High-orbit traffic, node and climate-lattice control installation

Hart Traffic and Climate Station

The station that kept the colony's sky. Thirty-eight years in high orbit above Fifteen, she ran traffic control, the junction node's orbital equipment and the forty-eight-frame climate lattice — and when terminal black took the lattice from under her, she kept eighteen people alive inside their own air for two months. Then her crew cut her in half on purpose: everything that only worked in orbit was vented and released, and the pressure core flew itself down onto a building site at the edge of a dark town. This sheet draws both shapes, because the books do.

Operator: Hart colony — military route command and civil climate operations, jointly
Series: The Chosen Dark
Drawn as: As she stood in high orbit on 17 May 2349, an hour before the truss went — and as her pressure core stood on the North Flats the following evening.

Sheet 1 Ring plan — looking down, throat side to the top 1 rings · 8 sealable sectors

1 The taped-over port The ring published One Road Out
Beside the servicing bay hatch. Stores-wrap since the second week of April. The corner gets lifted once or twice a week.
2 The top of the ring The ring published One Road Out – Roos puts the apricots back here, one handful at a time, where the sound goes both ways
Where the ring's acoustics carry in both directions. Where a man puts four kilos of apricots back, loudly.
3 Descent seats and drill-rig straps The ring published One Road Out – Kalb goes round every seat and pulls the straps through himself; Vidal in the third seat
Eighteen seats. Eleven of the people in them have never flown anything.

Sheet 2 Section — looking in, showing the terrace Core height 22 m

Sheet 3 Sector schedule — capacity against occupancy 18 in 18 places

RING The ring built 2311 18 / 18

R-BENCH Ring bench and galley plate none published One Road Out — the allowance kept on the ring bench; the pan on the galley plate
Okonjo's clipboard lives here and the descent allowance is worked down it, heavy things first and arguments last. ⭐ There has been no kettle aboard since 'forty-six; somebody has boiled a pan on the galley plate twice a day since March. The pan is four hundred grams and Okonjo signs it onto the descent list herself.
R-ENV Environmental panel none published One Road Out — 'which was where Menon caught people'
The loop's console. Menon keeps the trend up here — weeks of it, flat and boring and beautiful. ⭐ THE BEST AIR ANY HUMAN BEING ON THE PLANET IS BREATHING, and it is not close: the ground is running a block at a number that would have Menon writing a report about himself.
R-OBS Observation bay bay hatch published One Road Out – Okonjo stopped using it in April; the truss separation watched from it
The one window that looks at Hart. Okonjo stopped using it in April. On the seventeenth it is where anyone stands to watch a slow separation of two shapes that had been one shape for thirty-eight years.
R-SVC Servicing bay and airlock airlock published One Road Out — the port beside the servicing bay hatch; the safing sortie; the wall locker
The working bay: suit servicing racks, the airlock the craft sorties go out through, and the port beside the hatch that has had a square of stores-wrap taped over it since the second week of April – Vidal put it up without asking anybody, and once or twice a week somebody lifts a corner and looks at Hart. ⚠ The wall locker here is where two people were taking something they had not been prescribed; it stopped in the first week of May because Ferro stopped it.
R-TFC Traffic and node console suite none published One Road Out – Bae's four console suites, of which one comes down; the traffic module on the ground
Bae ran a traffic and node desk here for nine years on something that stands still. She had four console suites and lost two to the descent load, having spent a week proving to herself that one suite runs everything the node work needs. ⭐ THE STATION REFERENCE — the node's hard-state — comes down inside the core with this module. It is the only piece of the old architecture on the planet known to have had power on it in March.
R-BUNK Bunks none published One Road Out — 'the traffic module ran off the ring and so did the bunks'
Sleeping volume off the ring. On the ground it is why the station crew who can stay in the core stay in the core: it is warm, and the walk to the Launch Spine bays is short.
R-MED Medical none published One Road Out – Ferro's inventory; the imaging head and analyser come down whole
Ferro's station. The diagnostic set is the argument that costs the descent its bulk alloy stock: the imaging head and the analyser come down whole, the bench frame stays because Kim has a bench, and the consumables come down entire because anything left behind stops existing. ⚠ Her prescribing book comes down with her.
R-STORE Ring stores none published One Road Out — four cases of dried apricot off a supply run in 'forty-four; the emergency stores candle
Food and consumables. Four cases of dried apricot came off a supply run in 'forty-four and are argued over twice before the descent — once for their weight, once because Ferro wants them held for whoever is worst on the way down. A candle out of the emergency stores is Kalb's fortieth birthday, and goes back in the locker afterwards, written back onto the inventory in the right column.

Seal class — what shuts around this volume

Grade of every figure on these sheets

published Stated in the books. If a drawing disagrees, the drawing is wrong.
derived Arithmetic on published facts; the working is given.
fixed Canon was silent here and the drawing decided.

