Orbital Salvage 9

“The manifest says this station was decommissioned. The turret that just tracked my helmet says otherwise. I am going to need you to reconcile these two facts before I open this airlock.”

• Captain Reva Osei, Orbital Salvage 9

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1. Setting Overview & Tone

High-Concept Pitch: Orbital Salvage 9 is a blue-collar space story. The characters are not military heroes or corporate executives. They are welders, mechanics, and EVA specialists working in vacuum with borrowed equipment, trying to strip enough value from dead stations to keep their ship fueled and their crew paid. The war that created the wrecks is over. The legal, financial, and occasionally explosive aftermath is not.

Tone: Practical, tense, and darkly funny. The crew knows the work is dangerous. They do it anyway because the alternatives are worse. Conversations happen over suit radio while cutting through hull plating. Moral dilemmas arrive in the form of cargo manifests that list human remains alongside titanium alloy. The humor is the kind that develops when people do difficult things together and cope by talking about it.

Sensory Pillars:

1. Sight: Wrecks tumbling in slow rotation against a field of stars. The cone of a helmet light cutting through a dark corridor where everything floats: debris, tools, frozen droplets of coolant. The distant glow of a station’s emergency lights, still running on backup power seven years after the crew evacuated.
2. Sound: Inside the suit: your own breathing, radio chatter, the scrape of magnetic boots on hull plating. Inside a pressurized wreck: the groan of metal under thermal stress, the pop of a seal giving way in a section nobody has opened in years. Silence when someone’s radio cuts out.
3. Touch & Smell: The resistance of a manual airlock wheel that has not been turned in a decade. The vibration of a cutting torch transmitted through gloves. The stale, recycled air inside a helmet after four hours. The sharp chemical smell of a suit sealant patch applied to a micrometeorite puncture.

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2. The Salvage Field

The Graveyard Belt is the informal name for the debris field between Mars and Jupiter where most of the war’s orbital engagements took place. Thousands of objects drift here: stations, weapon platforms, transports, escape pods, and fragments too small to catalog but large enough to kill. Navigation through the Belt requires constant course corrections and a tolerance for proximity alarms.

Station Wrecks are the primary salvage targets. Each wreck is a self-contained dungeon: dark corridors, sealed compartments, environmental hazards, and the possibility that something inside is still operational. The most valuable wrecks are the ones nobody has entered yet, which are also the most likely to have active defense systems.

The Auditor Frigate is a corporate vessel that patrols the Belt enforcing salvage law. Its crew files claims on behalf of insurance companies, war creditors, and the estates of deceased station owners. The frigate’s legal team can freeze a salvage site remotely by filing an injunction with the Belt Authority, which gives the crew approximately 90 minutes to finish work and leave before the order takes effect.

The Crew Deck of the salvage ship is home. Four bunks, a shared galley, a repair bay that doubles as storage, and a cockpit with a viewport that needs a new seal. Everything on the ship has been repaired at least twice. The crew knows every sound it makes and worries when it makes a new one.

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3. Factions

Orbital Salvage 9 is the crew itself. Captain Osei holds the salvage license and makes the calls on which wrecks to approach. She is experienced, cautious, and in debt to a fuel supplier who is running out of patience. The crew trusts her judgment but not her finances.

Kerrigan Reclamation is the largest corporate salvage firm in the Belt. They have better equipment, more ships, and a legal department. They also have a policy of filing preemptive claims on any wreck an independent crew approaches, then offering to buy the independents out at a fraction of the value. Their field supervisor, Marsh Dao, considers this efficient rather than predatory.

The Belt Authority is the regulatory body that adjudicates salvage claims. It is underfunded, understaffed, and six months behind on filings. An honest claim can take a year to process. A contested claim can take three. The Authority’s field inspectors are overworked and sometimes accept favors in exchange for expedited processing, which everyone knows and nobody officially acknowledges.

The Ghosts are a rumored network of military veterans who live inside the wrecks. They entered derelict stations after the war, sealed sections, restored life support, and never came out. Some salvage crews report encountering pressurized compartments in wrecks that should have been vacuum, occupied by people who claim the station as home by right of habitation. The Belt Authority has no protocol for this.

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4. Unique Mechanic: Oxygen & Claim Clocks

Each salvage operation runs two parallel clocks:

Oxygen Clock (starts at 6, counts down):

• Tick down 1 per scene spent inside a wreck
• Emergency actions (running, fighting, heavy labor) tick down an additional 1
• Suit damage ticks down 1 immediately
• At 2: breathing becomes labored, physical actions take -1d6
• At 1: vision narrows, all actions take -1d6
• At 0: evacuate this scene or suffocate

Claim Clock (starts at 0, counts up):

• +1 for each verified serial number or manifest entry
• +1 for documented proof of abandonment (no life signs, expired distress beacon)
• +2 for recovering the station’s legal transponder
• At 4: claim is defensible. Kerrigan must go to arbitration to contest it.
• At 6: claim is ironclad. Only fraud evidence can overturn it.

The tension: building a strong claim requires time inside the wreck, but time inside costs oxygen. Every minute spent documenting is a minute not spent breathing.

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5. Character Archetypes

The EVA Cutter

You go in first. Your job is to cut through sealed doors, disable traps, and assess structural integrity before anyone else enters. You are very good at working in vacuum and very tired of people who think that makes you expendable.

• Drive: “Get everyone in and everyone out. The metal is not worth a person.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 3 | Finesse 2 | Mind 1 | Presence 2

The Claims Specialist

You handle the legal side: documenting serial numbers, photographing manifests, recording evidence of abandonment. You carry a camera, a scanner, and a copy of the Belt Salvage Code annotated with your own notes. You are the reason the crew gets paid instead of sued.

• Drive: “Build a claim so clean that Kerrigan’s lawyers cannot touch it.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 1 | Finesse 2 | Mind 3 | Presence 2

The Ship Mechanic

You keep the salvage vessel running on parts you pulled from the last three wrecks. You know the ship better than the captain does. You also know it will not survive another season without a major refit, and a major refit costs more than the crew has earned in two years.

• Drive: “One more job. Then we fix the ship. I have been saying this for a year.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 2 | Finesse 3 | Mind 2 | Presence 1

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6. Starter Scenario & Why It Matters

The Survivor Clause: The crew finds a wreck broadcasting a distress signal that, according to Belt records, was decommissioned and its beacon deactivated five years ago. Inside, they discover a pressurized compartment with a living occupant: a former station engineer named Fen who sealed herself in after the evacuation and has been surviving on emergency rations and recycled water. Fen claims habitation rights under a clause in the Belt Salvage Code that nobody has ever invoked. If her claim is valid, the station is not a wreck but a residence, and salvaging it is breaking and entering. Kerrigan Reclamation has already filed a preemptive claim. The Belt Authority inspector assigned to the case will arrive in 36 hours. The crew must decide whether to help Fen, strip what they can before the inspector arrives, or negotiate a split that keeps everyone out of court and alive.

Why It Matters: Orbital Salvage 9 asks who owns the leftovers of a war that everyone wants to forget. The wrecks are valuable precisely because the conflict that created them was expensive, and the question of whether the people who survive inside them have more right to the metal than the people who financed the war is one the legal system was not designed to answer.