DOC-03 · PLANETARY GUIDE · SYSTEM DOSSIER

Broken Wheel

TriStar Universe Divergence Notice

This article documents the TriStar Interstellar campaign universe. Canon Broken Wheel is a PDZ capital that suffers a humiliating pirate bank raid in 3069 and joins the Filtvelt Coalition in 3072. In this universe the raid never happens, the Coalition never exists, and Broken Wheel occupies the strangest and most comfortable chair in the Federated Suns: the official capital of a region that is actually run from somewhere else.

Broken Wheel is a hot, dry, hardworking plains world of 131 million dryland ranchers, mine crews, and hover jockeys — and, by New Avalon's org chart, the military capital of the rimward Periphery March. The AFFS's regional headquarters sits in Tripet; the region's actual decisions are made eighteen light-years away on Memphis; and the durable, productive, entirely unspoken arrangement between those two facts is the Quiet File's finest local monument. The reports go to Broken Wheel. The direction comes from Memphis. Everyone involved has agreed not to notice, for two hundred years, professionally.

Hover Country

Everything on Broken Wheel is named for the wheel — the moon Axle, the landmasses Magg, Tyre, and Valvo, the capital Tripet — and everything on Broken Wheel moves like it resents the ground. The great arid plains of Tyre and Valvo are the finest hovercraft country in the March: hard-pan flats, shallow salt seas, and 47-degree heat that punishes tracked logistics and rewards anything riding an air cushion. The planet's culture followed its terrain — ranching by hover, hauling by hover, and racing by hover, the Valvo Circuit being to Broken Wheel approximately what the water is to Lackland. The March recruits its drivers here the way Sherwood grows its rangers: by letting the planet do the training.

The Official Capital

As a Polymorphous Defense Zone capital, Broken Wheel hosts the AFFS's regional command apparatus: the PDZ staff, the March Militia depots, the paperwork of empire. For most of the Succession Wars this made Tripet a garrison town in the classic style — underfunded, far from the flagpole, and administratively certain it was in charge of a region that fed, armed, shipped, and defended itself through channels that appeared in no AFFS ledger. The relationship matured into something genuinely functional: PDZ staff officers learned that a quiet word at the TriStar freight office moved supplies faster than a signed requisition, Memphis learned that New Avalon's forms, properly filled, made excellent camouflage, and the Quiet File noted with approval that the March's official and actual capitals had achieved full interoperability without either admitting the other existed.

The 33rd

The 33rd Broken Wheel Cavalry, raised 3050, is the planet distilled: hypermobile 'Mech and hover forces with organic aerospace liaison, doctrine written directly from Clan-front after-action reports, and a rank structure heavily salted with Valvo Circuit racers who discovered that the Guards would pay them to do the only thing they'd ever wanted to do, at scale, with guns. The 33rd screens, raids, and reacts; in the Dominion rotation it is the reaction force, and its response-time standards are set by a regimental culture in which arriving second is a personality flaw. The regiment's crest is the planet's namesake wheel — broken, and moving anyway.

Broken Wheel in 3070

Hot, dry, prosperous, and double-hatted: the PDZ apparatus in Tripet, the 33rd's cantonments on the Tyre flats, the zenith recharge trade, the ranching and salt-chemical exports, and the Valvo Circuit running every dry season, which is every season. Canon's Filtvelt accession (3072) never occurs (see: D-009) — a world whose banks stayed unrobbed and whose cavalry stays home had nothing to secede about.

Differences from the Canonical Timeline

Cross-reference: D-005 (Fugeres corsairs), D-009, D-010, D-011.

Rimrunner — all Broken Wheel entries →