Breaking Yards

“I’ve been from the Maw to the edge of the Rifts of Hecaton and back and seen all the highs and lows of Mankind, but I’ve never seen a place as desperate and squalid and truly Emperor forsaken as the Breaking Yards. May the Holy One have mercy on their pitiful souls.”
–Trade Admiral Jonquin Saul
Located in the Cinerus Maleficum region, near the center of
the Koronus Expanse, SR-651 is a red giant star standing
silent watch over an empty system. Whether the system
ever had planets remains unclear, but the entirety of it is littered
with dense asteroid fields, the shattered remains of voidships,
and the detritus of millennia of passing fleets. SR-651 is also
occasionally lashed with terrible warp storms and plagued
by strange gravitational anomalies that cause the ever-present
debris to shift and flow like currents and pool here and there
in clumps hundreds or thousands of kilometers across. Despite
the desolation and navigational hazards, SR-651 has two
very important redeeming qualities: it’s located conveniently
near the dead center of the Expanse, and lies directly off one
of the larger trade routes that cross from Winterscale’s Realm
to the Heathen Stars. These factors, plus the surfeit of cheap
labor from the surrounding systems and the constant need for
voidship components, gave birth to the Breaking Yards.
==History of the Yards==
The Breaking Yards were founded by the Rogue Trader Iridas
Holden, the scion of a powerful family from the Calixis Sector
that was heavily invested in both shipyards and the salvage
trade. On a fact-finding mission through the Expanse, Holden’s
ship, the Salvare, was blown off course by a particularly savage
warp storm and deposited, battered and limping, in the SR-651
system. He immediately sought a sheltered anchorage for his
wounded ship above one of the intact planets at the far end of
the system and put his crew to work. While his crew and tech-priests
were busy with repairs, Holden took the opportunity to
survey the heretofore unknown system. He scanned everything
within reach of his auspex arrays and sent parties out in the
ship’s boats to search farther afield. One of these survey parties
stumbled across a small station anchored close to the system’s
center, housing a small-time salvage operation breaking up
wrecked ships amongst the remains of a shattered asteroid.
After a tense negotiation, the foreman of the salvage operation, a
grizzled and ancient voidman named Haargoth Agamar, agreed
to return to the Salvare to meet with Captain Holden.
Upon arriving at the ship, Holden and Agamar entered into
lengthy discussions about the history of the system and the nature
of the salvage operation. Apparently, numerous minor salvaging
organizations had been operating in the SR-651 system for
centuries. Rogue Traders would deposit teams of workers who
would operate for a while until their masters retrieved them or were
wiped out by some natural disaster or marauding pirates. While
the system itself was rich in constantly renewing salvage thanks to
its location, steady traffic and ever-changing navigation hazards,
the region of space was largely deserted, and the few human
outposts not wealthy enough to take advantage of the situation.
Holden, however, felt he could succeed where his peers failed.
After pumping Agamar for all the information the old voidman
possessed, Holden immediately pressed him into service, then sent
impressment teams to do the same to the remainder of his men.
With his repairs completed, Holden returned to Port Wander to
muster resources and lay plans.
One year later, Iridas Holden returned to SR-651. He had
crafted a plan to make himself incredibly wealthy by building
massive breaking yards in the system, recycling derelict ships
and selling the components and raw materials. He reasoned
that with the constant wrecks that happened throughout the
system, and with negotiated contracts with Rogue Traders
such as Saul to have broken ships sent to his yards, he could
build a lasting ship-breaking empire.
In the Imperium, it is rare that ships are broken and
scrapped. Each starship is a valuable prize representing
decades of construction and filled with arcane and priceless
technology. However, through battle, disaster, or hard use,
some ships do become untenable. With a flotilla of ships, tens
of thousands of pressed men to work as ship breakers and
a handful of lucrative salvage contracts, Holden claimed the
whole of the system as his own. Once the headquarters was
established on a planet-sized jumble of asteroids and planetary
debris held together in one of the systems gravitational sinks,
Holden would set to building his empire.
