Elite Dangerous 020 Col 285 Sector WL-L c8-40
Davies Dredging Site - Rodgers Metallurgic Territory - Leinster Point
Pohl's Deposit - Richardson Dredging Territory
The Grand Tour, PAGE 20
NOTE: All 138 facilities built in this system are listed (and shown) in order of distance from the sun. At least, according to the in-game architect’s view. There's a total of slightly over 18 hours of video, so the video, and the descriptions, are broken into smaller portions across multiple posts.
Some descriptions were written by myself, some with the help of AI. I've personally edited all of them, so if you must blame someone, blame me. :^)
10B Surface 00
Davies Dredging Site
Mining Settlement Medium (Mantus)
DOCK: Medium
L. P. Davies (Leslie Purnell Davies, 1914–1988) was a British author who mastered a unique blend of psychological mystery, techno-thriller, and science fiction. Writing mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, his work focused on mind alteration, memory loss, and characters questioning the validity of their own realities. Sounds like real nightmare material...
Prominent examples include his debut telepathy thriller The Paper Dolls (1964) and his simulated reality novel The Artificial Man (1965).
Davies preferred to call his work "psychic fiction" rather than pure sci-fi. Instead of building massive alien worlds, he used sci-fi concepts— memory-wiping drugs, telepathic hive-minds, parallel dimensions—as a backdrop for standard detective stories.
Davies had an incredibly varied career. He served in North Africa, France, and Italy during WWII with the Royal Army Medical Corps. After the war, he worked as a pharmacist, an optometrist, a postmaster, and a gift shop owner. His medical background in pharmacology and optics heavily influenced his frequent story themes regarding vision anomalies, hallucination, and loss of memory.
His 1968 novel The Alien—about an amnesiac man who might actually be a surgically altered alien sleeper agent—was adapted into the 1972 Hollywood sci-fi thriller film The Groundstar Conspiracy.
Davies was notoriously protective of his privacy and published under at least 10 different pseudonyms to mask how incredibly prolific he was. He did this so successfully that in the 1960s, sci-fi magazines were inadvertently printing multiple stories written by him in the exact same issue, believing they were supporting entirely different, independent authors.
10B Surface 01
Rodgers Metallurgic Territory
Mining Settlement Medium (Orcus)
DOCK: Large
Alan Rodgers (1959–2014) was an award-winning American author and editor whose work spanned horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction. He was a prominent figure in the 1980s and 1990s speculative fiction boom.
Rodgers published several notable novels including Fire (1990), Night (1991), Pandora (1994), and Bone Music (1995). His debut novel, Blood of the Children, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.
He served as the Associate Editor for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine from 1984 to 1987, and also was the solo head editor of its popular sister publication, Night Cry.
Later in his career he co-wrote Battlestar Galactica: Rebellion (2002) alongside original series star Richard Hatch. He won a Bram Stoker Award on his very first try for his 1987 dark fantasy novelette, "The Boy Who Came Back From the Dead".
10Ba Orbital 00
Leinster Point
Mining/Industrial Installation (Phorcys)
DOCK: NONE
Murray Leinster (the primary pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, 1896–1975) is widely revered as the "Dean of Science Fiction." Over a brilliant career spanning six decades, he wrote more than 1,500 short stories and dozens of novels.
He is single-handedly credited with inventing or popularizing several core tropes that form the entire backbone of modern science fiction, including parallel universes, structured space medics, and the literal phrase "First Contact".
His Hugo Award-winning 1945 novelette, First Contact, laid down the logical, suspenseful rules for what happens when two completely different space-faring civilizations encounter one another in deep space. Instead of an immediate war, it focused on the stand-off between two captains trying to communicate without accidentally giving away the coordinates of their home planets.
Decades before game loops offered specialized career paths, Leinster wrote the Med Service and Colonial Survey series. These stories followed interstellar professionals—like Calhoun and his alien pet Murgatroyd—who traveled to remote, isolated human star colonies to solve ecological crises, genetic plagues, and terraforming malfunctions. His groundbreaking 1934 story, "Sidewise in Time", introduced the concept of a cosmic disaster that shatters reality, causing different patches of the Earth to display alternate timelines. The real-world award for alternate history literature—the Sidewise Award—is named in his honor.
