Introduction
My name is Gebrina Luursech. I was born on the Western Berinu Islands into several generations of Severan warriors. My grandfather fought in corridors before I was born. My father has carried a rifle since he was old enough to hold one. My uncles operate relay perimeters in regions where the wildlife is more dangerous than anything the Energy Wars produce. I inherited none of this. I cannot fight. I have no reflexes for it, no instinct, and no aggression to draw from. I had no aptitude to helm, was not particularly good at actually operating any vehicle systems, and did not understand how relays worked well enough to take the corridor engineer path either. But where my Severan roots showed was a natural understanding of how these tools of balance and related systems worked. Not operating them. Understanding them. How they were built, what made them function, where they would fail, and why. My family accepted that I would not be in the corridors with them and sent me to the academies rather than forcing me into a life I was not built for. I will say plainly that I am more glad of that than of almost anything, because it set me toward the one subject I have ever loved without reservation. To be the person asked to set all of this down is a rare thing, and I have wanted to write it for as long as I have understood what these weapons are.
I was accepted to the Sentinel Division Weapons Engineering Academy in Northern Ngorrhal where I spent years studying, testing, disassembling, reassembling, stressing, overheating, freezing, submerging, and deliberately breaking every weapon system in the modern catalog. I have also tested pre-Empire and pre-Unification weapons that remain in active use, as well as obscured and ancient variants that most researchers only encounter in historical reference. What follows is what I know. Where I use examples from people I have known, particularly my father, it is because the choices real people make with real varens under real conditions explain more about how these weapons function in the world than any specification sheet the manufactories publish.
A word on how I have set this down. Much of what follows I lay out in tables beside my account, because this record is meant to be taken in two ways. Some of you are watching it over the relay as it is shown, and a table lets you hold the shape of a whole class of weapon at a glance while I talk through it. The rest of you have come to it later, in text, and those same tables are waiting for you to study at whatever pace you keep. Treat the tables as the bones of the thing. The words around them are what the bones cannot tell you on their own: why a weapon exists, who reaches for it, and what it costs the person who does.
Why Every Weapon Exists
My family taught me that every weapon on this planet exists because something needed to die to restore balance or something needed to not die to maintain balance, and the distance between those two reasons is sometimes a fraction of a second. A pistol exists because a contractor whose rifle is empty and whose position is being overrun needs something in hand that fires now. A cannon exists because a fortification will not come down by asking. A rail arm exists because silence is the difference between an ambush that works and a position that is given away before the first shot. An array exists because volume of fire is what holds a corridor when precision alone cannot cover the width. None of these overlap. All of them are needed. The planet stays fair because the people on it have access to the tools that match what they are being asked to survive, and the quality of those tools varies because the people buying them are not all buying them for the same reason.
Firearms
Firearms are the oldest idea on the planet still in daily use. A solid projectile driven down a barrel by burning propellant, and every advance in weapons engineering since has been an argument about how to do that one thing better. They are the most common weapons on Geba the way bread is the most common food. Every manufactory builds them, every contractor starts with one, and the whole family of them is one long conversation about a single trade: reach against handling, and both of those against what your body can absorb when the thing goes off. My father can name the manufactory of a rifle from the sound it makes clearing the barrel, and he is not performing when he does it. He is reading accuracy, rate of fire, reliability, and how well the weapon was built, all at once, out of a noise. That is what a life spent with these weapons gives you.
The thing to hold before you read the table is that none of these weapons competes with the others. Each one exists because a particular kind of moment demanded it. The pistol exists so that an empty or lost primary is not the same as your death. The carbine exists because a corridor rewards the weapon you bring onto a target a fraction faster and punishes the one that could reach a mark the corridor will never give you time to take. The rifle exists for the open ground where the first person to land a round on something still far away is usually the one who walks home. The support weapons exist to make a stretch of ground too costly to cross rather than to hit any single thing standing in it. Read the table as a set of answers, each one to a different question the planet asks of the person holding the weapon.
