Also Known As:
Bolt And Bolt Interplanetary Refuel and Repair Station, The Rivet, B&BR
Zone:
Outer Ring
Location:
Tradelanes between the Jupiter system and Saturn
Details:
With thanks to RagetheMage!
A waystation on the tradelanes between Jupiter and Saturn, the B&BR is compared to, looks like, and in fact is, a vast interplanetary fuel station—the largest such station, at least outside of any planetary system.
The Bluesky station was originally made by ASR to build dreadnaught-class ships. The downside of this is that the B&BR has a military-industrial look that sets it apart from the more glamorous Blueskies. It’s a central hexagonal hub with a long, slender dock, a functional but unimaginative shape that gives the station its “rivet” name. On the positive side, no matter how big, how weird, or how semisentient your ship is, there’ll be no problem finding a berth.
Owned and operated by the Bolt and Bolt Company, the Bolt and Bolt Rivet Rig maintains a careful neutrality. Visitors are asked to leave their conflicts on the dock. Customers bringing a bad attitude—or unnecessary corp heat—will find service at the various diners, shipyards, and entertainment dens somewhere between chilly, hostile, or simply absent, and bored security guards might find said customers a lot more interesting than just standing around and guarding an interplanetary fuel pump.
While you’re at The Bolt and Bolt Rivet Rig, you may want to visit:
♃ The Pier. The defining feature of the Rivet, this spindle-like dock is easily twice the list of the five-mile-wide station. Its halls are a hive of activity. Large corporate ships tend to dock at the far end of the Pier, where most of the work is handled by drones and robots. Smaller ships or wealthier customers looking for a personal touch may moor at the higher stations, where living hands handle the repairs and unloading…and for a few creds in the right hands, have stories from across Sol.
♃ kafe Grigoriya, which caters to a quiet and demanding clientele: TTI employees. Officially the Rivet Rig is non-partisan, but its parajovian location brings in a lot of TTI traffic, and the Russian revival feel of Grigoriya and the quiet, intense atmosphere make them feel welcome. Grigori herself has declared herself a “meat architect,” and her food pretty much justifies the title.
♃ 20W80 may be the least healthy dining establishment in Sol, definitely in the inner ring. When the station was first in service and the full hub hadn’t been built out, 20W80 was the diner that originally served mountains of fried grub to the dock crew. The food there is a heart-clogging hodge-podge of old school prefabricated carry out sandwiches and the products of the massive three-tiered grill. After decades of use, the layers of carbonized grease are thicker than the original steel. That, according to the patrons, is fifty years of flavor, right there.
♃ “The shop” has no name, and there’s all sorts of other shops to check out, but it’s a particularly massive establishment that’s grown like retail kudzu over the years. It’s located right by the join of pier and rivet head, spread across all five levels of the pier. The shop has the usual run of preprinted snacks, imported booze, bootleg unregulated “Fullnight” stims that work for three days and have all sorts of exciting side effects, and a random and weirdly placed array of adult novelties. The shop’s specialty is a sprawling selection of gifts to bring home for the family after a long, long absence, and the proprietor, a horse named Sadie, aggressively stocks gifts with limited production contracts, handmade goods, out-of-prints, and other “unique to the shop” items.
Need to Know (before you go)
“Leave your cares at the door” isn’t just a motto, it’s a warning. Out in the Big Empty there’s no room for hostility, and folks coming to B&BR with a grudge may find themselves with a quick patch and a “get your ass out of here” instead of a repair.
GM Notes
Bolt and Bolt, Salvage, Shipping, and Repair
The Bolt clan runs the Bluesky, aiming for neutrality at almost any cost. tedBolt and wesleyBolt, a gecko father and son team, purchased and rebranded the station, taking out huge loans to get the business up and running.
wesleyBolt has enough cybernetic replacements to look more like a cog than a gecko (and his coppery skin doesn’t help). He loves working in the ship-building side of the station, and getting his sticky hands into the latest ships. His father, tedBolt, has deeper pockets, and has a lifetime of experience tweaking and improving ASR designs, but over the years has become something of a reclusive genius. The deep space bluesky suits him well.
Spare Bolts:
MayBolt: mother to wesley, May is just as brilliant as her husband, specializing in servicing cogs with problems that defied ASR’s rank-and-file medics.
Raz “Meteor” Bolt: a badger and former Pulse athletic celebrity, Raz leads the corp’s security team, and comes out of Pulse retirement occasionally to train new macros.
DannelBolt: Another badger, a young member of the clan with a knack for robotics. As a mechanical prodigy, there’s a question as to whether he’ll be heir to the B&BR legacy, or return to ASR where his talents might be more fully realized.
Other NPCs:
♃ rikkSkriberr: Head of R&D for MarsCo’s BlueSky division, rikk has a lair/lab hidden somewhere in the maintenance ducts of the station. For a couch potato, he has an awful lot of political power, and few people know the fat, friendly raccoon lateral at the local greasy spoon has the station’s shutdown codes locked in his neural suite…
Plot Seeds
♃ The Visitor: Progenitus has heard rumors of a new living ship design. Yes, TTI is secretive, but the faceless dock workers can sometimes move in and out of the corporation beneath notice, and the ones that don’t fit into TTI’s claustrophobic corporate culture often escape to the B&BR. Progenitus is volatile enough that they may storm in to tear apart the peace of the station. The ship-building and repair world is a second city in the Pier, and finding the right paws to grease to get that information before the Progenitus Crusade docks is going to be a social and financial challenge.
♃ Renewal Notice: The Rivet represents a safe space for travelers between worlds, and there’s a long journey between Jupiter and Saturn. The friendly, neutral territory is very welcome on the long, empty spacelanes. But some power operating outside the corporation (perhaps a cult with a passionate, anti-corp agenda) has been targeting the cargo freighters running fuel between the Bolt and Rivet Rig and the jovian Nephilim Mana Platform. Each fuel run is a massive investment for the Rivet, and they’ve lost two in a row. Clan Bolt has a lot of allies looking for the culprits, but the big empty beyond Jupiter gives a clever opponent a vast space to hide in.
♃ The Bear: Possibly a defector from TTI, possibly a current employee of TTI, possibly a member of some rogue third party that really likes big guns, “Ivan” has been selling weapons and military secrets for a great many years, a nice little racket on the periphery of TTI’s territory. Is he legit? Hard to say, he’s at least a triple-agent, and it’s only is very deep pockets that have kept him off B&BR’s “naughty” list for the last few years.
♃ Toy Story: “The shop” is a great place to dump a cargo hold of otherwise useless knickknacks, but beware: Sadie has the outer appearance of everybody’s mom, but a heart of ice. Rumor has it that last year when Vinn Shipping Ltd. sold her a load of…”exclusive”…plush toys, which later turned up at every other spacelane rest stop on the outward side of Sol, they never found Vinn. But Sadie did acquire an extra large stuffed weasel for her window display. Sadie is an easy “Mrs. Smith” for simple shipping and delivery contracts, but she’s a vengeful old neddy and hires under-the-counter help for any number of slights that most merchants would laugh off and write off.