Leinster literally Predicted the Internet in 1946: Decades before personal computers existed, Leinster published a short story called A Logic Named Joe.
It described a global network of desktop terminals called "Logics" connected to a central server. In his story, people used Logics to stream entertainment, look up recipes, buy items, and look at data—and the plot revolves around what happens when the network accidentally becomes self-aware and starts answering users' most dangerous secret questions.
(Personal Note: I love this story, have read, and re-read this particular one across decades of my life!)
Leinster didn't just imagine advanced technology; he built it. He held multiple official United States patents, including Patent #2,727,427 for a system used in composite special-effects photography. invention laid the technical foundation for the "front projection" visual effects later used to create realistic alien landscapes in 2001: A Space Odyssey (and others.)
10Ba Surface 00
Pohl’s Deposit
Mining Settlement Medium (Mantus)
DOCK: Medium
I eventually wound up getting 4 different “Pohl” facilities with the random name generator, you'll see them sprinkled throughout this project.
Frederik Pohl (1919–2013) was a titan of American science fiction whose career spanned nearly 75 years.
He shaped the genre as a legendary author, a literary agent, and a magazine editor. His writing is famous for its razor-sharp satirical look at consumerism and corporate overreach. He was a master of the grim realities of space exploration
His 1977 masterpiece novel, Gateway, focused on human explorers gambling their lives to pilot abandoned alien starships. The book achieved an unmatched feat by winning every single major genre award in a single year, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards.
As the editor of pioneering pulp magazines like Galaxy Science Fiction and If, Pohl discovered and launched the careers of iconic sci-fi giants, including Larry Niven and Keith Laumer.
The Only Dual Champion: Pohl holds a unique record in science fiction history. He is the only individual to ever win the prestigious Hugo Award as both a Best Writer and a Best Professional Editor.
Long before political or social subgenres became common, Pohl co-wrote a 1953 novel called The Space Merchants. It accurately predicted massive modern societal shifts, including aggressive global advertising, global warming, mega-corporations taking over the roles of governments, and the aggressive monetization of everyday coffee and consumer goods.
Even in his 90s, Pohl never lost his passion for the genre. He started a personal internet blog called The Way the Future Blogs. His internet commentary was so sharp and beloved that he won a brand new Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2010 when he was 90 years old.
NOTE: This station was really hard to get ANY kind of a good name. I can’t begin to describe how thrilled I was when “Pohl Deposit” rolled. Talk about winning the lottery… this was a massive jackpot! Later I rolled several other “Pohl” facilities. Kept every single one of them!!
10Ba Surface 01
Richardson Dredging Territory
Mining Settlement Medium (Orcus)
DOCK: Large
Robert S. Richardson (Robert Shirley Richardson, 1902–1981) was an acclaimed American astronomer and astrophysicist who also wrote hard science fiction under the pen name Philip Latham.
He spent decades working at some of the world's most prestigious astronomical research bases, making him one of the few golden age sci-fi writers who actually mapped the stars for a living.
Richardson spent over 25 years as a staff astronomer at the Hale/Mount Wilson Observatory during the peak of its discoveries, later becoming the assistant director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. He specialized in solar physics, studying sunspots and the chemical composition of the sun's spectrum.
Using his "Philip Latham" pseudonym, he brought rigorous, real-world orbital mechanics and planetary science to legendary sci-fi magazines like Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Magazine. He published several space-exploration novels, including Five Against Venus (1952) and Missing Men of Saturn (1953).
Because of his dual expertise in hard astronomy and storytelling, Hollywood hired him as a technical advisor. He helped calculate realistic space flight trajectories and visual effects for classic sci-fi films, including George Pal's Destination Moon (1950) and When Worlds Collide (1951). His real-world contributions to mapping our solar system were so significant that an actual solar system body was named after him. If you look up Asteroid 1211 Bressole, you will find its designation was officially chosen by Richardson, and he has another minor planet, Asteroid 4423 Golden, named in honor of his family lineage.
Long before modern sci-fi started playing with complex physics, Richardson wrote a 1950 short story called "The Xi Effect". The plot centered on a terrifying cosmic anomaly where a ripple in the fabric of space begins shrinking the electromagnetic spectrum. As a result, colors, radio waves, and light waves slowly disappear one by one, leaving humanity blind in a shrinking universe—a concept that matches modern cosmic horror.