| Type | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pistol | Sidearm, close quarters | The weapon you carry so that losing your primary is not the end of you. No one who knows the work runs it as a primary. It is standard at every tier, from the throwaway a vendor hands a new contractor to a Solarn sidearm that answers on the first pull after a year in the holster, and which one you carry says more about what you can afford than about what you can do. |
| Heavy Pistol | High-caliber sidearm | A bigger caliber and real stopping power bought with recoil that climbs to match. Up close it reaches into carbine range, which is exactly what tempts operators who want one weapon to do two jobs. It does both of them worse than the dedicated tools, and the people who carry one know that and accept it for the lighter belt. |
| Carbine | Short-range primary | A rifle that gave up reach for speed: shorter barrel, faster onto a target, far weaker at distance. The most common primary in corridor work, where closeness rewards the quicker weapon. A contractor who buys a full rifle for indoor work learns the difference on the first contract, usually at the moment a shorter weapon would already have fired. |
| Standard Rifle | Medium-range primary | The baseline the whole catalog is measured against. It reaches and holds accuracy where a carbine is only making noise, and pays for that reach by handling slower when the walls close in. Carried by most who work open ground, relay perimeters, and long sight lines. This is the Severan silhouette, and the weapon my father has held since he was old enough to hold anything. |
| Heavy Support Rifle | Sustained fire, suppression | Built for volume, not for aim. Heavier, fed from a far larger capacity, meant to make a space too costly to enter while the rest of the team moves. You do not aim it, you direct it, and anyone who has been pinned behind cover by one will tell you the fire never needed to be accurate to end the argument. |
| Heavy Anti-Armor Rifle | Penetration, vehicle threat | The heaviest weapon a person carries on the shoulder, firing rounds that punch through plate and light vehicles at range. The recoil is severe enough that most natural-borns cannot fire it standing, and the few who can will not do it twice in a day. A specialist carries it because they expect to meet something armored and intend to be the one who ends the meeting. In Assault-Class hands it becomes another weapon entirely, which is what the fit variants are about. |
| Scattergun | Close-range spread | A spread of shot, ruinous inside its short range and worthless a step past it. The weapon for a single room, where making sure nothing is standing matters more than precision. Carried when the job is clearing a space rather than reaching across one. |
| Long Scattergun | Extended-range spread | A tighter spread and usable distance bought by giving up some of the close ruin. An honest compromise, carried by people who cannot know whether the next door opens onto a knife fight or a hallway and would rather be adequate at both than perfect at one and helpless at the other. |
Arrays
Vaelstrad is the only manufacturer of arrays, and I do not expect that to change in my lifetime or anyone else's. An array is a rotary weapon driven by gas, throwing kinetic slugs at a rate nothing else on the planet comes near. They are beautiful the way anything is beautiful when it does exactly what it was built to do at full output: the trails they leave in the air, the sound of the rotation at speed, and a volume of fire that works on the mind as much as on the body. My older brother once ran a corridor team beside an Assault-Class male who carried a medium array the way my brother carried his carbine. He just held it. Did not brace it, did not mount it, did not set up. When my brother tried to describe what it looked like when the man opened fire, he stopped for a moment and then said "it was like watching weather." I asked him what he meant and he said "it was not aimed at anything. It was aimed at everything. And then there was nothing left to aim at." My brother is not a poetic man. The array made him one.
The array climbs in a single direction, and it is worth understanding before the table. Every step up the ladder buys more fire sustained for longer, and pays for it by surrendering the last thing that could carry the gun on its own. A light array is the most a body can bear. Above that the weapon needs a machine, then a vehicle built to feed it, then a platform that never moves at all. Read the four as one weapon asked to hold a wider and wider stretch of ground.
Cannons
Haavu is the primary manufacturer of cannons, and the lock is as complete as Vaelstrad's hold on arrays. A cannon is artillery: a large bore, a warhead chosen for the work, and a scale that runs from a launcher one person carries on the shoulder to fixed guns that put a round through a mountain and come out the far side with force to spare. No other family of weapon on the planet spans so much. The reason a cannon exists at all is that some things do not fall to being shot. A fortification does not come down because you asked it to, an armored hull does not open to a rifle, and a position dug into rock has to be reached through the rock. The cannon is the answer to whatever will not die by any lighter means, and Haavu has spent the whole life of the Empire making that answer larger.
Where the array climbs by volume, the cannon climbs by scale and by what the round is built to do when it lands. The smallest is a thing a person carries. Above it the weapon needs a vehicle, then a ship or an airship, and at the top it stops moving at all and becomes a gun that owns the ground for a hundred kilometers in every direction. Read the table as that climb, and remember while you read it that all of it began in the Imperial era with the systems I set down after.
