Driver Atomic Pc Pad Converter Money

In 2014, Atomic announced that they'd teamed up with amp-modelling software company Studio Devil to develop the Amplifire, a new hardware guitar-amp. If the Amplifire is on a desktop or being controlled via a MIDI foot controller, you won't necessarily have to worry about its three programmable footswitches, but. Big Three collaborate on electric car research, July, page 40 Cheaper lithium batteries, November, page 41 Chrysler electric minivan sets record, June, page 38 Clear gasoline, October, page 42 Compressed natural gas powered vehicles, June, page 33 Converting CFC-12 air conditioners to R-134a, September, page 59.

There is a long history of SF novels about interstellar free traders eking out a marginal existence on the fringes of the huge trader corporations, from Andre Norton's to the series by John Maddox Roberts. Go to and read the entries 'ECONOMY', 'FREE TRADERS', 'PIRACY', 'REPLICATOR', 'TRADE' and 'TRADE FEDERATION'. Don't forget the entry in this website about As mentioned below, if you want to play around with interstellar trading, or even try doing a full simulation (to do worldbuilding for creating the background of your new novel), I'd suggest getting a copy of. Written with help from a real live economist, this allows one to model interplanetary and interstellar trade with equations and everything.

It has detailed analysis of the economics of interstellar trade, and a system of equations to model trade routes and economic demands. Sometimes the traders live in large 'clan-ships', developing a 'trader culture.'

Each ship is a world, carrying the entire clan. See the article at TV Tropes. Novels including this include CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY by Robert Heinlein, STAR WAYS aka THE PEREGRINE by Poul Anderson, the Cities in Flight novels of James Blish, MERCHANTER'S LUCK and FINITY'S END by C. Cherryh, RITE OF PASSAGE by Alexi Panshin, A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY by Vernor Vinge.

Sometimes these trader cultures in large clan-ships have a, where they have a monopoly on trade since they control all access to space. If people living on planets want to engage in interstellar trade, they have to go through the thalassocrats. The leader of the thalassocrats is of course called the thalassiarch. Traveller type 'A' Free Trader Beowulf, mesh model by (Cyberia23) This section is basically a rough outline of Rick Robinson's.

You'd probably be better off reading the full article but some people want executive summaries. Rick starts with certain assumptions and follows them to various conclusions about the interstellar economy. You can alter some of the assumptions yourself to tweak the economy to suit your science fictional background. Merchant Starship Costs Assumption: starships in the interstellar empire are equivalent to present-day jet airliners. They go fast, can carry lots of people and cargo, and are the most advanced technology that can be massed produced.

The ticket prices will not be similar between airliners and starships because FTL interstellar travel will probably take more than a few hours for the trip. Therefore the starships will do fewer trips per year than airliners, so the starship passenger ticket price (and cargo waybill) will have to cover a larger share of the starship's yearly expense. For comparison purposes we need an airliner's average cost of running, but the corporations are remarkably closed-lipped about that. Using a long series of estimations whose details can be found in Rick's article he concludes that the annual operating cost for an airliner is about $30 million (not counting fuel, landing fees, and taxes). An airliner's purchase price is $100 million so one year's uses costs about one-third of the purchase price.

A cargo jet can carry 50 tons so its purchase price is about $2 million per ton of cargo capacity. Assumption: starships are strictly, they use to transfer passengers and cargo between the starship and the planet. Assumption: starship purchase price will only be about $1 million per ton of cargo capacity instead of $2 million, because starships are orbit-to-orbit, need no landing gear, need no wings, can use lighter structure because they accelerate under 1 g, and we will assume they can carry twice as much cargo per deadweight () as a cargo jet. Assumption: cargo starship operating cost is similar to cargo jet. Therefore it costs $300,000 per ton of cargo capacity per year to run a cargo starship. This ignores taxes, station docking fees, and fuel.

Assumption: starship fuel is cheaper than cargo jet. Big assumption since JP-4 is about $1.39 per gallon. (ed note: starships are going to require.) Assumption: the service life of a merchant starship is 30 years. So the starship initial purchase price is about 1/10th of the overall lifetime service cost ($1 million / (30 * $300,000)). Actually it will be closer to 1/5th due to the interest on the purchase loan. With creative maintenance, the service life might be longer than 30 years, see below. • Question: how many cargos can a merchant starship carry in 1 year?

That is, assuming a full cargo turnover at each port of call, how many one-way runs can the ship make? Assumption: a one-way trip takes three months. From departure planet orbit to FTL flight to arrival planet orbit.

This is comparable to the Age of Sail. Assumption: each trip requires one month for servicing, maintenance, selling the cargo, buying new cargo for the next run. This makes each trip four months from departure to departure, or three cargos per year. This means the ship owner must earn $100,000 of profit per ton of cargo. That is, selling price at destination MINUS purchase price at origin must be $100,000 or more. Therefore if the cargo was available for free at the origin the minimum selling price at destination is $100,000 per ton, or $100 per kilogram. The implication is that only very high value cargo can be profitably shipped interstellar.

Assumption, average of 1/2 of retail price goes to shipping cost. Therefore the minimum price of interstellar imported goods are $200 per kilogram.

The implication is that the only things shipped interstellar would be luxury goods, items with a very high value per weight. Jewelry, spices, fine liquor, designer-label clothing. Maybe some high value per weight industrial goods, such as microchips.

Not high mass items such as sports car, not with a $100,000 shipping charge added to the car's price. Bottom line is that you are not going to ship bulk goods like wheat, not at $100,000 per ton you ain't. Assumption: the Gross Planetary Product (GPP) of a colony planet is $100,000 (about three times that of present day USA). If 2% of citizen income goes to imported luxuries and high-value capital goods, it comes out to $2000 per capita, with $1000 going to shipping cost. Assumption: Colony planet population is 10 million. Therefore the total shipping cost of imported goods is $10 billion.

Calculating backwards, this implies that 100,000 tons of interstellar cargo arrives at the colony planet annually. The colony must export the same amount or it will run a trade deficit and import prices will rise. This is because if they don't export, the cargo starships cannot find cargoes to transport and sell at the next destination. Starships with empty cargo holds cost nearly as much to run as with full holds. They will have to make up the shortfall somehow, so they will raise the price of what they sell at this planet. Take simplest model: two planets trading with each other.

Each year, 100,000 tons moves in each direction, or 200,000 tons total. Assumption: average cargo starship carries 1000 tons. This is less than seagoing cargo ships, but more than cargo airplane. This means there has to be 200 annual cargo loadings and unloadings to accommodate 200,000 tons.

Since each ship can make 3 one-way legs per year, then each ship will do three loadings. The implication is that the two planet's combined merchant fleet is between 65 to 70 ships. Of course if each ship carries more than 1000 tons then fewer ships are needed. If the ships can carry 5000 tons then you would only need 13 or 14 ships. In practice this would not work very well, since the larger the cargo hold, the more difficult it is to find enough cargo on the planet to fill it.A trade network of a dozen colony worlds will support a few dozen to a few hundred cargo ships depending upon cargo hold size. Click for larger image Passenger Traffic Airliners carry about four to five passengers per ton of equivalent cargo capacity.

However airliner trips are only a few hours. Interstellar passengers cannot live in their seats for three months. Assumption: Each interstellar passenger berth equals one ton of equivalent cargo capacity. This includes the passenger, their baggage, the berth, apportioned galley/diner space, and food. The direct result is that the cost of the passenger ticket is the same as the cost of one ton of cargo: $100,000. You are not going to get much tourist traffic, not at those prices.

A few rich people and business travellers. Problem: you must have large scale passenger traffic for the colony network to exist at all. In a word: Colonization. $100,000 per colonist is prohibitive.

Probably several times that for extra stuff like tractors and horses. Even worse, since the new colony will not have any exports, the cargo starship will have not cargo buy for the next trip. So the starship captain will have to charge round-trip prices for a one-way trip. It could total to around $1 million per colonist.

The problem is that our assumptions have made it so that only millionaires can afford the ticket, but millionaires do not want to go live on some jerkwater frontier world. Sending 10,000 colonists to a new world could cost $10 billion, which is a huge amount for private industry or governments to spend, regardless of the potential value of the planet. Our price schedule has made interstellar colonization unlikely in the first place. We will have to change some of the assumptions.

Lucky for us, there is some room to bring the costs down. We can make the merchant starships cheaper, or make them faster.

We shall do both. Assumption: annual starship service cost is $100,000 per ton of cargo capacity, not $300,000.

This is reasonable, since starships are not stressed as much as airliners (at least not orbit-to-orbit starships). Assumption: starship purchase price is $500,000 per ton of cargo capacity instead of $1 million, since starships are build for long-haul reliability.

With the 30 year service life, the purchase price is now 1/6th of the total lifetime service cost instead of 1/10th. Within interest payments this may be closer to 1/3th. Assumption: a one-way trip takes 35 days instead of three months. This means the cargo starship can deliver 10 cargoes per year instead of three. Assume 27 days is transit, 8 days is for servicing, maintenance, selling the cargo, and buying new cargo for the next run.

