MB-ARCH-0080SURVEY INDEX · OPEN DISTRIBUTIONLIVING DRAFTAS OF LS 212
Planets and Sectors
Survey records for the worlds and stations the Mach Wars are fought over or from: what the ground is, who holds it, what it is for, what happened there.
Source: docs/lore/07_planets_and_sectors.md · rendered by build_machborne.py · last updated 2026-08-29. Edits to the lore file flow to this page.
Survey records for the worlds and stations the Mach Wars are fought over or from. Written in the form the survey services use: what the ground is, who holds it, what it is for, and what happened there. Names follow the naming bank in 06_names.md §3; dates follow 01_timeline.md. Where a record says "lost", it means no hull has returned since the Break and no signal has been received that the survey services accept as current. The Null Collective disputes the word and offers no alternative.
The Lattice is divided by strand. A strand is named for its anchor node; a reach is a strand with more than one node. The world humans came from is on no strand: it is upstream of Halden, reached by the ordinary slow way, and the survey services do not list it because they were never asked to. Everyone knows where it is. Nobody in the Mach Wars is going back to ask for help.
A captured planetoid, eleven hundred kilometres across, on a long orbit around a dim star nobody would have visited for its own sake. The Halden survey of LS -14 found a gradient here that did not match any body in the system, and the first Lattice transit left from its polar anchor in LS 0. For a hundred and seventy years Halden was the first node: the timetable's origin, the place every strand was measured from, the reason the Helix Concord seated itself in the same system. The node station grew into a ring city of cargo terminals, survey offices and the Concord's original transit exchange, with a permanent population that at its height was four hundred thousand. Transit along its strand lengthened in LS 172 and stopped inside a year. The last hull to leave Halden carried a survey team and a partial data core; the team's report is the basis of every model of the Break that has since failed. Halden is referred to in the past tense by all four blocs' survey services. Null bulletins, when they mention it at all, use the present.
MB-WLD-02SURVEY RECORD
Verrin
Strand
Halden strand, second node outward
Holder
Helix Concord
Role
the first foundry world
A dense, dry, high-gravity world with a thin atmosphere and a crust rich in the rare-earth lattices that coupler cores are grown from. Verrin's foundries built the ship-scale couplers of the settlement era, shrank one to fit a cargo lifter in LS 77, and certified the first wearable unit, foundry line Mach-1, in LS 96. The first forty Machborne were certified here; the training ground where two of them died is still in use, a gravel plain under the foundry's cooling stacks that operators call the Yard. Verrin's surface gravity is what made the Drive necessary and what makes Verrin operators good: an unprotected fall of three metres breaks bones here, and every foundry apprentice learns Glide before they learn to weld. The Concord holds Verrin and administers it well, which is not the same as being liked there. Since the Break cut Verrin off from the Halden node its foundries have run on stockpiled crucible feedstock, and every bloc knows roughly how many years of it remain. The number is the most classified figure in the Concord.
MB-WLD-03SURVEY RECORD
Meridian Station
Strand
Halden strand, at the Verrin–Tessel junction
Holder
Helix Concord
Role
scheduling seat
Not a world: a station built on a small anchor mass where two strands cross, so that the Concord's transit exchange could sit at the one point a hull on either strand had to pass. Meridian is a timetable made into architecture, concentric rings of docking arms, survey halls and the long archive galleries where the Concord keeps every transit log since LS 58. Its population is clerks, surveyors, relay technicians and the companies that guard them. Meridian has never been attacked directly; the Concord's doctrine of seeing first was written here, and the station's sensor grid is the densest in known space. It is where the Sanctioned Contest Accord was signed in LS 197, in a hall the Concord chose because it had the best telemetry coverage of any room on the Lattice. Contest ledgers, the records of every sanctioned run, are held here, and a Machborne who wants a speed recognised has to have it recorded on Meridian's instruments or on instruments Meridian has certified.
MB-WLD-04SURVEY RECORD
Tessel
Strand
Halden strand, third node outward
Holder
Helix Concord, contested
Role
site of the first company war
Concept Mood for Tessel, from a concept board.
