Freehold Factory

Freehold Factory is an unclaimed star system in sector grid 1418. It is notable for being a former homeworld of the Freespacers. It is considered to be within the borders of Nepleslian-Controlled Territory

Red Dwarf star

A geologically unstable volcanic planet, orbiting Primary at about 0.7 AU. It contains significant ore deposits, though currently untapped due to more accessible nearby asteroid resources.

More commonly referred to as Freehold Factory (see description below). A barren desert planet, colored red by sun and iron oxides. Orbiting Primary at 3.6 AU. It is currently home to the Shasta No Sekai corporation who has brazenly declared themselves the sole claimant of the planet.

Freehold-03's smaller moon. Completely strip-mined and cleared of equipment and settlements.

Freehold-03's larger moon.

System: Freehold Factory Planet: Freehold-03 “Freehold Factory” Type: Barren / Desert Stellar Radius: 3.6 AU Circumference: 28,000km Surface gravity: 1.3 G Length of Day: 145 hours Length of Year: 614 days

Prior to Freespacer Massacre and Related Battles, Freehold Factory was once a sprawling industrial complex, most widely known for the fact its entire population was composed purely of both sentient and non-sentient machinery. Its distance from the Great Lighthouse meant that, given their current means of propulsion, the journey would take nearly twice a Freespacer's lifespan.

The complex was also the home to the sister unit to the Great Lighthouse's evanescent wave coupler communications system. This new unit allowed for bulk FTL data transmission between the two systems, or even transfer of entire conscious minds in the form of Synthetic Intelligence. Surrounding the base of this EWC tower was a sprawling “city” composed of mainframes and computer clusters, eventually giving way to heavier industrial complexes on the outskirts.

Freehold Factory, like the Great Lighthouse, was mining and smelting construction resources in bulk. However, Freehold Factory had a significantly smaller number of ships to support as a more distant outpost, so had begun putting its resources towards computer cluster construction and mainframe infrastructure development. In early YE 30, Freehold Factory had become one of the largest fully autonomous city-states in the galaxy and was projected to reach metropolis-size proportions within a century.

Later on in YE 30, however, the Star Army of Yamatai “glassed” the planet with a highly destructive orbital bombardment, destroying almost everything on or near the surface. This effectively ended Freespacer civilization on the world.

What secrets remained buried there perked the interest of several new Freespacer sub-factions in recent years. By YE 35, the Astral Locksmiths discovered that the incomplete third Stratops mainframe was laid to rest there, and began a massive covert operation to dig it out. The plan ended with sabotage, with one particular dissident bombing their leyline network, and later attempting to turn the entire planet into a personal factory-fortress of their own.

They managed to fight off all comers until YE 35, when the USO organisation attempted to salvage the old evanescent wave coupler and inadvertently blundered into the operation.¹⁾ Using the power of the recovered White Lament mothership, the crew decided to go for gold and take on the secret factory too. The very first generation of Death Crawlers were being produced on mass there underground, but were no match for the superior numbers, air support, and organization of the invaders.

Steelrender Lycosidae eventually surrendered and offered her manufacturing services in order to appease the invaders, once again reverting Freehold back into an empty graveyard. The Great Lighthouse sister unit was then stripped, along with all of the remaining underground industrial assets.

In YE 40, five years after the departure of the last master of freehold; Phage Nine Two B 92B-4561-8893, a clone of Steelrender Lycosade was one of potentially dozens of clones sent from their gene mothers new home on Planet Osman to scour the sector for valuable technologies and material for projects both grand and not when in Phages' travels they inadvertently joined a team of bounty hunters which consequently contained one future business partner in the form of Shasta Archeletta.

In their travels as bounty hunters, the two would bond as kindred sociopaths and Phage would eventually offer the taboo to her new friend in the form locations of note erected by their gene parent and left to decay and the verbal rights from one of Lycosades gene clones as permission to annex these locations for profit nad marginal gains shared by the two in a shared interest in salvage, technology, and monetary gain.

With a sizeable loan of 5,000,000 DA in Shastas' name and cheap and a plethora of cheap and disposable labor in the form of Shastas' large InterNep community roots the mutant was able to secure manpower from the communities of mutants, spacers, kuznyetski, and many other such minority grounds in the nearby Democratic imperium with no standard of training or proficiency that would inevitably lead to an ever-growing rate of on the job fatalities from a number of sources.

Using this loan and manpower the mutant and her spacer partner in crime began refurbishing factories and salvaging technology and garbage alike that might otherwise be trash to the former master of the world but was a valuable treasure, revenue, and research material for the new corporation. By YE 42 the Shastas' World corporation has declared itself the sole claimant of the planet and is currently engaged in a planetwide cleanse eviction of other salvage corporations, spacer refugees, and anyone not belonging to the factory by means of battlemechs, disposable and poorly trained security forces, and an assembly line of drone soldiers.

The future plans the corporation holds for Freehold are vague and known only to the Mad Mutant herself and her spacer partner in crime.