Haavu Cannon Systems
Everything in the section above descends from here. The cannon as Geba knows it began as Jeyrha's principal contribution to the Empire during the Era of Imperial Conquest, and it is not too much to say that these weapons are the reason Jeyrha stopped being something the Empire might one day conquer and became something the Empire could not do without. They gave the Empire a reach that neither its ships nor its airships could match on their own, and in solving the problems of building them, Haavu worked out the engineering that every modern cannon, and a good deal else on this planet, still stands on. The figures below are working estimates for the era. I give them because the scale is the whole point, and the scale is hard to believe without the numbers in front of you.
Haavu Savior
| Bore diameter | Approximately 800 to 900 mm |
| Platform height | Approximately 30 floors |
| Projectile mass | 1.5 to 2.5 tons |
| Explosive payload | Approximately 100 to 150 kg conventional |
| Effective range | 140 to 200 km |
| Crew | 150 to 250 |
The Savior was a colossal fixed artillery platform, and a single discharge delivered roughly twelve times the destructive force of a standard heavy cannon shell. Its enormous structure held the recoil system, the ammunition lifts, the loading machinery, the targeting stations, the cooling infrastructure, and the crew compartments all at once. It was installed inside major fortifications or coastal defenses and could not be moved again once it was finished. It was never meant for individual vehicles. It was built to erase formations, fortified positions, and whole sections of defensive infrastructure in a single fall of fire.
Haavu Imperial
| Bore diameter | Approximately 1,000 mm |
| Projectile mass | 4 to 7 tons |
| Explosive payload | 300 to 500 kg |
| Penetration | Approximately 40 to 80 meters of earth or fractured rock |
| Platforms | Heavy ships and heavy airships |
| Crew | 70 to 120 |
The Imperial fired massive penetrators set to detonate late, and it was built to open subterranean positions. The projectile went into the ground before it detonated, collapsing tunnels, exposing buried fortifications, and tearing openings through which infantry could enter. Strike after strike could turn an underground defensive complex into a connected field of collapsed chambers and exposed access points. It was far too large for an ordinary vessel; only heavy ships and the largest imperial airships could absorb its recoil and carry its ammunition, which is the first time you see the pattern that still holds, that the biggest guns choose their platform rather than the other way around.
Haavu Festival Fire
| Carrier shell diameter | Approximately 2,500 to 3,000 mm |
| Carrier shell mass | 80 to 140 tons |
| Submunitions released | Approximately 20,000 to 30,000 |
| Submunition mass | Approximately 2 to 5 kg each |
| Maximum dispersal radius | Approximately 80 km |
Festival Fire was a weapon of area denial thrown from high altitude. The carrier shell climbed to extreme height and opened into a wide explosive dome, scattering tens of thousands of large spherical submunitions across a radius of roughly 80 kilometers. Most of the immediate ruin came simply from the spheres falling; their mass and the speed they gathered on the way down let them break roofs, vehicles, exposed machinery, formations of troops, and light defensive structures. They did not all detonate on impact. Their explosive components woke only when a set chemical or atmospheric condition was present, so a single strike could be made to act as kinetic bombardment, as delayed area denial, or as environmental contamination, depending on how the ammunition was set. It was feared for what came after the fall, because thousands of unexploded spheres could stay scattered across the region long after the bombardment seemed to end.
Haavu Defender V2
| Caliber | Approximately 25 mm |
| Rate of fire | 7,000 to 10,000 rounds per minute |
| Feed system | Multiple continuous ammunition tracks |
| Crew | Approximately 60 to 90 |
| Role | Permanent defensive saturation |
The Defender V2 was an oscillation cannon of extraordinary rate. Rather than spinning several barrels the way an array does, its firing assembly drove through a rapid mechanical oscillation cycle, and once it was set going it did not pause the way other weapons pause. It stopped only when the ammunition ran out, when a component had to be replaced, or when it was taken down for maintenance. Its crew fed it without rest, swapping overheated parts, exchanging thermal cells, clearing damaged rounds, and tending the oscillation machinery the entire time it fired, and a single Defender position could hold an unbroken wall of fire across an approach for hours. This is the weapon that matters most to everything that came later, because the heat it produced and the mechanical strain it carried are what forced the early thermal cell into existence. The orange glow a contractor watches on the flank of a support rifle today began as the problem of a fixed gun that was never allowed to stop.