A cold, wet moon of a gas giant, with a node station on its trailing hemisphere and a surface of basalt terraces stepping down to a shallow methane sea. The terraces are why the first company war was fought here: in LS 166 a dispute over node access between a Concord transit authority and a Keld shipping cartel was put to contracted Machborne on the station's surface rather than to fleets, and six days of fighting across the terraces settled it more cheaply than a blockade. The terraces glide well, the risers between them are launchers, and the sea at the bottom is a place operators do not come back from. Tessel has been fought over twice since, once in LS 196 when the Iron Covenant tried to take the node outright and was stopped by a counter-battery action the Concord still teaches, and the Accord of the following year was in part a response to how expensive that was. The station is Concord; the terraces belong to whoever is contracted this season.
MB-WLD-05SURVEY RECORD
Tallow
Strand
Frontier strand
Holder
Frontier Ascendancy
Role
the glacial world; Tallow Reach contest ground
Concept Mood for Tallow, from a concept board.
An ice world at the far end of a long strand, settled in the second charter wave because it had water, a stable star and nobody else wanted it. Tallow's population lives in fjord settlements along the one temperate band and mines the glaciers for the heavy isotopes the rest of the strand pays for. The Frontier compact of LS 104 was drafted here, in a mine office, and the Ascendancy still meets here when it meets at all. Tallow's contribution to the Mach Wars is a valley: Tallow Reach, a glacial trough twelve hundred metres wide between two ridgelines, with a moraine crest along its eastern edge that gives velocity the whole way down. The Reach became a sanctioned contest ground in LS 199, two years after the Accord, when the Ascendancy offered it as neutral ground and every other bloc accepted because none of them could reach it in force. The Rail, the Floor and the Serac Drop are named in the Reach's brief in 04_the_break.md; the recorded time for the Rail stands at 1:42, set in LS 210, and the Reach's telemetry is certified by Meridian under an arrangement the Ascendancy dislikes and honours.
MB-WLD-06SURVEY RECORD
Cinder Row
Strand
Frontier strand, inner section
Holder
Frontier Ascendancy
Role
six mining stations
Not a world but a string: six stations strung along a strand where it passes through a debris belt, each one built into a different fragment of the same shattered body. Cinder Row was the Frontier's first industry, a line of ore processors and slag heaps that shipped refined metal inward along the strand for a century and paid Concord tolls at every node on the way. Its people are Frontier in the old sense: transit crews, riggers, salvage hands, and the companies raised from them fight the way the stations are built, in the open, fast, and without much expectation of help. Since LS 189 the Row has been the Ascendancy's relay spine, the chain of stations that keeps the Frontier's own network alive when Concord nodes are closed to it, and in LS 208 the Null Collective spent nineteen days proving that a relay spine is only as good as the sensor operators watching it. The engagement is in 09_mach_wars.md. The stations still call each other by number. There is no Row-4; the fragment it was built on is where the LS 208 operation ended.
MB-WLD-07SURVEY RECORD
Keld
Strand
Keld reach
Holder
Iron Covenant
Role
the forge world
Concept Mood for Keld, from a concept board.
A heavy, hot, mineral-rich world with a surface the survey called "iron-grey to the horizon" and a population that has been building the Lattice's infrastructure since LS 31. Keld's foundries cast the node stations, the heavy hulls and the ship-scale couplers that every other bloc's transit runs on, and when the Covenant seceded in LS 133 it did so by the simple method of stopping shipments until the invoices were paid. They were not paid; the Covenant has been keeping the ledger since. Keld's ground is fortified the way the Covenant fortifies everything: ridgelines cut into gun positions, valleys floored with prepared hardstanding, every settlement built around a foundry and every foundry built as a strongpoint. Girder Yard, the heavy-hull foundry, is a city in its own right; Anvil Station, the reach's inner node, is the only node station on the Lattice that has never changed hands. Covenant doctrine, the Marked Ridge chain, the Bulwark frame and the Titan platform were all developed on Keld's proving ground at Lowwater, a ridge above a drained reservoir where the Covenant runs the beacon-mortar chain against itself every season and publishes the results.