From the beginning however, the entire endeavor was a
disaster. Upon arrival at SR-651, many of the flotilla’s ships,
piloted by captains unfamiliar with the treacherous system, were
lost to collisions and asteroid impacts. Once the operation’s
headquarters were established and the temporary habitats were
built, a brutal, month-long warp storm swept through the system,
disrupting asteroid orbits and sending shards of rock careening
into ships at anchor. Many thousands of crewmen and impressed
workers were lost, as well as the permanent habitats and a fair
portion of the operation’s food and supplies. Supply shortages,
hunger rations and deadly working conditions led to riots and
work stoppages which were suppressed quickly and violently.
Holden attempted desperately to hold his operation together,
appealing to investors for more loans and stretching his already
thin fortune to breaking. News of the disasters and setbacks at
SR-651 began to get out, and Holden was undone. A rival Rogue
Trader clan, smelling blood in the water, took the opportunity
to declare war on the Holden dynasty. They reduced Holden’s
once-powerful family to poverty and sold the majority of them
into indentured servitude. Finally, in the midst of this chaos, the
crew of the Salvare rose up in mutiny and killed Holden and his
officers. This mutiny, bloody, violent and expertly planned, was
led by none other than Haargoth Agamar.
Now in command of a well equipped voidship and possessing
an intimate knowledge of the system and its hazards, Haargoth
Agamar picked up where the unfortunate Holden had left off.
He brought the remainder of the doomed expedition together
and made them an offer. Those who would stay and work would
be provided shelter, food and a cut of any profits. Those who
wished to leave would be given a ship and sent on their way. A
surprising number decided to take Agamar up on his offer and
stayed. They spent months in dangerous, back-breaking labor
preparing the installation with what few supplies that they had
left. The makeshift, temporary habitats were shored up and
made, if not permanent, at least livable. They towed hulks and
scraps from around the system for salvage and building material.
Agamar made deals with surrounding systems, trading ship parts
and raw materials for food and supplies. Eventually, and much to
the surprise of Agamar and his followers who knew nothing of
them, the first of Holden’s contract ships arrived from elsewhere
in the Expanse to be broken down. They were followed by more,
and soon Agamar found himself in the salvage business.
Sadly, soon after the operation was up and running,
Agamar and the Salvare disappeared on a passage through the
Maw. In response, most of Agamar’s employees disappeared,
fleeing to other regions with whatever equipment, goods and
money they could carry. The remaining employees couldn’t
maintain the operation, which slowly collapsed into a skeleton
of itself. Instead of a region-spanning ship-salvaging empire
or an efficient and professional scrap concern as Holden and
Agamar had envisioned, the breaking yards became a hellish
industrial prison where the poorest and most desperate people
of the Expanse toil away for endless hours in patched voidsuits,
tearing ships apart piece by piece with inadequate tools. Here,
life is incredibly cheap, the mortality rate is staggeringly high,
and everyone is sick from radiation poisoning or contact with
the dizzying array of hazardous materials used in building
voidships. It became, like many places in the Expanse, not a
place of hope but one of exploitation and despair.
==The Yards Today==
In the decades since their founding, the Breaking Yards
haven’t changed much. The complex is comprised of two
main areas, the Receiving Yard and the Breaking Yards.
The Receiving Yard is a massive, spindle-shaped
space station thirty kilometers long that orbits
the Breaking Yards. It is here that incoming
ships, many of which are completely unrepairable, are processed
and inspected before being sent into the Breaking Yards for
salvaging. The spindle contains the old administrative offices,
along with living quarters for the clerks along with the yard
foremen and their enforcers. A bustling marketplace dominates
the central decks of the station, where ship components from the
Breaking Yards are sold to anyone with the Thrones to purchase
them. Everything from auspex array lenses to warp drives and
Gellar Field generators can be had, in varying condition. Even
whole ship hulls can be purchased at the yards, although these are
a much rarer commodity. These are bare hulls, typically stripped
to the gunwales and lacking even engines and generators, perfect
for the Rogue Trader who wants to assemble a ship from the
keel up.