Crunching the numbers, the minimum profit per ton of cargo or passenger ticket is now $10,000 instead of $100,000. The cost for colonists (provisions and no return cargo) is probably about $100,000 or less. That's more like it. In the reach of the middle class. This price schedule makes interstellar colonization viable. Note that the same ten-fold cost reduction can be had by making the one-way trip 12 days but keeping the original $300,000 annual cost.

Our colonization-viable starships will also increase interstellar trade. Shipping cost of $10,000 per ton means the threshold cost of imported goods is about $10 per pound. Only $10,000 shipping cost for a sports car. But no bulk cargo, not when oil's shipping cost will be $1500 per barrel. As with all freight the rates will vary. Higher value merchandise will support higher shipping charges. A long-term fixed contract (allowing ship owner to have dependable regular cargoes) will get a lower rate.

Standby cargo will get a better rate, if the ship is making a run anyway, it is better to have full cargo holds. If imports are still only 2% of CPP, the volume of goods will increase ten-fold. The shipping capacity will only have to increase three-fold since starships now deliver three times as much cargo per year. Since shipping costs ten times lower (so a wider range of goods are worth importing) then the import-export sector can expand in total value of goods shipped as well.

Assumption: an inverse square-root rule applies here, so reducing the shipping costs by a factor of 10 will increase spending upon imported goods by a factor of 3. This means 6% of CPP now goes to imports. High, but not out of reach for a mature trading zone. So a colony of 10 million will have an annual export and import of 3 million tons per year. Each trade starship can pick up and deliver 10 cargoes per year, so they need a net cargo capacity of 300,000 tons. For a trade network of 12 colonies, the combined merchant marine needs a capacity of some 3.6 million tons.

Most ships will still be small (but bigger than jumbo jets) to facilitate filling their cargo holds, but the heaviest-traffic routes will support some bigger ships. Assumption: say the trade network's merchant fleet is: Type of ship Number of ships Cargo capacity of one ship Total cargo capacity Large 75 20,000 tons 1,500,000 tons Medium 300 5000 tons 1,500,000 tons Small 400 1500 tons 600,000 tons TOTAL 775 3,600,000 tons If there is no FTL radio, then some of the small freighters will sacrifice cargo capacity for speed ( i.e., acceleration), in order to become something like an interstellar FedEx or pony express. The idea is to reduce the normal space transit time. Actually this might be a better job for an unmanned drone, they can take higher acceleration than human beings.

Passenger traffic is only a fraction of total cargo volume (unless there is a colonization effort underway). Freight makes a profit for somebody, passengers are pure expense to whoever pays their ticket. Perhaps passengers are 1% of total volume, makes 360,000 passengers per year. A few routes may support scheduled passenger service (probably in small ships). But most will ride in cargo bays (like railroad sleeping cards), in freighters, or in spare crew quarters.

Ship mass and size Full load mass and physical size depends upon assumptions about fuel mass ration, fuel bulk, etc. Assumption: Deadweight (inert mass) 1 17% Cargo (payload) 2 33% Fuel (propellant) 3 50% TOTAL 6 100% Note that total mass is three times the cargo capacity.

As you can see, deadweight is the ship proper, structure, engines, anything that is not cargo or propellant. With this assumption, the big freighters will have a fully loaded mass of 60,000 tons. The largest ships might be twice as big: 120,000 tons. Our building cost is $500,000 per ton of cargo capacity, the mass assumption makes a building cost equal to $1 million per ton of deadweight. Annual service cost is $100,000 per ton of cargo capacity, the mass assumption makes the annual service cost equal to $200,000 per ton of deadweight. The starship hulls are not cheaper, but they can carry more cargo in proportion to their structural mass.

Type of ship Cargo capacity Purchase price Large 20,000 tons $20 billion Medium 5000 tons $2.5 billion Small 1500 tons $750 million At $500,000 per ton of cargo capacity, largest giant freighter cost $20 billion to build, but it it has a cargo capacity of 200 Boeing 747 jets, and accounts for over one percent of whole fleet's cargo capacity all by itself. Small freighter costs $750 million, and has seven time the capacity of 747. With a 30 year service life, the combined shipbuilding yards of the 12 planet trade network will turn out about 25 ships per year. Hulls will last longer than 30 years but the equipment wears out and has to be replaced. Ships go back to the yards for an overhaul every decade or so, but eventually the cost of stripping everything and replacing it will exceed the value of the ship.

Depending upon overhaul costs the shipyards may make more money on rebuilding than on constructing brand new ships. Some ships will stay in service for many decades.

Others will be retained as the futuristic equivalent of naval hulks or the old passenger equipment that railroads use as work trains. Every big commercial space station will have a bunch of these old ships in the outskirts. If modular design is taken to its limit, 'ships' will have no permanent existence. Instead they will be assembled out of modules and pods specifically for each run, much like a railroad train. In that case, a ship's identity is attached to a service, not a physical structure.

Example: the Santa Fe 'Chief' was identified by a timetable and reputation, not a particular set of locomotive and cars. Artwork by Paul Calle Starship Performance The analysis up until now focused on money and economics. Businessmen only care about how long it takes to deliver the cargo and how much transport costs, they could care less about the scientific details of the ship engines. But authors care. As with everything else, it all depends upon the assumptions. Bangla New Books Pdf.

Your assumptions will be different, so feel free to fiddle with these and see what the results are. Assumption: the time spent in FTL transit is zero (jump drive). For the FTL segment of the transit you can use whatever you want, as long as the details do not affect the analysis. The main thing is that the required time spent in FTL transit will add to the total trip time, and thus the number of cargoes a starship can transport per year. Assumption: starships use reaction drives for normal space travel.

We know that the mass ratio is 2.0. So the tells us that the starship's total delta V will be the propulsion system's exhaust velocity times 0.69 ( i.e., ln(2.0) ). Since starships accelerate to half their delta V, coast, then decelerate to a halt, their maximum speed is half their delta V, or exhaust velocity times 0.35 ( i.e., ln(2.0) / 2).

In practice you would accelerate up to a bit less than half their delta V in order to allow a fuel reserve in case of emergency. It will be even less if the FTL drive happens to use the same type of fuel that the reaction drive does. Basically part of the fuel mass will have to be considered as cargo, not propellant, which will alter the ship's mass ratio. Reaction drive Exhaust velocity rule of thumb Nuclear powered Ion ~100 km/s Fusion a few thousand km/s Beam core matter-antimatter about 100,000 km/s ( 1/3 c ) We have assumed that the ship spends 27 days in route (with an instantaneous FTL jump), so the outbound and inbound legs are 13.5 days each (1.17 million seconds). Assumption: the acceleration on each leg is constant. In reality at the same thrust setting the acceleration will increase as the ship's mass goes down due to propellant being expended. The thrust will probably be constantly throttled to maintain a constant acceleration.

Makes it easier on the crew and easier on our analysis. The implication is that obviously the average speed will be half the maximum speed (which is half the delta V) Reaction drive Exhaust velocity rule of thumb Average speed Outbound/ inbound leg distance Acceleration/ deceleration Advanced Ion or Early Fusion 400 km/s 130 km/s 75 million km (1/2 AU) 0.01 g Advanced Fusion 10,000 km/s 5000 km/s 20 AU (Sol-Uranus) 0.44 g Beam-core Matter-Antimatter c 0.3 c 350 AU (x5 Pluto's orbit) 8 g!!! These figures will be lower if time is consumed in FTL flight, maybe be only Terra-Luna distance is thrust times exhaust velocity, then divide by 2. To get the thrust, we know that is ship mass times acceleration. The ship mass goes down as fuel is burnt. As a rule of thumb for ship mass, figure that it only has 2/3rds of a propellant load.

That is, multiply the total ship mass by 0.83. So our 120,000 metric ton ship would have a rule of thumb mass of 120,000 * 0.83 = 100,000 metric tons (100,000,000 kilograms). Reaction drive Exhaust velocity rule of thumb Acceleration/ deceleration Thrust Thrust power Advanced Ion or Early Fusion 400,000 m/s (400 km/s) 0.108 m/s (0.011 g) 1.08×10 7 N 2.16×10 12 W (2 terawatts) Advanced Fusion 10,000,000 m/s (10,000 km/s) 4.3 m/s (0.44 g) 4.3×10 8 N 2.15×10 15 W (2,000 terawatts) Beam-core Matter-Antimatter 3.0×10 8 m/s ( c) 76.5 m/s (7.9g) 7.65×10 9 N 1.15×10 18 W (1 million terawatts) •. Where does fuel come from and who does it get into the ship's fuel tanks?