MB-WLD-08SURVEY RECORD
Sable and Nullset Station
Strand
Sable strand
Holder
Null Collective
Role
the Collective's declared seat
Sable is a tidally locked world with a habitable terminator band, settled in LS 40 by a research consortium that wanted a quiet sky. It stayed quiet. The consortium's descendants became the networked culture that published the Null declaration in LS 148 and has said almost nothing since. Nullset Station is Sable's node station, or was; Concord surveys have not been permitted to dock since the declaration and record it as "operational, unresponsive." What is known comes from telemetry: the station's field modulation is unlike any other node's, its transit schedule does not exist, and hulls that settle into the Sable strand arrive where they meant to go and are not, so far as anyone can determine, interfered with. The three unnamed systems further along the strand, listed as Sable-2, Sable-3 and Sable-5, are the Collective's and are not visited. There is no Sable-4 on any map. Null companies contracted in the Mach Wars come from Sable, and their Drives carry Sable foundry marks that no foundry outside the strand can read.
MB-WLD-09SURVEY RECORD
Cairn
Strand
Halden strand, near boundary
Holder
contested
Role
first battlefield of the Mach Wars
Concept Mood for Cairn, from a concept board.
A captured planetoid with a polar mass-anchor, the last node on the Halden strand before the boundary zone begins, and after LS 181 the only node from which the Break's edge can be reached on a scheduled transit. It was a freight junction with a permanent population of nine thousand. It is now a ring of fortified cargo terminals held by whoever won the last contract, a surface of broad, shallow craters that glide beautifully in the low gravity, and an interior transit tube that has been the site of more close fighting than any other structure on the Lattice. Historians mark the Mach Wars from the first contested action here in LS 189, a Frontier company against a Concord one, and the node has changed hands eleven times since. The anchor's gradient distorts Burn Arcs near it; the survey services describe the effect and no map shows it, which is why Cairn operators are hired by everyone and trusted by no one. Cairn is the doorway to the Break, and the salvage that comes out of the boundary zone comes through it.
MB-WLD-10SURVEY RECORDLOST
Marrow Outer Station
Strand
Halden strand, deep boundary
Holder
evacuated
Role
swallowed LS 204
Concept Mood for Marrow Outer Station, from a concept board.
A desert world at the end of a dead orbital tether, settled for the tether: a cargo elevator to a transfer station that made Marrow the Halden strand's outermost port. Transit failed here in LS 174 and the world was half-evacuated by LS 181. The half that stayed were salvage crews, because the boundary zone's coupling made Marrow the best place in known space to test what a Drive could do, and the ground station under the tether became a contest ground by custom before it was one by Accord. The Break advanced in LS 204 and took the transfer station and the upper cable; the lower cable still hangs from the sky and buries itself in the dune field at the basin's centre. The record of 412 km/h was set on that cable. The basin is inside the boundary now, reached only by companies willing to run the gradient, and Marrow's survey record ends with a line the services have not updated: evacuation ongoing.
Sectors
The Halden strand. The original strand: Halden (lost), Verrin, Meridian Station, Tessel, Cairn, Marrow. The Concord's spine and the Break's entrance.
The Frontier strands. Three long strands outward from the Tessel junction: Tallow, Dry Fork, Kestrel's Landing, Backwater, Skerry, Cinder Row, Long Valley. Thin supply, long transit, no help coming.
The Keld reach. Two nodes, Anvil Station and Girder Yard, and the worlds between: Keld, Lowwater, Bedrock, Quench. Everything on the Lattice heavier than a person was cast here.
The Sable strand. Sable, Nullset Station, Hush, and three systems the Collective has not named.
The Break. The Near Boundary (Cairn's far side, the Serac Belt), the Deep Boundary (Marrow, Wick, Ashfall), and the Interior (Halden, Ninefold, and nine systems the survey services list by number).
The years these records refer to: Timeline. Three of these grounds, as briefs: The Break. What was fought on them: The Mach Wars.
