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The Belt

Lawless mining claims and pirate holes strung between Terra-Forge and Jovia, worked on credit against ore that has not been dug yet.

Overview

The Belt is thousands of contested rocks, no single authority, and an economy built entirely on extraction. Claims are held by whoever is currently on them and defended the same way. There is no planetary government to appeal to, no garrison worth the name, and a great deal of ore.

It is the first genuinely contested country outward from the Inner Sphere, and the closest frontier to civilisation — which makes it the most-worked and least-governed place in the system at the same time.

How it feels ⛏️

Clan country. Claims are held by families and worked across generations — hereditary, defended, and remembered. Think coal country: company scrip, company stores, a company that owns the road out, and a population with very long memories and very specific grudges.

  • Kinship is the unit, not the individual or the company. Who your people are precedes what you can do
  • Outsiders are tolerated and not trusted, on a timescale of decades. A stranger who stays twenty years is a stranger who has been around a while
  • The debt is inherited. A claim worked for a lifetime and never owned passes to somebody, and so does what is owed on it
  • Craft is identity. Belters are good at a hard thing in a place that kills people who are not, and they know it
  • Feuds are real, old, and rarely about what they appear to be about

The debt

Passage, air, water, reactor parts and medical work are all bought on credit against future yield, and the credit is issued by the same parties buying the ore. A claim can be worked for a lifetime without ever being owned.

Nobody out here is outraged about it. It is simply the shape of the business, described flatly and at length by people who have done the arithmetic more than once.

Belters are not a nation and do not want to be one. They are a population with a shared grievance, a shared vocabulary, and no institution — which is precisely the condition in which a place starts producing its own faiths.

Known places

  • Gallows Rock — a lawless asteroid town, and the closest thing the Belt has to a capital nobody voted for
  • The Inner Sphere — the market the ore goes to
  • Jovia — the next stop outward, and where the heavy industry is

Status

Contested, indebted, and the most obvious place in the system for something to grow that nobody is watching.