Easiest if it is obtained locally at the destination's solar system. The economics of interplanetary transport is same as interstellar (since we did a lot of work making interstellar a cheap as interplanetary). If fuel from a gas giant at a distance comparable to Terra-Jupiter and round trip is to only take weeks, interplanetary tankers will need speeds of around 1000 km/s. So tankers will be almost as expensive as starships. If tankers use low speed (to make them cheaper), the round trip balloons to a year or more. To service the starship fleet's thirst for fuel, tankers will need to be huge or there will have to be a lot of them.

Either way, fuel shipped from gas giants ain't gonna be cheap. If we forgo interplanetary tankers and instead have starships make extra leg to the local gas giant to refuel, it will cost you more than you will save.

The alternative is shipping fuel up from destination planet. Yes, we know about in terms of delta V cost. But in order to colonize space at all, surface-to-orbit shipping cost will have to be cheap anyway. The industrialization of space will start with using space based resources, but eventually surface-to-orbit will have to be cheap or there is no.,,, something like that.

Assumption: surface-to-orbit shuttle economics are equivalent to current day airliner economics. Round trip to LEO and back is about two hours (not counting loading/unloading).

With loading/unloading and maintenance, figure 4 flights a day. Implication is that a round trip passenger ticket is $250 and round trip freight service is $1000/ton (which is +10% added to interstellar transport costs) Fuel is not round trip, it only goes from surface to orbit, but shuttles have to go orbit to surface in order to get the next load. You will have to streamline the process.

High capacity pumps to minimize load/unload times, crew-less shuttle. You might be able to squeeze fuel lift cost to $500/ton. So if starships carry 1.5 tons of fuel per ton of cargo, surface-to-orbit fuel lift costs adds $750/ton to interstellar shipping cost. So total surface-to-orbit overhead is $1000/ton + $750/ton = $1750/ton or 17.5%. This is an ouch but not a show-stopper.

Back to starships. How big are they? Present-day maritime tonnage rule: 1 registered ton = ~3 cubic meters. Assumption: 1 ton = 3 m 3 applies to fuel and hull ( e.g., crew quarters, engineering spaces, etc) as well as cargo. Therefore, if the absolutely hugest cargo starship in service has a cargo capacity of 40,000 tons (twice that of a large cargo starship), then: Wet Mass Payload mass to total mass ratio is 3.

So wet mass is 3 * 40,000 = 120,000 tons Starship Volume 1 ton of total ship mass = 3 m 3 of volume. 120,000 * 3 = 360,000 cubic meters. Volume of a sphere is 4/3πr 3, so the radius of a sphere is 3√(v/(4/3π)) or radius = CubeRoot( v / 4.189) diameter = (CubeRoot( v / 4.189)) * 2 •. Assumption: a 'cigar-shape' for a spacecraft is a six times as long as it is wide, with the proportions indicated in the diagram above. The center body is a cylinder 1 unit in diameter (0.5 units radius) and two units high. The two end caps are cones of 0.5 units radius and 2 units high.

If the monstrous cargo starship is spherical, it would have a diameter of 88 meters. If it is cigar shaped then length = 300 meters and diameter of 50 meters. A 1500 ton cargo capacity tramp freighter would have a wet mass of 4500 tons and a volume of 13,500 m 3. Spherical shape would have a diameter of 30 meters, cigar shaped length = 100 meters long and diameter of 17 meters. Modular ships dimension would be similar but a bit larger due to being assembled out of component parts. Crew This is very difficult to estimate. Since each crew has same berthing requirement as passengers, each crew represents one ton = $100,000/year in lost revenue capacity.

Therefore crew will be kept as small as practical. Operating crew: pilot-navigator and engineer for each watch. Plus life support specialist/medic, cargo-master, and captain. Total of nine. Small ships might squeeze this to four or five.

Big ships might double up with assistants and trainees for 20 to 25. Maintenance technicians will be needed. Ships are en route for a month or so at a time.

Unlike aircraft, maintenance can't all be done during layovers. Time is money, you do not want to hold off departure because station tech has not finished some routine servicing. So techs will be carried to do maintenance during the flight. Assume (conservatively) 1 tech embarked per $100 million in construction cost ( i.e., stuff to be maintained). So small ships will have a maintenance crew of seven or eight (total crew of ten or twelve).

Largest ships in service might have total crews up to 250. Scut work (swabbing decks and peeling potatoes) will be done by junior crew. As has been the case since time began.

Hotel Staff: passenger-carrying ships will need crew for hotel-type services (stewards, chefs, etc.), but not if passengers are colonists (fend for yourselves, scum!). Coach class could make do with one for every 10 passengers. First class would have one for every 2 or 3 passengers (and the ticket price would reflect this).

If a typical ship has 1 percent of cargo given over to passengers, the required hotel staff could increase the crew by about a third. Naturally the hotel staff will be looked down upon by the operating and tech crew members. On a passenger ship the hotel staff will vastly outnumber the rest of the crew by some 30 to 1.

Artwork by Ed Valigursky Orbital high ports These are primarily starship ports and service bases, though they may have. With our current assumptions, at a given time 3/4ths of the ships are en route, the rest are in port. So at the stations of the dozen colony worlds there will be docked about 15 cargo ships. One or two would be large cargo ships. A cargo ship will arrive and depart about three times a day. Orbit-to-surface traffic is heavy. If each shuttle can carry the load of a 747 jet, about 100 arrive and depart each day.

If starship fuel is shuttled up from surface, some 150 daily tankers arrivals are needed as well (if 4 daily flights per shuttle, about 65 physical shuttles are needed). This is for a typical station. The busiest station in the trade network might have twice the traffic volume. At any one time we might expect to find 200 to 300 off-duty starship crew at a typical station (probably all in bars). Unlike airports, passenger traffic is small. 200 or so arrive and depart each day. Passenger shuttles will also carry station crew, ship's crew going sightseeing, so there will be a few daily passenger flights.

A station is a ship without a drive engine, so its capacities can be estimated the same way. If 10% of the overall cost of the merchant fleet goes to support the stations (since the stations maintain the ships) then the stations taken together will have about a tenth of the fleet's deadweight mass, or 180,000 tons all told. A typical station would then have a mass of 15,000 tons, not counting cargo awaiting loading, fuel in storage tanks, etc. But stations are likely to grow by accretions over the years and become sprawling structures extending hundreds of meters in all directions. Using same estimates for cargo ships, the maintenance crew of an average station would be about 150.

However, stations provide the major ship maintenance, so they probably have about as many technicians altogether as the ships themselves do. They alone will multiply the station population by tenfold; support staff and miscellaneous services might double it again, so a typical station could have some 3000 workers. The largest stations might have two or three times as many. Living quarters will be nearly as expensive ship quarters, but frequent shuttle fare also add up. The income from shuttle fare can be used to subsidize living quarters rent, so many people could live on board, even with families.

Station could be a cosmopolitan orbiting town. The entire space-faring population of the trade network, ship crews and stationers, come to well over 50,000, maybe as many as 100,000 (out of a total population on 12 colonies of some 120 million). The space economy as a whole however employs many times more.

If the merchant marine industry accounts for 3% of the economy it will also employ 3% of the workforce, 2 million people. With a similar number employed in the import/export industries. • Ship classes and types from the 'Stardate: 3000' line of metal starship miniatures. Playing counters from by GDW, 1979. CC: Command Ship BB: Battleship BC: Battlecruiser CA: Cruiser DD: Destroyer FT: Fighting Transport TR: Transport OF: Orbital Fighter RF: Robot Fighter Numbers are Attack-Defense-Movement Warships The expense of a trade-protection navy is an insurance premium charged against trade. Assumption: the insurance premium to fund the navy is 10% of total value of trade. Say the 12 colony network is a trade federation and the insurance premium for defense is 10% of total value of trade (this setup could just as well be one planet monopolizing trade, in which case the navy protects the franchise.

We will call it a federation anyway). Half the value of trade goes to support the merchant fleet (the other half is initial purchase cost of shipped goods) therefore the cost of the war fleet will be about 1/5 of the merchant marine Assumption: warships have the same relationship to cargo ships as cruisers do to ocean liners or jet bombers to airliners. Instead of cargo, warships carry weapons, sensors, armor, more powerful engines, and greater fuel capacity. Ton for full-loaded ton they are more expensive than trade ships (maybe x2) but cost per deadweight ton is about the same since technology going into it is similar.

(some present day warplanes have higher cost-to-mass ratio than jetliners. This is due partially to 'gold-plating' of weapon systems and partial due to false economies such as small orders that reduce production efficiencies. We will assume that a navy funded by merchants will not allow such expensive stupidities) Assumption: For first approximation, scale down merchant marine by factor of 5 to get war fleet. • 1 battlecruiser per 5 heavy freighters • 1 cruiser per 5 medium freighters • 1 corvette per 5 small freighters This will give the following order of battle: • 15 battlecruisers • 60 cruisers • 80 corvettes This may or may not be balanced, substitute as needed. (ed note: for a discussion of what Rick Robinson means by those three ship classes see his analysis ) Space combat will require to support them: food supply ships, ammo and missile supply ships, repair ships, hospital ships, fuel ships, etc.

So some of the cruisers and corvettes in the order of battle will have to be traded for auxiliaries of various kinds. Some civilian cargo ships can be requisitioned in wartime for auxiliary missions (such as tankers). Depending upon technology and threat level, it might be feasible to fit cargo ships with weapon pods instead of cargo and use them as armed merchant cruisers. And warships might be fitted with cargo pods to become very well-armed transports. Assumption: a warship's deadweight mass is 1/3rd (0.33) of loaded mass (propellant always dominates a reaction-drive spaceship's mass). You could call the deadweight mass the. Assumption: the following deadweight mass values in the following table.

Assumption: warships are always cigar shapes because Hollywood hates spheres We have already assumed that purchase cost of a spacecraft is $1 million per ton of deadweight. We have also assumed that each ton of loaded mass equals 3 m 3 of volume. Result of assumptions: Warship type Loaded mass Deadweight mass Purchase cost Volume Cigar dimensions Battlecruiser 30,000 tons 10,000 tons $10 billion 90,000 m 3 200m × 30m Cruiser 7500 tons 2500 tons $2.5 billion 22,500 m 3 120m × 20m Corvette 2000 tons 700 tons $700 million 6000 m 3 75m × 12.5m Corvette are the length of a 747 or but larger diameter.

Very close to space shuttle in launch configuration. Since corvettes will have a surface landing module (for gunboat diplomacy) they may even look like space shuttle stack (with a big winged thing stuck on the side). Merchant express mail couriers might be a civilian version of courvette. During peace time war fleet has lower operating tempo than merchant marine. May spend half their their time docked instead of the one-quarter that merchants do.

This saves operating expenses. The savings allows greater procurement, so they are replaced and retired from active duty after 20 years instead of 30. Then they go into a mothballed reserve force for another 20 years, so reserve is the same size as active fleet. As with cargo ships, warships might undergo top-to-bottom overhauls and remain in service longer. Crews are larger in proportion than for cargo ships. Operating crew will be augmented with offensive and defensive weapon controllers, scan/ECM, and communication/intelligence; larger ships will have in addition a command staff.

The maintenance technicians will be larger per unit cost because they have to, during or after the battle. Of course there is no hotel staff.

Some warships will carry a landing force of. Due to berthing cost and limited space (mass ratio of 2.0, remember?) there won't be many marines, but they will be highly trained (SEALS). Warship type Crew Battlecruiser 300 Cruiser 75 Corvette 20 Crew numbers will be higher if they have a landing strike team embarked This is not a huge crew force. About 10,000 for the entire fleet, with probably a similar number on shore duty at any given time. Add in the marines and the total wearing uniforms is still no more than 25,000 to 30,000. Perhaps with a similar number of civilian employees.

Defense spending for running the fleet (by far the largest budget item) is a modest $72 billion, 0.6% of trade federation's combined GPP. In a prolonged major war this would expand greatly.

But this is supported by trade. If the cost of trade protection (the insurance premium) approaches or even exceeds the value of trade itself, there will be a collapse of political support. Operations in a trade war will be primarily in space. If large scale planetary landings are required, cargo ships can be pressed into service as troop transports.

Light infantry is roughly equivalent to civil passengers: 1 ton equivalent cargo capacity per soldier. However heavier equipment, shuttles to carry troops/gear/provisions to surface, armed shuttles for close air support, will all be required. So for an invasion force, 3 ton equivalent cargo capacity per soldier, not counting the naval escort. If 1/10th of the entire merchant marine is gathered as an invasion force it can transport and land 120,000 light troops, less if heavy equipment is required. But 120,000 troops is a pretty big force to invade a planet of 10 million people.

Middle-period Empire Suppose instead of 12 worlds, the empire had a thousand worlds, each with a population of 100 million. Then all the above can be multiplied by a factor of over 800. Improved technology will increase size and number of ships. If typical ships is x3 in linear dimensions they will be x27 greater in mass, and fleet can have x30 as many of them. Large cargo starships: if spherical 300m diameter, if cigar 1,000 km long.

Cargo capacity 1 million tons. Full-load mass of 5 million tons each.

Empire will have about 1000 ships of that size (and some larger). It will have 50,000 medium cargo ships with cargo capacity of 20,000 tons, and hundreds of thousands of smaller vessels. Great hub-route stations will have population in the millions.

Navy battlecruisers will be 1 km long, full-load mass of 3 million tons. Build cost $1 trillion.

Crew of 30,000. Empire will have 125 battlecruisers in the fleet. It will have thousands of cruisers with a full-load mass of 100,000 tons. Naval budget can be held down to $60 trillion. Galactic Empire 100,000 worlds with average population of few billion each. The scale factor is another x3000.

You can do the math yourself. Tribble trader. Star Trek (1967) Naturally, to make interstellar trade work, you need the cost of interstellar transport to be incredibly low, or the value of the trade item to be incredibly high. Raw minerals probably are not valuable enough, it will probably be cheaper to synthesize rare elements instead of shipping them in.

As for manufactured goods, why not just send the blueprints by radio or by your Powered tm FTL communicator? In a future where everybody has, the economy would be based upon trading intellectual property. Since there does not seem to be any real-world trade item worth interstellar trade (unless it is cheaper to ship from another star than it is from another city), you will probably be forced to invent some species of. In PROTECTOR, asteroid miners prospect for (which are great for constructing compact motors and generators).

Proposed prospecting for. In the old SPI game, the only valuable commodity is 'telesthetic' women, who are the of FTL travel, and who cannot be mass produced by genetic engineering. In Vernor Vinge's A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, some of the main characters are traders contracted to transport part of a huge for secure cryptographic transmissions (such a pad cannot be transmitted without compromising security). Sometimes humans and aliens discover that.

And in IRON SUNRISE, the most valuable things are packages of entangled quantum dots, used for FTL communication via (with the fascinating twist that the dots must be transported slower than light or they are ruined. They are shipped by ). Artwork by Ed Emshwiller for Astounding Science Fiction December 1958 Spices I will note that historically one of the most valuable trade goods was. Which cannot be 3D printed unless their resolution is atom-by-atom. Freaking was so valuable that it was. In the 1400s the Italian monopoly on black peppercorns was the incentive behind the Portuguese effort to find an alternate route to India.

Vasco da Gama managed to reach India by sailing around Africa, which would be a very uneconomical route except for the sky-high value of black pepper. (ed note: This is about an adventure set in the medieval fantasy role playing game like Dungeons & Dragons.

But it could be adapted to a RocketPunk future, abet one that had very limited long-range communication. A setting during the would do nicely. The author is highly skilled at applying modern economic theory to fantasy situations.) The Goblin and the Peppercorn The Halfling Thief found the bag of peppercorns on the goblin’s body. An argument ensued. The Fighter wanted to keep walking toward the ruins and fulfill their benefactor’s request.

The ruins were full of treasure, he said. The party got to keep whatever they found as long as they killed the monsters and returned with the ruins secrets.

Peppercorns weren’t treasure. They were food. But the Thief wanted to understand how this little bag of black spices ended up in the goblin’s pocket. Goblins don’t cook with peppercorns. Black pepper makes the traditionally bland food of the region interesting and flavorful. When peppercorns appear in the market – rarely – people pay more gold for small bags than for major magic items.

The poor crave them. The rich kill for them. Sure, this small bag of peppercorns is not a Cap of Underwater Breathing or a Potion of Heroism, but it can buy them.

This bag is better than gold. Can we indulge in Halfling curiosity? The ruins have been ruins for thousands of years. That’s why they’re called ruins.

The secrets aren’t going anywhere. When the Wizard and the Bard sided with the Thief, the Fighter caved. We will follow you on your so-called mystery. And then we will head to the ruins and discover some real secrets. The goblin’s trail lead to the bandit’s massacred bodies not more than a day old and rotting in the open air. One bandit carried small, empty sacks smelling strongly of pepper and a letter of free passage on this road between the Lord of this land and the True and Free City Republic.

From the look of the site, the goblins jumped the bandits while they were camping and cooking. Of course, the goblins ate the well-seasoned and peppered steaks. The party left the bandit’s bodies to rot while promising the Fighter that he could massacre any future peppercorn-stealing bandits. They took the letter.

Further along the road by another two days (and the Fighter made noise about ruins and secrets) the party discovered the overturned carts, dead horses, and bodies of the traders. They were dressed in merchant’s red robes. The sacks were empty. The cargo stolen. But the Halfling Thief found a manifest of good and prices.

Prices higher than the party could command for spelunking and murder expeditions. Maybe the ruins could wait, the Fighter said. The party buried the traders. This land’s gold, the Halfling Thief said, was flowing east down this road to the Free City Republic. We, adventurers, root through ancient cellars and dig through old ruins, risking our lives and very souls, to haul out chest after chest of easy gold. We cheerfully hand that gold to rich merchant and wizard guilds in return for armor and baubles and magic.

Lords wrest that gold from guilds by taxation. Then, those Lords send that gold down this road east in return for this. Let’s follow the money, the Halfling Thief said. Let’s follow the peppercorns. And we went east.

The Free-City Republic The Free-City Republic stank. For all its glamour architecture and glorious history, humans demi-humans pressed together in the streets with little sanitation and less space. They climbed over each other for space on this tiny island nation.

The temple entrances reeked of urine where supplicants voided themselves before climbing the steps. Merchants dumped their garbage into the streets. The Transmuter Bankers, members of the mighty Exchanger’s Guild, ruled above the stench from their black towers and behind their long red masks. They were rarely seen but always felt. A Republic in name only, the immensely rich ruled this plutocracy with an iron fist in a velvet glove.

They were more interested in their constant wars with the other Free City Republics ruled by other Transmuter Bankers than the daily government rhythms and wrapped themselves in bureaucracy. Down on the streets, enormous customs houses squatted among the warehouses while armies of armed customs agents took their due. Long ships with short triangular sails bobbed in filthy waters while moored at a mile long dock. Thousands of merchants and porters unloaded their wares into a market of uncertain prices and taxation.

Purchasing agents bartered loudly with street merchants for their Lord. Bails of cotton and linen. Cases upon cases of rare and precious magic reagents.

The Halfling Thief thrust her arms into a barrel of peppercorns, worth more than the land she was hired to serve, and drew in a deep breath. She asked how much. “Only the Gods and Modrons know the prices of the day,” the peppercorn merchant told the Halfling Thief. “Today might be a good day. It might be a bad day.

We don’t know until we sell.” Pirates, horrible and wealthy, plied the profitable waters offshore. They preyed on lightly armed merchant ships and took their cut by force. Smugglers and a far flung powerful Thieves Guild made good use of sewers to avoid the customs house and the hated head tax. The Navy pushed out into waters to find more fertile trading grounds and pursue the Republic’s endless wars.

This was not the peppercorn’s source, the Halfling Thief said. This is the terminus. This is wonderful but merely the city where the merchants collect the land’s gold and send it further east. I want to find the source of the peppercorns. We should press onward. But when she turned around, the Fighter was gone. He found his source of endless money, booty, magic items and glory far beyond mere run down ruins in a backwater country.

He left to fight the pirates of this sea until he conquered them all and they acknowledged him as their King. He took the Ranger with him as backup. The Fighter wanted to make it a buddy movie. Yet the Thief still had the Wizard, the Cleric and me, the bard. And we went east. The Old City This old city at the desert’s edge was a relic of an ancient time.

Once, it made its wealth by shipping grain north into great open markets of hungry cities. Now, by conquest, it shipped its grain south to less discerning and wealthy consumers. Its sand stone walls told stories of ancient battles and grand Kingdoms and the magnificent adventures of Murder Hobos long dead. Centuries ago, this city ruled Empires. Centuries hence, its power forgotten, it would be shriveled, an open air theme park for tourists pretending to experience its grandeur and power. This city was fated fade, remembered for its art and music but not for its heroes and power.

Its sewers infested with monsters and converted to adventuring dungeons. Its marvelous temples turned into adventuring ruins with dark secrets for rich rulers to plumb. Thus was the power of trade. Far more powerful than any army, religion or ruler, trade builds empires binding together humans and demi-humans under one banner. And trade lays them to waste.

The old city was still a vibrant trading force. Its power had not completely leaked out its walls. The great camel caravans came in through the east gate. The merchants unloaded and made transactions with rapacious middle men. Dockworkers loaded precious cargo by the ton on the long ships and sent them west to the Free Cities to feed their endless wars. The tax men with their thugs roamed among the merchants taking their due for an Emperor thousands of miles away. The open air markets were full of peppercorns.

They were cheaper here than the dead merchant’s lists back home and cheaper still than the Free Cities. The Halfling Thief watched the peppercorns come in through the gate by camel and be delivered by the half ton to the merchant’s stall. Gold exchanged hands. Gold still flowed east. Comprehend Languages and Tongues helps with travel negotiations between cultures. Without the Fighter and Ranger, we were vulnerable to bandits but if we traveled down the river instead of overland and with other caravans we could make it east to the peppercorn source.

Overland trade, we learned, was phenomenally dangerous. Outside, in the desert, banditry was tribal.

If we flew the wrong colors, we would be forced to give bribes at best and attacked at worst. The Halfling Thief ensured the caravans that our Wizard and Cleric would keep us safe. The Thief turned to the Cleric but the Cleric was gone. Taken by the mash of cultures and nations passing through this trade city, she was determined to proselytize. What better place to create converts than a trade nexus between Empires? Even if she converted a handful, her God’s Word would spread far to new corners of the world.

Her God would grow. What is better than a big, fat, well-loved God? Yet the Thief still had the Wizard and me, the Bard. And we went east. The Ocean Market The great oceanic trading city was made of magically bound sand. Enormous limestone and coral fortresses towered over a sprawling dock reaching across the horizon. Houses five stories high stood over packed market-filled streets.

Impossibly thin golden minarets topped bright white temples of a strange God. The mash of cultures, languages and beings, many never seen in the Halfling’s land far away across a sea and a desert, pressed together in the great bazaar beneath the Sultan’s uncompromising eye. And the market!

Uncut rhinoceros and elephant horn of pure ivory. Bizarre animal skins. Gold stacked in bars. Huge towers of wax for candles and supplies. Enormous bushels of grains. Plates and bowls of purest white. Cloth so smooth it barely caressed the skin.

Ambergris, pulled from the bellies of murdered whales, and fragrant incense. Brightly lacquered wood. Magic items with strange and new properties.

Elaborately crafted magical weaponry and armor dyed bright colors and adorned with ostrich feathers. Endless shelves of rare magical reagents and jewels. Bizarre fruit.

Slaves, driven to open air slave markets, by the thousands. Fragrant spices, including the peppercorn, heaped in enormous baskets in huge open air stalls. An unimaginable bounty from the nexus of trade. Gold coins from a dozen unknown and distant lands passed through the Halfling Thief’s hands. The Halfling Thief, with extensive help from Tongues and a bit of prodding with Detect Thoughts, asked about the origins of peppercorns.

Did they come from this land? Is this the terminus of all our gold, our sweat, our tears, our hard work? The merchants laughed.

We bring great bushels of grain and these strange animals to the market. We supply incense and skins. We send wax and wood.

But the peppercorns? The peppercorns come from the far east across the ocean on the other side of the monsoon winds. They come here on the bottoms of boats. See, the Westerner Agents will give us all their gold for the peppercorns we import at great cost.

Farther than the horizon, the merchants said. Farther than the sun and moon. But you can follow them, if you wish, on our boats held together with coconut twine and adorned with great lanteen sails. Board one of our great trading dhows and follow the rising sun. There, you will find the peppercorns where they grow wild and abundant on enormous vines. That is where your golden money flows, Halfling. Your source of infatuation, madness, and black gold lies over the sea.

A sailor on the open ocean has only one true companion: fear. Wizards help to keep the skies clear. Clerics of the storm and sea provide grace to the voyages. Past the shore pirates are not a threat but the sea itself kills. But even with prayers and spells, many voyages are lost with all hands. A trip across the sea was much more dangerous than a dungeon crawl through ancient ruins looking for lost secrets. But on the other side of the ocean, what secrets we will find!

The Halfling Thief turned to consult the Wizard about the voyage but the Wizard was gone. Seduced by the allure of new knowledge and new spells, the Wizard found his way into the city’s enormous libraries filled with thousands of books. Dazzled, the Wizard no longer had to crawl through filthy dungeons and dangerous ruins to learn new secrets. He had a lifetime of research here where spells came to him from all points of the world.

He didn’t need to kill for this knowledge. He simply waited for it to be unloaded off ships from distant lands. I asked the Halfling Thief if she was prepared for this journey.

Our Fighter, Ranger, Cleric and Wizard were gone. We were all that was left.

The voyage was long and dangerous. Who knew what we would find on the other side? The Halfling said, how can a Bard turn down stories and adventure?

And we went east. Writer’s Note: I’m an enormous fan of road stories and the is the best road story in history. This one follows over sea instead of over land simply because the sea route has fewer major stops. The cities involves are (Italy), (Egypt) and (Somalia). The influential is a huge, often unmined source for adventure and exploration. An easy way to get players out of their Western European adventures and into somewhere like that is to simply follow the peppercorn. “They’re a pygmy race—at least the Llor consider them so.

And they are deadly—to anyone who tries to invade their territory. Use poison darts and mantraps. But whether we’re headed into Cos country now, I don’t know. And their quarrel may be only with the Llor—there’s always that hope. Anyway, we have no choice but to advance. And now you’re going to work, Karr.” “Yes, sir?” “You’re attached as Alien Liaison man from now on.

Figure out what you need for a ‘first contact pack’ and get it together tonight. We’ll have no time in the morning and you must have the kit ready to use.” Food— Almost all aliens had an innate curiosity about off-world food, especially if they lived in a rugged country on a near-starvation diet. And of all Terran foods there was one in particular which the Combatants always carried with them, one grown only on their native world, which most extraterrestrial life relished.

