Dregs

Vital Statistics

Name: The Dregs

Other Names:

Location: The Asteroid Belt (between Jupiter and Saturn)

Permanent Population:

Transient Population:

Imports: Nothing critical. Mostly luxury items and goods that are not produced locally.

Exports: Officially, Nothing. Unofficially, the Dregs is the largest producer of starship components, sensory systems, drives, and habitate modules/components in the solar system.

Description

The term ‘The Dregs’ does not refer to any place in particular but rather everything not covered specifically elsewhere. This term has been applied to anyone who lives outside ‘the system’ or ‘off the grid’. These are people who for one reason or another have chosen to disengage themselves from the conglomerate and its way of thinking. Dregs are usually looked down upon and openly despised by even the lowest class citizens of the Conglomerate. They tend to live off scraps and steal for what they need to survive. They live in sewage systems, recycling plants and other undesirable locations throughout the system, including some salvaged micro-space stations that they have taken possession of and hauled off into the uninhabited corners of the Sol system and brought back to life for occupation.

The Dregs are an assemblage of asteroids within the Sol system’s asteroid belt that have been hollowed out and connected together to form a rather unique population center. Each asteroid is its own, self-contained environment that is linked to those around it through a series of tunnels and tubes that allow easy movement from habitat to habitat. However, each of these habitats can be isolated from the others instantly if anything happens that would otherwise jeopardize the integrity of the network.

The people that live in The Dregs do so because they choose to live ‘off the grid’ and away from the corporate landscape of the rest of humanity. The Dregs are nearly self-sufficient, requiring only minimal food-stuffs to be imported. By mining the surrounding asteroids, the inhabitants of The Dregs are able to produce metals, machines and equipment, and even drinkable water, oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to fuel their ship’s drive systems. They are even able to export certain products, such as drive systems and super-dense hull plating that cannot be made as cheaply anywhere else in the system due to labor laws and the constraints of forming the material’s matrices in gravity fields.

One of the largest buyers for such components is the conglomerate, although they would never publicly admit to it. All transactions are handled by third parties and usually take the form of commodity exchanges since the people of The Dregs do not use standard credits, or give them any value at all.

Most of the people that live in The Dregs do so by choice, and even though their lives are difficult, they earn their living through hard work and toil, but live happily and feel fulfillment at the end of the day.

Features/Places of Note

Government

Legislative/operational policy is decided by public assembly and debate that is presided over by a minimum of 99 heads of family.

Most policy is debated and decided upon by the council of family heads and once a decision is made and agreed upon, it is posted publically and can be stopped before it is officially inacted if 50%+1 of registered voters disagree with the resolution.

Similarly, any registered voter may bring a resolution before the assembly, make a case for it in teh public forum/debate, and have it posted as a proposed policy, at which point it is voted upon by all registered voters, including the heads of household that make up the current counsil of family heads. If such a resolution should receive 50%+1 positive votes from the registered voter base, then it is ratified into action.

Any resolutions can be repealed/removed from operation by similar means. Someone must publicly speak out at the forum to ask for its removal, at which point it is voted upon just like any act that is working to be made official.

History

Spoilers

Status: