  Context The Vela Molecular Ridge is one of the nearest (700 pc) giant
molecular cloud (GMC) complexes hosting intermediate-mass (up to early B, late
O stars) star formation, and is located in the outer Galaxy, inside the
Galactic plane. Vela C is one of the GMCs making up the Vela Molecular Ridge,
and exhibits both sub-regions of robust and sub-regions of more quiescent star
formation activity, with both low- and intermediate(high)-mass star formation
in progress. Aims We aim to study the individual and global properties of dense
dust cores in Vela C, and aim to search for spatial variations in these
properties which could be related to different environmental properties and/or
evolutionary stages in the various sub-regions of Vela C. Methods We mapped the
submillimetre (345 GHz) emission from vela C with LABOCA (beam size 19.2",
spatial resolution ~0.07 pc at 700 pc) at the APEX telescope. We used the
clump-finding algorithm CuTEx to identify the compact submillimetre sources. We
also used SIMBA (250 GHz) observations, and Herschel and WISE ancillary data.
The association with WISE red sources allowed the protostellar and starless
cores to be separated, whereas the Herschel dataset allowed the dust
temperature to be derived for a fraction of cores. The protostellar and
starless core mass functions (CMFs) were constructed following two different
approaches, achieving a mass completeness limit of 3.7 Msun. Results We
retrieved 549 submillimetre cores, 316 of which are starless and mostly
gravitationally bound (therefore prestellar in nature). Both the protostellar
and the starless CMFs are consistent with the shape of a Salpeter initial mass
function in the high-mass part of the distribution. Clustering of cores at
scales of 1--6 pc is also found, hinting at fractionation of magnetised,
turbulent gas.