Intersystem Traders had been trying to export it for years. But the Terrans had ruled it a military supply and so controlled its production—keeping it for the troops and a few of their favored alien friends. As a bargaining point it had been too precious to destroy back at the last camp. Their ration of it must be lashed on one of the carts he had helped to drag.

He should ask the Medico for a supply. Ornaments—the veterans had stripped their wealth from the dress uniforms. Each man would carry his own in a waist treasure belt. Kana must beg for the showiest pieces. Well, no time to lose. Neither Mic nor Rey owned anything worthwhile.

But there was the whole camp to canvass. Kana dropped his blanket wearily and started off on his task, his first quarry being the Medico. Crawfur heard his plea and then detached one of the small boxes from the nearest cart.

Kana signed for a packet as big as his hand—a packet which would have brought the equivalent of a deputy-control officer’s pay for half a year had it been offered for sale in the black markets on half a dozen different planets. And on hearing of the other need Crawfur unhooked one of the pockets of his own belt and contributed to the cause a Ciranian “sunstone” which drew light from a muffled lamp to make a warm pool of fire in the donor’s hand. “Might as well take this. My neck’s worth more than that. Don’t hesitate to ask—we all know what we may be up against. Tal, Kankon, Ponay.” He roused his assis­tants and explained. When Kana left the group he had the packet of sugar, the sunstone, a chain of Terran gold about a foot long, a ring made in the form of a Zacathan water snake, and a tiny orb of crystal in which swam a weird replica of a Poltorian lobster fish.

It was a little after noon, the calmest hour of Trenco’s day. The wind had died to “nothing”; which, on the planet, meant that a strong man could stand against it, could even, if he were agile as well as strong, walk about in it. Therefore Kinnison donned his light armor and was soon busily harvesting broad-leaf, which, he had been informed, was the richest source of thionite. He had been working for only a few minutes when a flat came crawling up to him, and, after ascertaining that his armor was not good to eat, drew off and observed him intently. Here was another opportunity for practice and in a flash the Lensman availed himself of it. Having practiced for hours upon the minds of various Earthly animals, he entered this mind easily enough, finding that the trenco was considerably more intelligent than a dog.

So much so, in fact, that the race had already developed a fairly comprehensive language. Therefore it did not take long for the Lensman to learn to use his subject’s peculiar limbs and other members, and soon the flat was working as though he were in the business for himself.

And since he was ideally adapted to his idly raging Trenconian environment, he actually accomplished more than all the rest of the force combined. “It’s a dirty trick I’m playing on you, Spike,” Kinnison told his helper after a while. “Come on into the receiving room and I’ll see if I can square it with you.” Since food was the only logical tender, Kinnison brought out from his speedster a small can of salmon, a package of cheese, a bar of chocolate, a few lumps of sugar, and a potato, offering them to the Trenconian in order. The salmon and cheese were both highly acceptable fare.

The morsel of chocolate was a delightfully surprising delicacy. The lump of sugar, however, was what really rang the bell—Kinnison’s own mind felt the shock of pure ecstasy as that wonderful substance dissolved in the trenco’s mouth. He also ate the potato, of course—any Trenconian animal will, at any time, eat practically anything—but it was merely food, nothing to rave about.

Knowing now what to do, Kinnison led his assistant out into the howling, shrieking gale and released him from control, throwing a lump of sugar up-wind as he did so. The trenco seized it in the air, ate it, and went into a very hysteria of joy. More!” he insisted, attempting to climb up the Lensman’s armored leg. “ You must work for more of it, if you want it,” Kinnison explained. “Break off broad-leaf plants and carry them over into that empty thing over there, and you get more” This was an entirely new idea to the native, but after Kinnison had taken hold of his mind and had shown him how to do consciously that which he had been doing unconsciously for an hour, he worked willingly enough.

In fact, before it started to rain, thereby putting an end to the labor of the day, there were a dozen of them toiling at the harvest and the crop was coming in as fast as the entire crew of Rigellians could process it. And even after the spaceport was sealed they crowded up, paying no attention to the rain, bringing in their small loads of leaves and plaintively asking admittance. It took some little time for Kinnison to make them understand that the day’s work was done, but that they were to come back tomorrow morning. Finally, however, he succeeded in getting the idea across; and the last disconsolate turtle-man swam reluctantly away. But sure enough, next morning, even before the mud had dried, the same twelve were back on the job, and the two Lensmen wondered simultaneously—how could those trencos have found the space-port? (planet Trenco has such violent electrical storms that the fabric of space is warped like an amusement park mirror so it is easy to get lost) Or had they stayed near it through the storm and flood of the night.

“I don’t know,” Kinnison answered the unasked question, “but I can find out.” Again and more carefully he examined the minds of two or three of them. “No, they didn’t follow us,” he reported then. “They’re not as dumb as I thought they were. They have a sense of perception (a ESP sense that is not fooled by the fabric of space being warped like an amusement park mirror), Tregonsee, about the same thing, I judge, as yours—perhaps even more so. I wonder why couldn’t they be trained into mighty efficient police assistants on this planet?” “The way you handle them, yes.

I can converse with them a little, of course, but they have never before shown any willingness to cooperate with us.” “You never fed them sugar,” Kinnison laughed. “You have sugar, of course—or do you? I was forgetting that many races do not use it at all.” “We Rigellians are one of those races.

Starch is so much tastier and so much better adapted to our body chemistry that sugar is used only as a chemical. We can, however, obtain it easily enough. But there is something else—you can tell these trencos what to do and make them really understand you.

I can not.” “I can fix that up with a simple mental treatment that I can give you in five minutes. Also, I can let you have enough sugar to carry on with until you can get in a supply of your own.” In the few minutes during which the Lensman had been discussing their potential allies, the mud had dried and the amazing coverage of vegetation was springing visibly into being. So incredibly rapid was its growth that in less than an hour some species were large enough to be gathered. The leaves were lush and rank in color or a vivid crimsonish purple. “These early morning plants are the richest of any in thionite—much richer than broad-leaf—but the zwilniks can never get more than a handful of them because of the wind,” remarked the Rigellian. “Now, if you will give me that treatment, I will see what I can do with the flats.” Kinnison did so, and the trencos worked for Tregonsee as industriously as they had for Kinnison—and ate his sugar as rapturously.

“That’s enough,” decided the Rigellian presently. “This will finish your fifty kilograms and to spare.” He then paid off his now enthusiastic helpers, with instructions to return when the sun was directly overhead, for more work and more sugar. And this time they did not complain, nor did they loiter around or bring in unwanted vegetation. They were learning fast. 'You've got your own causal channel?' Frank asked, hope vying with disbelief.' Tiny — it's the second memory card in my camera.'

She held her thumb and forefinger apart. 'Looks just like a normal solid state plug.

Blue packaging.' .Alice looked over the waist-high safety wall, then backed away from the edge. 'I'm not climbing down there.

But a bird — hmmmm. Think I've got a sampler head left. If it can eject the card...

You want me to have a go? Willing to stake half your bandwidth with me if I can liberate it?' It's got about six terabits left. Fifty-fifty split.' Thelma nodded. 'How about it?' 'Six terabits —' Frank shook his head in surprise.

He hated to think how much it must have cost to haul those milligrams of entangled quantum dots across the endless light years between here and Turku by slower-than-light. Once used they were gone for good, coherence destroyed by the process that allowed them to teleport the state of a single bit between points in causally connected space-time.

STL shipping prices started at a million dollars per kilogram-parsec; it was many orders of magnitude more expensive than FTL, and literally took decades or centuries of advanced planning to set up. But if it could get them a secure, instantaneous link out into the interstellar backbone nets.' The reason trade exists is that different groups are efficient at doing different things.

For example, let us say there are two countries, A and B. A takes 15 man-hours to make a widget, but only 5 to make a thingummy.

B takes 5 to make a widget and 15 to make a thingummy. Suppose each country produces as many thingummies as widgets, and each has 100 man-hours to allocate. Each will then produce 5 thingummies and 5 widgets ((5*15) + (5*5) = 75 + 25 = 100 man-hours). If A and B now open trade, each may concentrate on producing the item which it produces more efficiently; A will produce thingummies and B widgets.

Since a thingummy costs A 5 man-hours, it can produce 20; similarly, B produces 20 widgets. They trade 10 thingummies for 10 widgets, since each wants as many thingummies as widgets.

The final result is that each country has 10 thingummies and 10 widgets and each is twice as well off as before. (Indeed, trade is even in the best interest of both when one party has an efficiency advantage in both products, because trade will allow him to shift production into areas where his efficiency is greater.) One problem not taken into account in the above analysis is the cost of transportation (and other barrier costs, such as import and export duties) which raise the cost of doing business with another group. But all we collected in years of fringe-running was a reputation.