Haavu-Sentinel Snow Fire
| Carrier shell diameter | Approximately 2,000 to 2,500 mm |
| Dispersal radius | Up to 120 km |
| Debris released | Approximately 8,000 to 15,000 pieces |
| Individual debris mass | Approximately 10 to 40 kg |
| Role | High altitude kinetic bombardment |
Snow Fire came out of cooperation between Haavu engineers and Frost Sentinel formations. The carrier opened at extreme altitude and threw thousands of dense fragments across a radius of as much as 120 kilometers, and the fragments were not meant to explode. Their force came from their mass and the speed they gained falling, and the result was very close to an artificial meteor storm. Buildings came down under repeated impact, vehicle formations were broken apart, exposed troops were driven underground, and roads were made unusable. It was at its worst in cold country, where the falling debris could set off avalanches, fracture ice fields, and bury defensive positions under displaced snow and rock.
Haavu Sky Manipulator
| Payload diameter | Approximately 1,200 to 1,800 mm |
| Typical deployment | Multiple synchronized shells |
| Operational area | Approximately 150 to 300 km |
| Role | Atmospheric alteration and battlefield preparation |
The Sky Manipulator used carefully timed explosive payloads set off at different altitudes to bend the local behavior of the air. It could push pressure systems, break or thicken cloud, force rain, raise heavy fog, turn the wind, spoil aircraft routes, or lay the conditions another Haavu weapon needed. It could not make weather out of nothing; it worked only the pressure, moisture, temperature, and airflow already in the region. Before a major imperial operation it went ahead of everything else to set the field: fog to hide approaching ships and aircraft, shifted winds to throw off enemy projectiles, heavy rain to bog down rovers and rail, cleared skies to sharpen Closed-Altitude Precision Node targeting, and the exact chemical conditions that would arm Festival Fire's submunitions. Alone among the weapons of its age it did not kill the enemy directly. It changed the ground and the sky so that every other imperial system did its work better.
Set them side by side and you are looking at modern cannon engineering in its first and largest form. The Savior's recoil system is the ancestor of every mount that lets a smaller gun ride a rover or an airship without shaking it to pieces. The Imperial's penetrator, set to open only after it was deep in the ground, is why a siege cannon can be told to pass through a wall before it detonates rather than break against it. Festival Fire and Snow Fire taught Haavu how to make one shell become a field of them, which is the whole logic behind every submunition and area round still in the catalog. The Sky Manipulator is why Haavu has never stopped treating the sky itself as something a weapon can shape. And the Defender V2, as I have said, is the reason the thermal cell exists at all. Jeyrha did not merely hand the Empire a set of weapons. It handed the Empire the problems, and the solutions to those problems are the ground that everything since has been built on.
Rail Arms
Electromagnetic acceleration. Magnetic cells as the power source. Silent compared to firearms, extremely accurate, and the cell's discharge rate caps the rate of fire. Midreach Arms produces the most common version. I have a personal affection for rail systems because they do exactly one thing and they do it without announcing themselves. A rail arm does not want you to know it is there. It wants you to know you have been hit. My uncles operated relay perimeters on the Western Islands for years with standard rail arms, and they told me the same thing independently without knowing the other had said it: the best shot you will ever take with a rail is the one nobody heard. They both switched to heavy rails eventually because the perimeter fauna got larger and a standard rail stopped being enough to put something down in one shot, but neither of them ever carried a firearm for perimeter work. They said the noise defeated the purpose.
Explosives
Standalone ordnance not fired from a cannon. Charges, grenades, rockets, and launchers. Limited by weight and availability rather than by the weapon system they are fired from.
Historical Weapons Still in Use
Several weapon systems that predate the Empire remain in active use. They persist not because they are superior but because they are reliable, available, and in some cases better suited to specific conditions than anything the modern catalog has replaced them with. I have tested every one of the following and I respect them more than most things the manufactories produce today.
Fit Variants
Every weapon and armor line carries a fit variant describing the physiology it was built for. This is a physiology tag, not a quality tier. A Standard weapon is not worse than an Assault-Class weapon. It is built for a different body. The confusion between these two things has gotten people hurt.
Why My Father Uses What He Uses
A weapon type is what a thing is. A manufacturer is who made it. The same type made by different manufactories is the same silhouette with different stats and a different price. The question is never which weapon. The question is who built it and why you are paying what you are paying.
Do not mistake price for a ladder, cheap makers at the bottom and dear ones at the top. That is the first thing people get wrong. Joxi, Sentinel, and Solarn will all sell you a rifle, and the three are not one rifle at three qualities. They are three answers to three different questions. A Joxi rifle is built so that it will not break. A Sentinel rifle is built so that it will not overheat. A Solarn rifle is built to do neither and to cost you what a rover costs. Each maker owns one thing it does better than anyone alive, and what your varens buy is that thing, not a place in line.
