Verne's Yards

Most deep-space vessels are built at Verne Station, L5, where the shipyards run on skilled hands that are suddenly scarce. A boom in settlement-bound freighters has outrun the trained fitters and welders, and the station is fighting over how to fill the gap: recruit from Earth's overstocked labor pools, poach from the L4 Habitats, or lean harder on automation that the yard's proud maintainer culture distrusts. Build slots are now booked years out and tied to transfer windows, so a slipped launch cascades across the whole calendar. Whoever controls the yards' throughput quietly controls who gets to expand into the outer system.