Kaldres

The leading food producer in all of charted space, Kaldres is able to export edible items at an astounding rate. This fact is largely thanks to several bold, new concepts introduced several decades ago for sustaining numerous crops of various natural and alien foods, on multiple-stage, partially anti-grav platforms one atop the other. New technology and other practical additions allowed water and light to be recycled down the stages at higher efficiency than in other, similar vertical farms. Dozens of corporate owned and trust sponsored mega-farms exist on the planet's surface.

Even before mankind left Earth for the first time, the ability to produce foods without soils had been around for many centuries but implementation on such a grand scale had never been tried before. Numerous lifts are used to transport harvester droids between platforms. Astrum, eager to contribute toward preventing any further food shortages in more remote regions of space, provided additional workers in the form of non-violent prisoners for work-release.

Kaldres has a Gateway Station in orbit for all off-world traffic exchange to the planets surface. All traffic, except for food transports, is required to utilize the chartered shuttle services. The food transports are slow, but built sturdily to withstand entry and are able to house 300,000 kilotons of produce. These transports are also outfitted with internal slipstream mapping systems that allow them to bypass the use of traditional gateways like Tal-Eiffel.

The gateway exists as a precaution against outside contamination of the planet's crop-yields which exist largely without pesticide or chemical additives. Incoming cargo is inventoried and offloaded into secondary shuttles for last-mile delivery. Such precautions make commerce to and from the world in materials other than food slightly more expensive than anywhere else in the system.