the insects were here first. The Dragonfly is an information runner: four long wings that are radiators, not sails (there's no air to fly on); the tightest turn in the game when spread, faster folded, and charging in sunlight for the patient pilot. It doesn't out-gun anything. It out-turns everything.

(planned) Solo & Sons' drawers hold more: the Shrike (Bram's, with a nose clamp built to stop a ship, not destroy it; its plans reach us half-redacted, recovered from a Falcon's wreck near Riedquat), the Kestrel (Kit's sprinter), the Hearth (Jory's quiet blockade-runner for the forty-one, named for home, not a bird) and the Rook (Tobin's, heavier and uglier, built with Vorg money, and his brothers hate it).

The yards and the Titanoboa

Nobody tows a station across the stars. Wexley-Yorozu brings the factory instead.

The Titanoboa is a factory in sections on one standard coupling, as big as the job needs: the Maw, a wide mouth that takes in a moon a little at a time; Furnaces for smelting and refining (W-Y recommends you do not stand near them); the Hold, where tugs and traders deliver; the Habitat, a wheel where a few thousand workers live under the company mark; the Fabricator, an open cradle where station sections are made and leave by the sides (and so, occasionally, does the crew); the Reactor behind its shadow shield, the one you don't want to go wrong; and, for the rare job of moving a station, a Drive. A Science pod on a long mast, at arm's length from everyone, holds whatever the explorers found living there, and can be ejected.

It never travels whole. Teams of Bullsnakes, short, square and slow with tractor booms where the guns should be, bring the modules through a W-Y rift, couple them by a moon, and the yard begins: furnaces lit, a spine, a frame, plating, then a new station spinning up. Then the Titanoboa comes apart and moves on. Nobody has ever seen one hurry.

The coupling standard is open: anyone can design a module. W-Y pays once, in credits, and your name goes on it: Designed by CMDR X. The design agreement is very clear that all designs become the property of Wexley-Yorozu in perpetuity, across all systems known and unknown. The company thanks you for your contribution.

(planned) When a science pod is ejected and drifts towards the planet, everyone wants something different: the Science Division wants it intact, the colony wants it destroyed, and Wexley-Yorozu notes that clause 214 covers specimens.

Keeping a ship flying

(planned) Ships wear with jumps, hard flying and scrapes. A tired ship warns before it fails: shields slow to recharge, a scanner that flickers, a drive that misfires on the countdown. Only a well-equipped yard restores you to new. A cheap second-hand Cobra might be a bargain or a wreck, and in corrupt systems the paperwork may lie: a former owner's record, a hidden compartment, a Falcon's old paint under the new.

Stations of your own

The Co-operative's stations stay the Co-operative's. (planned) Out on the frontier and in the anarchies, stations can be run by guilds, by co-operatives, by communities, or by AI-agent station masters with characters of their own: a weary, incorruptible harbourmaster; a charming smuggler-queen who runs a free port. A station that's supplied thrives. One that isn't declines (the shipyard closes first, then people leave) and in the end it's a derelict: salvage, a pirate hideout, or somewhere to restore. You earn a station charter by building the galaxy: supplying the yards, designing its ships and writing its stories.

Canon notes

Settled here, where the designs disagreed:

• The empty chair. Every Mutual meeting keeps one, and the members don't agree who it's for: the twenty-eighth founder, whose name was never written down (Hexon still has her file); Iver Solo, who answered a call nobody else would; or everyone who came when called and didn't come back. All three are true enough.
• The forty-one. The Hold Fast carried forty-one people. A Mutual hauler picked them up from the tug, and they ended up at the Solo yard. Sam Dray is among them.
• The Gaboon is Vorg's ship, not Wexley-Yorozu's.
• The Bullsnake is a 70 m ore hauler and tug, not an enormous one; the Titanoboa is the giant.

Homage, kept to the rule (evoke, never copy): the Cobra, Viper, Sidewinder, Mamba, Coriolis and the classic hulls are 1984's names as a tribute, with our own shapes and words. Solo & Sons nod to a famous smuggler and to CMDR Solo, who flew Elite in 1984 and draws its ships for Traveller; nothing from the films. Wexley-Yorozu and Vorg Industries nod to two film companies; the Carriers' Mutual to the Rochdale Pioneers. The Dragonfly starts from the insect, not anyone's ornithopter. The music is the U.S. Marine Band's public-domain recordings: the Blue Danube for the docking computer, Semper Fidelis for the Marshals, and Berlioz's Witches' Sabbath for the Falcon. No emblems, and no endorsement implied.

Not yet written: what witchspace is, beyond the jump; what a Thargoid looks like; and who the Bureau answers to. They're open.

Think something here should change? Say so on the ideas board, where others can vote it up, or email hello@witchspace.org.uk. If you code: this page is docs/lore.md on GitHub, open to pull requests.