The cargoes we carried never made a fortune, but they created rumours. The stories we could tell about ourselves were impressive, and contained enough truth for later voyagers to confirm that we might actually have done what we said. Lapthorn liked people to talk about us. After the fringe, I tried to come back into the really big markets, in search of a killing.

Guns, cosmetics, jewellery, and drugs were all hot markets, with constant demand and irregular supply. Anything in which fashion rules instead of utility is a good market for the trader — and that includes weaponry as well as decoration and edification. I reckoned that we had the initiative to dig out the best, and I was right, but times had moved on while we were out on the rim with the dropouts, and we failed at the other end — the outlets. We couldn't get a fair price, with the middle-men moving into the star-worlds in droves, quoting the Laws of New Rome, and the ordinances of wherever they happened be, and never moving their hands from their gun butts.

It was enough to sour anyone against life in the inner circle. I began to sympathise with Lapthorn's dislike of the human way of life.

We stuck with it for a while, because I thought Lapthorn’s genius for digging out the best gems and the most exciting drugs might see us through. But it was useless. The little people seemed to take an excessive delight in cheating us and leaning on us because we were known.

The other free traders talked about us. We were the best, by their lights. But we weren't system-beaters. We weren't equipped for dealing with that kind of problem, we had no alternative but to return to small trading, alien to alien. Lapthorn wasn't sorry, of course, and my sorrow was more for the evil ways of the world in general than for our own small part in the human condition. “We must study them.” Bury’s Motie sipped contemplatively at his dirty water, “We spoke of coffees and wines.

My associates have noticed—how shall I put it?—a strong cultural set toward wines, among your scientists and Navy officers.” “Yes. Place of origin, dates, labels, ability to travel in free fall, what wines go with what foods.” Bury grimaced. “I have listened, but I know nothing of this. I find it annoying and expensive that some of my ships must move under constant acceleration merely to protect a wine bottle from its own sediments.

Why can they not simply be centrifuged on arrival?”. “Thirty-Two Tons, this is Clajdia SysCon, we’re going to need you to abort your next maneuver, recompute for previous burn time plus twelve minutes, crossing traffic drone freighter DF-01369. Over.” “Clajdia SysCon, Thirty-Two Tons, negative on that, we have traffic priority over drone freighters. Over.” “Thirty-Two Tons, Clajdia SysCon, affirmative, but you don’t want to exercise priority over one-three-six-nine, over.” “Clajdia SysCon, Thirty-Two Tons, clarify please. Over.” “Thirty-Two Tons, Clajdia SysCon, one-three-six-nine is a three-hundred-barrel fermenter of Callaneth’s Finest with a special requirement for constant acceleration. We preempt her for you, they lose thrustdown. They lose thrustdown, they lose the batch.

They lose the batch, all the belters out of Ipsy Station want your heads to decorate their candles. How badly do you want to harsh the local color? Over.” “Clajdia SysCon, Thirty-Two Tons, recomputing as requested. (1982) The main mechanism for trade is what is called, the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets. In this context it boils down to 'buy cheap and sell dear', that is, purchase goods that are cheap at Planet A, then transport and sell them at Planet B where the goods are expensive. The money you make selling at Planet B, minus how much you spent purchasing at Planet A yields your gross profit.

Subtract from that your transport expenses and other expenses and you'll find your net profit (if any). There is also the problem of. The profit is from the price difference between the two markets. The difference tends to shrink over time, which eliminates the profit. Sometimes the market at your destination becomes saturated (as the manufacturers of ), sometimes the supply at the origin dries up (like petroleum).

A trader would like a nice simple two-planet set up: where they go to planet Alfa to buy a load of Alfan Aphrodisiac Apples, transports them to planet Bravo to sell them at a fat profit, buys a load of Bravoian Bodacious Beef, transports it to planet Alfa, and sells it at a fat profit. Rinse, lather, repeat. But all too often one of the planets does not cooperate, such as when planet Bravo desired Alfan Aphrodisiac Apples, but the vegetarian Alfans look upon Bravo's major export with horror. The key to solving the problem is Triangular trade.

The trader has to find a third planet, one that wants to import Bravo's export, and which exports something that Alfa wants. Such as planet Charlie, which adores Bravoian Bodacious Beef, and exports Charlean Chicory Coffee without which no Alfan breakfast is complete. Triangular trade or triangle trade is a historical term indicating trade among three ports or regions.

Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has commodities that are not required in the region from which its major come. Triangular trade thus provides a method for rectifying between the above regions. The particular routes were historically also shaped by the powerful influence of during the. For example, from the main trading nations of Western Europe it was much easier to sail westwards after first going south of and reaching the so-called '; thus arriving in the Caribbean rather than going straight west to the.

Returning from North America, it is easiest to follow the in a northeasterly direction using the. A similar triangle to this, called the was already being used by the Portuguese, before Columbus' voyage, to sail to the and the.

Columbus simply expanded the triangle outwards, and his route became the main way for Europeans to reach, and return from, the Americas. This gives the sky merchant a grasp of economics rarely achieved by bankers or professors. He is engaged in barter and no nonsense. He pays taxes he can't evade and doesn't care whether they are called 'excise' or 'king's pence' or 'squeeze' or straight-out bribes.

It is the other kid's bat and ball and backyard, so you play by his rules — nothing to get in a sweat about.By the Law of Supply and Demand a thing has value from where it is as much as from what it is — and that's what a merchant does; he moves things from where they are cheap to where they are worth more. A smelly nuisance in a stable is valuable fertilizer if you move it to the south forty. Pebbles on one planet can be precious gems on another. The art in selecting cargo lies in knowing where things will be worth more, and the merchant who can guess right can reap the wealth of Midas in one trip. Or guess wrong and go broke.The trade routes for a two-way swap show minimum profit; they fill up too quickly. But a triangular trade — or higher numbers — can show high profits. Like this: Landfall had something — call it cheese — which was a luxury on Blessed — while Blessed produced — call it chalk — much in demand on Valhalla.

Whereas Valhalla manufactured doohickeys that Landfall needed. Work this in the right direction and get rich; work it backwards and lose your shirt. (ed note: this was intended for a medieval fantasy background such as Dungeons & Dragons. But while reading it, mentally replace ' flying castles' with ' mobile space stations' and replace ' town' with ' planetary colonies'. The author is highly skilled at applying modern economic theory to fantasy situations.) Triangle trade is a simple and extremely profitable concept. An example: • High Elves desire silver as they melt the coins down and turn them into jewelry. In return for chests of silver, they sell their carefully hand-crafted ghostly textiles, super common to them but rare to everyone else.

• The Dwarves, who have strained relations to the High Elves but not with the people flying castles, exchange the holds of Elven textiles for Dwarven magical weapons and armor. • The Murder Hobos at home pay premium price (in silver) for Dwarven magical weapons and armor which they use to murder various indigenous demi-humans for more silver. Around and around the goes, taking a markup at each step, and selling to those who want things and buying oversupply. This is not limited to Elven textiles and Dwarven magical weapons – Flying Castles trade in rare and precious magic items and spells, spices, other textiles, rare food stuffs, inventions, technology, finished goods, and beings from far away continents. Problems crop up in the otherwise tame and civilized triangle trade when two nations both want a monopoly in one rare and valuable good. For example, both Flying Castles wish to sell a high performing rare Elven mithril armor crafted only by one tribe of Elves living on a distant and nicely tropical island. Controlling that good – and the island – and monopolizing it allows one nation to reap the profits while the other nation to pay sky high and price-controlled prices.

The potential profits are huge. It’s in the best interests of Murder Hobos, and the two nations, to try to control that island, its goods, and its inhabitants.

In go the swords and mercenaries. One might think the Elves on the island making armor would have something to say about all this. But to have a say, they need to get a Flying Castle. Right now what they have are coconuts and really nice hammocks.

The Elves are out of luck. Here the nations do what nations do. They do enter into far off hostilities. They ship fireball-throwing cannons instead of cotton thread. And they get into a hot shooting war over islands and Elves.

A letter of credit is a document issued by a financial institution, or a similar party, assuring payment to a seller of goods and/or services.[1] The seller then seeks reimbursement from the buyer or from the buyer's bank. The document serves essentially as a guarantee to the seller that it will be paid by the issuer of the letter of credit regardless of whether the buyer ultimately fails to pay. In this way, the risk that the buyer will fail to pay is transferred from the seller to the letter of credit's issuer.The letter of credit also insures that all the agreed upon standards and quality of goods are met by the supplier.

Letters of credit are used primarily in international trade for large transactions between a supplier in one country and a customer in another. In such cases, the International Chamber of Commerce Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits applies (UCP 600 being the latest version).[2] They are also used in the land development process to ensure that approved public facilities (streets, sidewalks, storm water ponds, etc.) will be built. The parties to a letter of credit are the supplier, usually called the beneficiary, the issuing bank, of whom the buyer is a client, and sometimes an advising bank, of whom the beneficiary is a client. Almost all letters of credit are irrevocable, i.e., cannot be amended or canceled without the consent of the beneficiary, issuing bank, and confirming bank, if any. In executing a transaction, letters of credit incorporate functions common to giros and traveler's cheques. A bill of lading (sometimes abbreviated as B/L or BOL) is a document used in the transport of goods by sea.