The Breaking Yards are built on and throughout a clump
of asteroids and planetary fragments roughly 3,500 kilometers
in diameter, loosely bound together by one of SR-651’s
errant gravitational anomalies. Massive chains and hundreds
of kilometers of flexible, semi-rigid pressure corridors connect
the disparate pieces of the complex. Each asteroid in the clump
is studded with a multitude of slapdash hangars, slips and
workshops bashed together from hull plates and other random
detritus. Leaky, unshielded pressure domes and temporary
emergency habitats make up the living quarters for those workers
lucky enough to have them. Even with their fetid, poorly
recycled atmospheres and tendency to de-pressurize or implode
without warning, they are still preferable to sleeping aboard
one of the space hulks in a vacsuit or in a makeshift hovel built
from the scavenged cockpit of a gun cutter---as so many do. The
entire place is full of wretched, hollow-eyed people and has the
look and feel of a huge, dangerous slum. It’s dominated by the
hulking shapes of derelict voidships and always lit by glaring
floodlights and the glittering sparks of cutting torches.
==Defense of the Yards==
With its wealth of voidship salvage, the Breaking Yards seem
a prime target for raiders and pirates. However, while there
have been occasional shipment hijackings or daring cutting-out
expeditions led against the Yards’ fleet of marketable
hulls, large-scale attacks are rare. This is due to a number of
factors, the first being the Yards’ location. Navigating SR-651’s shifting asteroid belts is a dangerous proposition unless
the pilot follows one of the charted passages, and the Yards’
have broken the hulks of numerous pirates who have tried.
Those who do follow the passages must contend with the
Yards’ not inconsiderable defenses. The facilities of the Yards
mount hundreds of salvaged, dismounted macrobatteries and
lances, along with thousands of close defense turrets, bristling
from the rocks and asteroids. These are manned at all times by a
rotation of trained gun crews and co-ordinated from a salvaged
ship’s bridge used as a command and communications center.
This allows the Yards to defend themselves and the Receiving
Yard at both short and long ranges. The Yards also maintain a
small, ragged fleet of fast defense monitors and intersystem
ships for interception and interdiction.
While mostly made from spare parts and thinly crewed with
poorly trained pressed men, these ships still
provide a decent defense force, and have
driven off more than one raiding fleet. In addition, any number
of powerful and expertly crewed Rogue Trader or pirate vessels
can be found in the Yards at any given time. These ships are
typically unhappy to be bothered in the middle of their business,
and are more than happy to punish any interlopers. More than
anything else, the power of the Yards’ macro-batteries and the
goodwill of its trading partners have kept the Orks of the nearby
Undred-Undred Teef, clearly the greatest threat to the Yards,
from completely overrunning the place.
Of course, some Rogue Traders have succeeded in taking
over the Yards---through force or dealmaking---over the years.
However, ownership of the Yards proved to be the ruination
of each, driving them to poverty, shame, and financial
collapse. Whether poor luck or simply that the Yards are an
ill-conceived venture, the facility seems destined to survive on
its own, running on momentum and directed anarchy.
The macrobatteries mounted to the Breaking Yards give
the structure incredible defensive coverage for what is
essentially a planet-scale scrapyard. From any approach,
an attacking ship will find itself facing either two lances
or four macrobatteries of any type. The scavenged defense turrets
give the Yards a Turret Rating of 3, and the random auger
arrays give it a detection of +12.
As for its fleet of cobbled together ships, the Yards
should have as many ships as the Game Master sees
fit, and can be represented by the Wolfpack Raider, usually armed
with macrocannons such as the Thunderstrike. In
general, Yard crews are no better than Incompetent,
although the crews running the actual Yard defenses
are Competent.
==Using the Breaking Yards==
Though the Yards have a poor reputation, they are something
of a rarity in the Expanse---a (mostly) functional shipyard. This
makes them invaluable for Rogue Traders who need to refit
their vessels, or simply repair damage from a dangerous run.
In addition, rumor has it that due to a bureaucratic mishap,
a perfectly serviceable cruiser, formerly the property of one of
the branches of the Imperium, has recently found a new home
at the Breaking Yards. As if that wasn’t bad enough, depending
on who you talk to, this ship is either equipped with some sort
of heretical technology, or has a hold full of deadly weapons.
Either way, if this is true, that ship is a danger to the yards and
whoever lost it is going to want it back.