My father has been a working Severan his entire life. He only uses Joxi rifles and said he would never spend the varens on Solarn. Yet the only pistols he ever bought were from Solarn. When I was old enough to ask why, he explained it: a Joxi rifle is designed to be used, abused, and pushed to the hardware limits, and when it breaks you replace it for a price that does not hurt. He fires thousands of rounds through a Joxi rifle, drops it in terrain that would ruin a precision instrument, picks it up, and it keeps working until it does not, and then he buys another one. That is what Joxi is for. A Solarn pistol is the opposite. The relay engineer and protector class pistols from Solarn are designed to work after never being maintained. My father rarely pulled his. It sat in the holster for months at a time. When he pulled it, it fired. That is what Solarn is for. He was not cheap. He understood what each one was built to do and he bought accordingly.
| Manufactory | What They Master | What You Are Buying |
|---|---|---|
| Midreach | The cheapest gear on the shelf | A subsidiary of Solarn that carries the name and almost none of the craft. It holds together in easy conditions and fails the moment conditions are not, and sand, dirt, or hard cold will stop it. The free carbine a vendor presses on a new contractor is a Midreach, poor by design, there to make you want something better badly enough to go and earn it. Experienced hands leave it where it sits. |
| Joxi | Gear that will not break | Not cheapness, whatever the price suggests. A Joxi is built to be used, dropped, fouled, and pushed well past what should ruin it, and at the top of the line it simply does not break. You run thousands of rounds through one, carry it through terrain that would kill a finer instrument, and it keeps working until it does not, and then you buy another and the loss does not hurt. It is the gear most working contractors live on, my father among them, because it asks to be trusted and replaced rather than nursed. |
| Sentinel | Gear that will not fail in the weather | The answer for every climate, out of imperial engineering and Frost Sentinel cold work in Ngorrhal. Where a Joxi is proof against abuse, a Sentinel is proof against the world around it: a Sentinel rifle at the top of its line will not overheat, and its gear keeps working in cold, heat, and long field conditions that stop other makers where they stand. Its rail arms are the finest on the planet, bar none. This is what you carry when the environment itself is the enemy. |
| Haavu | Heavy systems that always perform | The standard every serious weapon is measured against, and the only name in cannons. A Haavu cannon always performs, and that is not a slogan but the reputation the Empire was raised on, and their heavy armor, siege systems, and combat drones carry the same promise. What Haavu does not do is win at the small end. A Haavu pistol or carbine will never stand against what Solarn makes, because the sidearm was never their art. You buy Haavu for the heavy work and for nothing lighter. |
| Vaelstrad | Arrays, and arrays alone | Not a tier and never was. Vaelstrad makes arrays, every array on the planet, and no one else can, which is why their housings ride other makers' platforms and their name means one thing carried to the exclusion of all else. They build elite repeaters, carbines, and scatterguns besides, but the array is the reason they exist. You do not rank Vaelstrad against the others. You go to them when nothing but volume will do. |
| Solarn | The finest of everything, at the steepest price | The pinnacle of planetary manufacturing, priced so that for most of Geba it lives in relay broadcasts rather than in their hands. Solarn buys precision and mobility that nothing else reaches, and the best pistols and carbines made anywhere, which is exactly why a Haavu sidearm never competes with theirs. A Solarn does not care if you ignore it for a year; it fires the moment you need it. My father spent nothing on Solarn in his life but a single pistol, and he bought it for precisely that reason. |
Those are the makers you meet across the whole of the catalog, the ones whose gear you will hold no matter where you work. But the planet is wider than six names, and there are houses that own one corner of it so completely that no one else troubles to compete. You will not find their work on every shelf. You will find it exactly where the corridor, or the water, or the sky demands it, and nowhere else.
