Kravane

What is Kravane like?

Kravane is the largest of the moons of Kharsis, the system’s arid mining planet. It is a lunar-type moon: dry rock, like Earth’s Moon.

• Size. 1,150 km in radius.
• Gravity. 1.06 m/s².
• Air. Tenuous: almost vacuum. It has only an exosphere, a very thin layer of argon. Outside work means EVA, in a spacesuit.
• Its sky. Kharsis rises and sets: an ochre disc fifteen and a half degrees across. Kravane spins once every 3 hours and circles Kharsis in under an hour and a half. So it does not always show the planet the same face.

Where is it, and who holds it?

Kravane orbits 47,622 km from Kharsis. It belongs to the Zenith, one of the two sides, who run the Fundición Alta there. The Nadir, the other side, have never tried to take it: they would get the furnace without the mine.

What is done here?

Kravane is the chimney of Kharsis: it smelts the ore that cannot be smelted below. On the planet there are sandstorms, canyon collapses and air thick with fine dust that ruins any vacuum furnace. So the raw ore goes up:

1. The mass drivers of the Refinería Yermo, on Kharsis, fire capsules of ore towards Kravane day and night.
2. The Fundición Alta takes them in.
3. The foundry smelts the ore in vacuum chambers, with no slag, no smoke and far from any lung.

It is the most efficient industrial installation humanity has built in Parhelion, the settlers’ galaxy. It is also the ugliest: nothing in it is there for show. The Arquitectos of the Cátedra, who draw up the Zenith’s blueprints, designed it and have never been there.

What is there to fear?

The weak point is not the foundry but the route. The Fundición Alta-Refinería Yermo axis is the richest and most exposed supply line in the inner system, the part closest to the star. That is where it really hurts the Zenith.

What monument does it have?

An auxiliary core of the Flota Aura, the fleet that brought the settlers, also passed through the Refinería Yermo, lost among the scrap. He was saved by La Fragua Baja, the seat of The Forge, the guild that mines, refines and hauls. The dossier on the compis, the rescued cores, tells the story:

“La Fragua Baja recovered him from a hopper at the Refinería Yermo, inside a batch of scrap on its way to the furnace. He was in the batch. He was going to be melted down.”

Dossier on the compis

The worker set him aside: to his eye, the piece had “too much shape”. That core is now FUELLE, the Forge’s compi. The worker has a plaque with his name at the Fundición Alta: the nearest thing to a monument on Kravane.

What is odd about its orbit?

Kravane opens the Kharsis chain with Kharun, another moon, and the asteroid Ashkar. Their periods keep an exact 1:2:4 ratio: Kharun takes twice as long as Kravane, and Ashkar twice as long as Kharun. That is why the three always rise and set at the same point on the horizon. The miners have used them as a clock for forty years without ever correcting it.