Aurex

The Aurex is the Astral Consortium's own flagship extraction hull — a bucket-wheel excavator built for the order's extraction concessions, not a hull any shipyard builds and any station resells. It never reaches a general market. It is sold in exactly one place, to exactly the commanders the Consortium has decided it can trust with it.

Built for the Claim, Not the Belt

Where the fleet's other mining hulls work a belt one load at a time, the Aurex is built around a Consortium extraction concession — the same claim machinery that already backs the order's convoys and its arboreta, scaled down to a single commander's hull. It is the industrial peak of everything the Consortium already stands for: an order that measures its own reach in tonnage moved and seedlings shipped, not in territory held.

Sold Only at Consortium Spire

Consortium Spire is the only station that carries the Aurex, and the order ledger it keeps on every commander decides who is even offered one. The charter shop only opens the listing to a commander whose ledger already reads On record or higher — an unrecorded commander can dock, trade, and fly every other hull in the fleet, but the Aurex itself stays off the board until the Consortium's own books say otherwise.

Why the Consortium Guards It

Putting Consortium-built claim machinery into an unrecorded commander's hands is exactly the risk the order's ledger exists to price out. The Aurex is not withheld out of suspicion of any one pilot — it is withheld the same way every one of the Consortium's extraction concessions already is, granted only once a track record backs the grant.

Every other hull in the fleet, you buy. The Aurex, the Consortium decides to sell you.