| Manufactory | Their Corner | What You Are Buying |
|---|---|---|
| Kela Maritime Guild | The deep and the cold | Out of New Auren on Kela, the guild builds submersibles and the expensive underwater arrays, and alone on the planet it makes a pistol and a carbine that fire and function beneath the water, where every other maker's gear floods and dies. It is what you carry when the fight is under the surface or in the polar seas. There is no substitute for it, because no one else has solved the problem. |
| Berinese Naval Engineering Guild | The old sea craft | The oldest maritime tradition on Geba, out of Berinu and its former sailors and pirates. They still make the repeater, the weapon that shrugs off rain and saltwater and keeps firing where a modern mechanism seizes, which is why a repeater still rides naval decks and coastal work long after the catalog moved past it. Respected, though they lean on Sentinel and Joxi for their power. |
| Veykar Propulsion | Rockets, and everything that flies | Every rocket worth the name is Veykar. They came out of the Fracture era's failed escape ships and turned that work into propulsion, and the ordnance that flies to its target is theirs. Like Solarn they sell only to the top of the register, so their hardware lives more in broadcast than in most hands, and the same name owns the planet's music besides. |
| Zhikhan Manufacturing Collective | The heavy road | Armored trains, bridgeworks, siege systems, and the logistics that move an army across a continent. Zhikhan has outlived every government that ever hired it by being the one everybody still needs, and it is Haavu's true rival in the Energy Wars. It sells to whoever has to move something heavy a long way, and it does not much care who that is. |
| Brena Propulsion Designs | The grey market | The engineering arm of the Jerhit Syndicate out of Inland Thazvaar, and its trade is compact and quiet: jetpack suits and micro-cannons for operatives and regional elites, built on captured knowledge and the only parallel relay outside Solarn. You do not buy Brena in the open. You buy it where the relay does not reach. |
| Jeyrhan Bio-Engineering Consortium | The living foundation | Not an arms house in the way the rest are. Jeyrhan works in living systems, ecological restoration, regeneration, adaptive flora and fauna, and its biological science sits underneath a great deal of what the others build in weapons, vehicles, and energy alike. Respected, funded, and not feared. Where its hand reaches a weapon at all, it does so through the biology beneath it and not the barrel. |
You may notice a name missing from all of this. There is one maker I will not set down in a paper meant for the relay, and if you know the field well enough to feel the gap, you already know why I have left it there. Some things are not mine to publish.
Power Cells
Two cell systems support weapon performance. They are not power sources for the weapon itself in the case of firearms, but they are essential to how it operates at peak output. Rail arms are the exception: a rail weapon without a charged magnetic cell does not fire at all.
The Glow Language
Power cells are the visual shorthand for what a weapon or vehicle is doing. This glow system is consistent across everything on the planet that uses cells, from personal weapons to the fastest airships.
People Who Know More Than They Say
Anyone who has ever been in a hot corridor or a remote nowhere has likely run into Getrin Desmoor at some point. Ask my father about him and you will hear that the man is artificially friendly and a little needling beneath the warmth, the kind who smiles while he sells you ammunition, and my father does not trust a smile like that. I understand where it comes from. A life in the corridors teaches a person that anyone warm to you for no reason usually wants something, and that the friendliest face in a bad place is the one to keep your eye on. By that lesson Getrin trips every wire my father spent a lifetime learning to feel. I read him differently, and I have come to think the difference is only that I did not come up where my father did. He came up in the corridors. I came up in the academies, among the weapons themselves, and someone who spends their years learning what a thing is made of falls into the habit of listening for what a person knows before wondering what they want. What I noticed about Getrin, and what my father will not admit he noticed too, is that he always knows what he is selling. Not in the way a merchant knows inventory. In the way an engineer knows tolerances. He knows what a weapon will do under conditions the buyer has not thought about yet, and he prices things at a level that can save a life that needs ammunition more than water to make it home. I have seen contractors walk into his stations with nothing and walk out with enough to survive the trip back, paying what they could, and I have never seen him turn someone away who was genuinely in trouble. My father calls that a business strategy. I call it something else.
He also knows vehicle systems better than he lets on. He owns a Solarn Galavant, which most people know as the Eight Wing: a very expensive and very rare high-speed cargo hauler built for moving valuable freight at speeds most cargo ships cannot sustain. The Eight Wing is known across the industry for being extraordinarily difficult to land in confined spaces because the wing configuration that gives it speed makes it unwieldy at low velocity, and the landing approach requires compensating for drift patterns that change depending on wind, load weight, and how hot the thermal cells are running. Most trained pilots will not attempt a confined approach in one. Getrin does it routinely. He does not discuss how. I have watched him do it twice and I still do not fully understand the technique. A man who can land an Eight Wing in a space that would make academy pilots refuse the approach and then walk inside and sell you a Joxi carbine with a smile is not just a vendor. He is someone who decided that selling was more interesting than whatever he did before, and I suspect whatever he did before involved knowing these systems from the inside.
But that is enough about Getrin. I hope this paper has been of use to those who actually read it, and not only to those who came to look at the charts.