Systems

Recovery package

published

Thirty-eight years dormant, and it behaved, mostly

Built inAt commissioning — the core was always meant to be able to come down
DormancyThirty-eight years; came up overnight on checkout
What misbehavedEverything a manual printed on Earth had said would; most cleared with heat and time
The one that liedA valve position sensor reading closed with the valve open – Nowak proved which was lying and hung a paper tag on it in her own writing
⚠ Never cycledThe loop runs one configuration through descent and another on the ground; the change-over valve set had never been cycled outside a factory. Boateng watches the humidity number

One Road Out

Environmental loop

published

Ninety days, and it was never oxygen

Air and waterSubstantially recycled; local station power remains after terminal black
Limiting clocksFood, consumables, maintenance redundancy, accumulating failures — never oxygen on Day 12
EnduranceAbout ninety days autonomous at reduced load after 18 March 2349
WashingEvery one of the eighteen has washed every day since March, because the loop wants the load taken off it

One Road Out; The Chosen Dark orbital survival lock

Deorbit and entry

published

Before the burn, abort is a word that means something

Personal allowanceTwenty kilos a person, under a rule Okonjo wrote on the board in four words
BurnMorning of 18 May 2349; ran a fraction long and stopped where it was supposed to
The fallNineteen minutes in which a competent person has no task
The columnTwo months without a sun: colder and shorter than the manual's, so deceleration arrives late and hard, and the heat load in a lump instead of a curve
RedesignationSecond point north of the first on the same graded ground. There is no third answer
AboardEighteen. All eighteen. Nobody outside

One Road Out

What was checked

The books state distances aboard this ship. The drawing has to produce the same ones or it is wrong — so it is made to, and the working is shown. These run again on every build; a compartment moved by a metre fails them.

“The station has stood for thirty-eight years by May 2349” One Road Out — 'two shapes that had been one shape for thirty-eight years'; the recovery package 'out of thirty-eight years of dormancy'

Both figures agree, and both are the same thirty-eight: the truss has been joined to the core since commissioning, and the recovery package has been dormant since the same day. 2349 − 38 = 2311, which is the ring's `built` year. The station predates the The Chosen Dark colony's civilian expansion and is older than most of the people on it.
“Eighteen aboard through terminal black, eighteen down” One Road Out — 'Eighteen aboard. All eighteen. Nobody outside'; The Chosen Dark orbital survival lock (author-locked at eighteen)

The ring's population is 18 against a capacity of 18. No zone overlay is drawn because there is no casualty to draw: every person who was aboard on 18 March 2349 walks out of the hatch on 18 May, four at a time with ten minutes between, and is counted.
“Everything that only works in orbit was released; only the pressure core lands” One Road Out — the truss with both outrigger booms, the radiator wings folded, the two orbital-only annexes vented and released, the instrument suite on the long boom

Every arm on this sheet carries a release fate in its seal field and none of them appears on the ground. The core's contents in the prose after landing — the ring, the traffic module, the bunks, the galley plate, the station reference — are exactly the sectors of the one ring. The sheet's split matches the book's.
“The two maintenance craft are still in orbit, safed, not scrapped” One Road Out — 'one of the two leaves something up here that still works'

The craft berth arm carries no capacity and no population (SCHEMA 4a) and its seal says dormancy, not release. A future book may reclaim them; this one leaves them where Solano put them.

Service history

What this drawing does not decide

A blueprint that answered everything would be inventing. These are the things canon has not fixed and this sheet deliberately leaves for a book to claim.

⚠ EVERY DIMENSION IS THE DRAWING'S. No length, radius, mass or volume is stated in three books. What is stated is what is off the ring, what was released, and who sat where — and that is what this sheet is built from.
The second outrigger boom's payload. The prose counts two booms and names the instrument suite on the long one; the other is drawn as its mirror and carries nothing the books have claimed.
Which bays are pressurised through entry and which are stowed. The sheet assumes the whole ring stays habitable, because eighteen people ride it down in descent seats and nobody is reported outside a pressurised volume.
The six unnamed crew. Twelve of the eighteen are named on the page (Okonjo, Bae, Menon, Boateng, Nowak, Kalb, Ferro, Nasser, Solano, Abbott, Vidal, Roos); the remaining six are the survival lock's roles without faces, and this sheet does not invent them.
⛔ The station's exact node role and what 'most node reach' means in hardware. The books keep the junction relationship as a relationship, never a visible gate, and this sheet does the same.
The two maintenance craft — type, mass, endurance. Safed in orbit and still there. A later book may claim them.

Compiled from

One Road Out – Above Hart; Eighteen More; Orbital Half
Terminal Black – Black