Elite Dangerous System Col 285 Sector WL-L c8-40 - The Grand Tour 10, 11 - Piper - Gladys Thrift - Hope - Gold

Elite Dangerous 010, 11  Col 285 Sector WL-L c8-40
Piper Sanctuary - Gladys Thrift-Always Loved
Hope Beacon - Gold's Chemical Hub

The Grand Tour, PAGE 10, 11  (There are TWO videos on this post, both only feature 2 stations.)
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.  :^)

07 Orbital 00 
Piper Sanctuary 
Commercial Outpost (Plutus)      
DOCK:  Medium

And… Piper Sanctuary.  This is one of two “Piper” stations.  Both are named after our younger Schnauzer.  She’s gone now, but still missed.  Schnauzers are among the most loving dogs in existence.

Piper's problem was not that she loved, but she loved too deeply.  She loved all of us, but her 'person' was my mother-in-law, Georgette, who I called Mom.
When we lost her, Piper lost her entire world.  She went from being a joyful, outgoing, happy girl, to a sad, lost little puppy.  She started being afraid to walk on the floor.  We had to lay small carpets in paths through the house so she could get around.  She stopped caring about eating; we had to sit with her and encourage her to eat.  She moped, and she quit playing with her toys, even her favorite one.
You read about this in romance novels, and it sounds like a made-up thing... but Piper literally pined away for Mom.  She only had 2 things left that brought her joy.  One was when Monique's sister came to visit; Piper mistook her for Mom, and was overjoyed to see her.  The other was our daily walks.  Without fail, she was always excited to go for a walk.  Her fears left her, she was happy, confident, and acted like she owned the entire world.
She finally joined Mom in heaven a little over a year ago.  We still miss her.

07A Orbital 00
Gladys Thrift – Always Loved        (Was Asimov)
Coriolis Starport      
DOCK:  Large

I mentioned with “Satilla Estates”, that Mom has become the de facto matriarch for the extended Thrift family.  Gladys Thrift (we knew her as “Nanny” was Mom’s mother, and the family matriarch for decades, until her passing in the early 1990s.  Nanny was always the home we all came back to. She’s still missed by those of us fortunate enough to have known her.
She loved everybody.  My Dad taught me how to fish, but Nanny taught me to love fishing.  She was always willing to drop whatever she was doing, walk the half-mile to the river, and spend the day fishing with me.

She used to tell me if a fish is big enough to catch, it's big enough to eat.  She'd put the smaller ones in a Mason jar.  One day we got back to the house, ready to clean our catch.  She poured the Mason jar into the sink, only to see some of her fish go down the drain.
That was when she looked at me and said "Maybe not ALL of them are big enough to keep."
It's a memory that always makes me smile now.
I've also seen her fighting with a water moccasin that decided to steal fish right off of our stringer.  She won.  We ate all the fish we caught that day, including the one that snake thought he could take.
There are a lifetime of memories, but those are two of my favorites.

07A Orbital 01
Hope Beacon
Industrial Outpost (Vulcan)
 DOCK: Medium

Not his first or last name, but I’m going to give Hope Beacon to William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), because I like his stories.
He was a legendary British author who perfectly bridges the gap between classic maritime exploration and cosmic sci-fi horror. He is widely recognized by genre historians as a brilliant, foundational pioneer of cosmic horror and dying-earth speculative fiction.
He wrote the monumental 1912 speculative novel The Night Land, a massive inspiration for later generations of hard sci-fi authors. Set millions of years in the future after our Sun has completely died out, the remaining remnants of humanity live inside a colossal, metal pyramid called the "Great Redoubt," defending themselves against towering, silent cosmic entities and geometric alien abominations prowling the pitch-black wasteland.
Hodgson created Carnacki, one of literature's very first "occult detectives," who used early scientific machinery, photographic plates, and electrical fields to track down reality-warping anomalies.
Hodgson spent his youth as a merchant sailor and physical culture expert, surviving brutal ocean voyages. His real-world claustrophobia and psychological trauma from being trapped on a wooden vessel surrounded by a vast, pitch-black, uncaring ocean heavily inspired his iconic Sargasso Sea Stories—perfectly matching the psychological toll experienced by deep-space pilots trapped inside a ship's hull.

Personal note – Over the years I’ve run across some of his Carnacki stories, and enjoyed them a lot. It’s kind of cool to find a great writer from the early days of Sci-Fi, and realize I’ve read his work!

07A Surface 00
Golds Chemical Hub
Industrial Settlement Large (Gaea)
DOCK: Large

H. L. Gold (Horace Leonard Gold, 1914–1996) was an influential American science fiction writer and editor. Alongside John W. Campbell, he is universally credited with completely reshaping 1950s science fiction by launching Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.
Before Gold, sci-fi magazines focused almost exclusively on gadgets, rocketry, and mad scientists. Gold revolutionized the genre by shifting the focus entirely to sociology, psychology, and satire. He demanded stories that explored how regular people—like corporate desk workers, interstellar merchants, or stressed colonists—would actually react to advanced technology.
Under his leadership, Galaxy published absolute masterpieces like Ray Bradbury’s The Fireman (the early draft of Fahrenheit 451) and Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man.
While serving in the Pacific theater during World War II, Gold developed a severe, debilitating case of acute agoraphobia. It became so extreme that he spent the peak of his legendary editing career completely confined to his small New York apartment, terrified to step outside. He single-handedly managed, edited, and controlled one of the most successful galactic literary empires of the 20th century entirely via telephone and mail.