Asteroids23

Towers, domes, spires and reliefs adorn the surface of this asteroid, beautifully absurd. The airspace is fairly busy, but you have no great issue finding a docking slot. As you approach your lock, the scale of the rock carvings become apparent, as well as their woefully worn state. As you disembark, strange chanting and heady smells reach you through a mist of incense and a haze of colourful light.  Type:  Habitat Function:  Old mining colony  Power source:  A mix of fission and fusion reactors Gravity:  0.7 SG Size:  5 km Affiliation:  None  Population:  A few thousand  Sells:  Drugs, charms, knowledge, illegal tech Buys:  Anything needed to survive, luxury items, slaves This is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the belt. It has a rich history and an origin lost in time. Remaining mostly independent for the last few centuries, it has established itself as a prosperous trading port with a unique cult...

If there’s anything a gritty, hard sci-fi campaign needs it’s gritty space bars. These should last you a while. d6 Prefix Suffix Type Atmosphere Clientele Specialty 1 The Hole Fully automated  Cramped Unseen Cyber drugs  2 Old Red Hole-in-the-wall Sterile Blue collar Beer 3 Black Den Ambulatory Shoddy Addicts Distilled spirits 4 Spacer’s Refuge Small bar Neon Punks Hookahs  5 Big  Arms Gambling den Labyrinthine White collar Cheap cocktails 6 Corner Bar Large bar Smoke-filled Thugs Synth wine

You receive a brief but urgent distress call, low on details, a fairly anonymous transponder code. A small freighter is drifting with a broken plasma injector coil. Maybe you can help?  As you approach, you see a brick-shaped hauler, one of thousands used by private trading companies. When you dock however, you hear a rhythmic clanging through the airlock mechanism, as if someone was banging on the hull from within. S…. O… S… Type:  Drifting freighter Function:  Illegal slaver Power source:  Fusion Gravity:  None Size:  79.3 m Affiliation:  Criminal Population:  Crew of 5, 12 prisoners in the hold  Sells:  Nothing Buys:  One plasma injector coil of almost any model The crew, a collection of grizzled, gruff spacers, are slave traders and human traffickers. Upon docking, they thank you curtly and try to make it very clear that they only need a replacement coil and are ready to pay a fair sum. They seem very keen to quickly conclude bu...

You were not supposed to find this. Something like a complex radio mast is affixed to the small asteroid, full of auxiliary antennas and dishes. It’s a tightbeam relay station, designed to intercept, refocus and forward encrypted, laser-borne messages. The secrecy relied on the improbability of anyone finding it; yet here you are. Whoever the owners are, they have seen you… Type:  Tightbeam relay Function:  Secret communication  Power source:  Thermonuclear batteries Gravity:  None Size:  Mast, 100 m Affiliation:  Military Population:  None  Sells:  Nothing Buys:  Nothing The station is undefended, but a message has been sent out to the owning government. There is no reliable way of discerning who owns the mast, but the PC ship is already identified and a target for covert attack vessels throughout the system. One way of avoiding it would be to spread the information about the station very fast, at which points an attack would becom...

It’s a small rock. According to the spectrometers, there may be gold inside. Type:  Asteroid Function:  None Power source:  None Gravity:  None Size:  300 m diameter Affiliation:  None  Population:  None  Sells:  Nothing Buys:  Nothing The asteroid contains a low-yield vein of gold. Mining equipment is needed to get to it. Information about it may be of some value for small mining companies.

At first, nothing. Then, a weak heat signature; outlining the ugly, contorted shape of a frigate, cylindrical modules twisted around masts and heat radiators. From a different direction, a faint EM burst from a dying reactor. Soon they are everywhere, looming dead in the dark: a dozen wrecks, maybe more. Sparsely distributed enough that you could easily miss them while blasting past, but something made you look. The radio receivers picks up a thin howl of a thousand voices, almost-but-not-quite drowning in the ubiquitous static. Did the lights in your cockpit just flicker..? Type:  Anomaly Function:  None Power source:  Void Gravity:  None Size:  Hundreds of kilometres across Affiliation:  None Population:  Unknown Sells:  Nothing Buys:  Nothing The PCs have found a strange phenomenon, perhaps following the lead from the  clerk  in the Corporate Outpost . It is a goldmine of  scrap and ship components , but whatever destroyed t...

This comet has somehow been knocked off its orbit, ending up in the belt, far away from its origin in the outer recesses of the system. It still sports a long tail of glowing dust, as befits a comet. Water being a precious resource, a small boomtown of frigates, freighters and stations has sprung up around it, jostling for plots which are being sold at an increasingly outrageous premium. As a result, the comet is swiftly shrinking, being ferried away piece by piece. In a few months, nothing will be left. Type:  Comet Function:  Water ice mine Power source:  Various Gravity:  Various Size:  1 km diameter  Affiliation:  Various  Population:  About 5000 crews Sells:  Ice Buys:  Food, fuel, tools The PCs might try to get a hold of a plot somehow, in which case they get to drill down into the ice to extract as much of the precious stuff as they can (up to a million cubic metres) without interfering with other teams.    No one i...