THE YARDS

Sixty stations. Thirty-three of them can build, and thirty-two are building now.

The yards are concentrated where the material is, which was not an accident. Three sites carry almost all of it — one in Czerka space, one in the home asteroid field, one in deep space at the edge of the working grid. Ore does not travel further than it has to, and where those sites sit is not published.

WHAT IS ON THE LINES

Eight yards are tooled to Mining Barques, which is the programme feeding itself: every barque off the line is another operation running against the deposits. The rest are running starfighters, and a frigate line is standing by.

The fighter production is deliberate and it is early. Combat has not arrived yet. When it does, thirteen asteroids and sixty stations will be worth taking from us, and a fleet that starts building on the day it is needed is a fleet that arrives late.

TWO HULLS, TWO JOBS

Asteroid fields are worked from the deck, not from the ground, and the work splits cleanly in two. Y-8 Mining Vessels carry the heavier sensor package and do the finding. Mining Barques do the taking. There is no ground crew on a rock — only a deck, a search pattern and a hold to fill.

That is why eight yards stay tooled to Barques. What is in the ground already outruns what can be pulled out of it several times over, and deposits decay whether they are touched or not, so extraction capacity is the binding constraint on the whole asteroid programme. Every Barque off the line is another operation running against a clock.

THE GROUND FLEET

Separately, Torize holds a hundred and thirty-three planetary survey vehicles: a hundred and eight airspeeders and twenty-five groundhogs, eleven full squadrons. They do not work asteroid fields — that is not what they are for — and they are held for planetary prospecting, which is a different job on different ground.