LOCATIONS: RICHARD PARKER'S LOT

 

Another station.  Richard Parker was a cabin boy cannibalized by his crewmates after he drew the short straw following an 1884 shipwreck which is the subject of the landmark case King v. Dudley and Stevens.  

RICHARD PARKER'S LOT

Where is it? In Rim space, orbiting in the asteroid belt of a balkanized system with one parateraformed world currently experiencing several major conflicts.

Population:  20,000 permanent inhabitants, itinerant population usually exceeds 80,000

Construction: Modular

Who's in charge? A laughable question.

Issues and dangers?  Total lack of centralized authority, no gravity, intermittent consumable shortages.

Features: Black market, red light district, refinery.

THE STATION

The Lot is a massive 25km-long truss covered in thousands of small ships and modules.  When times were better it was meant to be the backbone of a large mass driver.  Now it is home to a constantly changing collection of barely spaceworthy habitats and asteroid mining vessels docked (or even just tied) to the truss.  The station does not provide power, water, air, or food to its inhabitants -- everything must be arranged individually.  While there is a single  tube running the entire length of the station, that functions as a massive central black market, getting anywhere else usually requires a spacewalk.

The Lot is where the local belters take their spoils to be refined and processed for shipping, generating a steady stream of inbound and outbound traffic.  That means that the station is stopping point for most commercial traffic passing through the system.  The Lot is also the main staging area for refugees escaping the conflicts on the terrestrial planet with all the human trafficking that this entails.  Many are press-ganged into very dangerous asteroid mining jobs or worse.  Some attempt to escape but badly maintained cryopods kill hundreds each year and unscrupulous traffickers kill even more.  

While the Lot is not a safe or refined destination (it has all the charm of a seedy truck stop and is even less sanitary).  Despite its well-deserved bad reputation, the Lot sees a many spacers because it is on a major trade route and is the only place to pick up and offload useful quantities of cargo in this system given the ugly war going on in lower orbits.  If one is not involved in human trafficking, it is also a great place to buy and sell large quantities of drugs and get very cheap He3 (at the expense of those mining it).  

Despite the stunning crime rate, the Lot is actually relatively free of organized crime.  The Golyano Il Bratva and most other large outfits are not welcomed by the local "small businesses."  It's the one thing everybody tied up to the Lot can agree on.  If you're wanted on the Dream or one of the other large Free Ports, Richard Parker's Lot may be one of your only options.  At least there's no shortage of drugs here.