Lo

Behold, the pulsing heartbeat of interspecies commerce! Corel III, known only as “Lo” around the galaxy, is the system’s inhabited world and serves as the physical handshake between the Human and Banu governments. The planet itself is an interesting mix: sparsely populated plains, lazy border towns and massive shipping/customs complexes through which pass everyone from freelance traders to corporate cargo crews.

Lo is, essentially, the last exit before the Banu protectorate, and it has all the qualities of both a massive transport hub and a distant frontier trucking station. The usual entertainments for long-haul transport crews are in good supply, although the sheer number of customs officials stationed here (as well as guard patrol crews) serves to mediate the more unsavory of these developments.

The center of the station is New Junction, a town built up around the largest customs house on-world. Lines of ships can wait for up to twelve hours on a bad day to pass through the detailed inspection screening required by both the UEE and Banu governments. Roughly one in ten cargoes is given a full visual inspection, and all others are subject to an array of scans and a mountain of paperwork.

New Junction
New Junction is located on a natural landing area: the sprawling plains of the equatorial Qoph (pronounced “koff”) region. While Lo is a generally temperate world, New Junction is in one of the hotter regions year round, something which many traders dread experiencing during their layovers. Cool drinks and air conditioned habicube rentals sell for a premium in the area surrounding New Junction! Regular dust storms combined with the city’s base of prefab buildings plus the vast quantity of shipping containers passing through make for something of an almost prehistoric ‘wild west’ vibe. But make no mistake, this is not the lawless frontier: a fortune in legitimate shipping passes through Lo every day, overseen by meticulous customs agents.