It serves several purposes in international trade, both as transit information and title to the goods. A legal document between the shipper of a particular good and the carrier detailing the type, quantity and destination of the good being carried.

The bill of lading also serves as a receipt of shipment when the good is delivered to the predetermined destination. This document must accompany the shipped goods, no matter the form of transportation, and must be signed by an authorized representative from the carrier, shipper and receiver. From ' entry of Wikipedia Merchant Guild Medieval merchants had other innovations that might be useful in an interstellar trading future. The roads were bad and in poor repair. Ocean routes were treacherous.

Brigands and pirates lurked in parts of the trade route far from any help. Distant nations treated merchants with disdain at best and as rich people to rob at worst.

And every single landowner along the trade route felt that they had a right to extort whatever tax they could get out of the trade caravan. To fix these problems the medieval merchants found effective solutions, the most effective being the concept of a. These were association of of traders. Guilds could invest the member's fees in such things as improving road conditions and suppressing pirates and brigands. Lighthouses were erected at dangerous points, to prevent merchant shipwrecks. The guild would negotiate treaties of commerce with foreign nations, protecting the liberty and security of guild members (sometimes the guild could even get an agreement for foreign troops to travel with a trade caravan).

And while a single trader could not do much about landowner's imposed taxes, a huge guild could negotiate from a position of power. Negotiations with a landowner would result in a Merchant Guild charter, where guild members would pay a fixed sum or an annual payment for right of passage.

You can see how these concepts can be re-used in an interstellar trading future, the situations are much the same. The flip-side of course is that the guild members have to pay their dues to the guild, and obey all the guild regulations. Members cannot engage in any type of trade forbidden by the Guild charter, fines were imposed on members who broke the rules, and guild members had to aid and support fellow guild members in times of trouble. If a guild member was killed, the guild would care for any orphans thus tragically created. Guilds also supplied health insurance, funeral expenses, and doweries for girls who could not afford them. Naturally the guilds became quite powerful. Independent traders would find it difficult to compete.

In a village, local craftsmen also found it difficult to compete with the Merchant guilds, which lead to the rise of Craft guilds in self-defense. Eventually the merchant guild members delegated all the actual traveling and trading jobs in their profession to employees, and instead sat comfortably at home while their did all the hard work. In Andre Norton's novels the 'Free Traders' are independent interstellar merchants owning little more than their starship. Often they are victimized by the trading companies, who are too big for an individual free trader to fight. In the novel apparently the free traders have formed a Merchant guild called the 'Legion', which collectively is powerful enough to defend the members from the megacorps.

Trading Post A or 'factory' is where a merchant (or the merchant's ) carries on the merchant's business on a foreign planet. The trading post exchanges imported trade items for valuable local goods.

In some cases a trading post and a couple of warehouses can grow into an actual colony. The trading post merchant or factor is responsible for the local goods logistics (proper storage and shipping), assesing and packaging for spacecraft transport. The factor is the representative for the merchant in all matters, reporting everything to the merchant headquarters.

The longer the communication time delay between trading post and headquarters, the more trustworthy the factor has to be. Factors may work with native contract suppliers, called a •. Fluyt merchant ship Also interesting is how the rise of the 17th century Dutch seaborne empire was due in part to their superior utilization of wind energy in the form of their breakthrough cargo transport, the. Unlike other cargo ships of the time, the Fluyt was not designed to be easily converted into a warship.

It was pure merchant vessel. This means it was cheaper to build, carried twice the cargo, and needed a smaller crew.

Specialized shipyards optimised for Fluyt production brought the construction price down to a mere 50% of a cost of a conventional ship. It could also operate in much shallower water than a conventional ship, allowing it to get cargo in and out of ports other ships could not reach. By using a Fluyt, cargo transport costs were only 70% to 50% of the transport cost with a conventional ship. The only trade route Fluyts could not be used on were long haul voyages to the East Indies and the New World, because Fluyts were unarmed. If you are a science fiction writer or game creator, these ideas should start the wheels turning in your mind. It may be instructive to read a couple of history textbooks on the topic of Merchant Guilds, and look over the stories of Poul Anderson.

While a trading post can be on a remote planet at the frontier of a long space route, a will probably be more centrally located. A trading post planet might be the only source of some valuable luxury good (exotic gem stones, unique liquor, native artworks) so it can be located on Planet Sticks in the Boondocks Cluster. By way of contrast, transport nexuses are centers of commerce and will be 'strategically' located.

'Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells When shadows pass gigantic on the sand, And softly though the silence beat the bells Along the Golden Road to Samarkand. We travel not for trafficking alone: By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned: For lust of knowing what should not be known We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.' ' — James Elroy Flecker, 'The Golden Road to Samarkand' An Intrepid Merchant is a merchant that goes to the far corners of his world, bravely seeking profit. He is a treasure-hunter but the treasure is not hidden, it is in the bazaar waiting for him, or The chief characteristic of an Intrepid Merchant is that he is both a merchant and an adventurer. He buys and sells like any other trader.

The difference is that he goes to far distant markets to find what he is looking for. (May be fond of being - after all, the more dangerous it is to get at something, the rarer and, therefore, more valuable it's likely to be.) On the less salubrious side of things, this character type can overlap with being a or (where the risk is the original owner fighting back), a smuggler (where the risk is that you're trading illegally), or even a slave trader. If he ever 'retires' (or at least settles in one place), he's likely to become a on the basis of his earnings.

This trope is, dating back in poetry, folklore and history to at least, continuing as a staple of adventure fiction until the present day, and finding its way into science-fiction almost as soon as the genre came into existence. It migrated to role-playing games, especially, in which it is one of the main player character types.

Inevitably the Intrepid Trader, appearing in and its successors. A common space subtrope of this would be the. Intrepid Merchants were arguably the foundation of the world's economy, before easy transportation and communication made his kind irrelevant. They still exist in places like Central Asia in which transportation and communication are not easy. When a whole culture has this as its, it is a. For a huge list of examples.

Not counting the Line and the Foundry, the yards and the village, too, I've made myself and a million; but I'm damned if I made you. Master at two-and-twenty, and married at twenty-three — Ten thousand men on the pay-roll, and forty freighters at sea Fifty years between'em, and every year of it fight, And now I'm Sir Anthony Gloster, dying, a baronite: For I lunched with his Royal 'Ighness — what was it the papers had? 'Not the least of our merchant-princes.'

Dickie, that's me, your dad! Rudyard Kipling, The Mary Gloster By using acquired wealth, knowledge, and skills (), a merchant or other capitalist character becomes a member of society's ruling class. Unlike in, the Merchant Prince doesn't necessarily own outright the society he rules, or even run a; he may, in fact, be only the 'first among equals' among many competing merchants. However, this usually doesn't keep him from trying to run the government like he would his business. Note that to qualify for this trope, a merchant must rise to power as a consequence of his own power and wealth.

A merchant who inherits political power because he was already the rightful heir to the throne doesn't count, as he would have gotten that throne regardless of his mercantile activities. A who becomes royalty by being wealthy and renowned enough to marry the king's only daughter would count, however. Generally, a will be ruled by one of these, or by a council of them modeled after those of Renaissance Italy. Though not required for the trope, some may operate (at least) one.

A particularly successful often 'retires' to become one of these. In more modern settings, expect a lot of these to also be. Some video games based on the model may have becoming one as the player's goal. For a huge list of examples. 'If it can't be had here, it can't be had on any world.'

— High Market flavor text, A city populated mainly by merchants, or known for its shopping opportunities. Tends to be a port or somewhere financially strategic. Usually has a and/or a. You can buy the best available items there, or at least have the most variety to choose from.

This is often, but not always the capital. On many occasions it will be the hometown of a, and will be the favorite hangout of the. Some are even ruled. For a huge list of examples. (ed note: In the novel, the women refugees from Terra arrive in another alien.

They need to start a business to support their efforts. Luck for them, Terra has a few economic innovations unknown to the aliens) The sha-Eyzka had received the humans kindly, in their fashion: given them the freedom of Zatlokopa, taught them language and customs, heard their story. After that the newcomers were on their own, in the raw capitalism which dominated this whole cluster. But a small syndicate of native investors had been willing to and help them get started. There wasn't much question of commercial rivalry yet. The women's operations were too radically unlike anything seen before.

And existed in plenty throughout this cluster, but not on the scale which Terran Traders contemplated—nor with such razzle-dazzle innovations as,, and among outworld cultures. (ed note: One of the women is abducted by the alien Forsi.) Forsi, Sigrid realized. The second most powerful race in this cluster.

She might have guessed. One goblin leaned toward her. His skin rustled as he moved. 'There is no reason to waste time,' he clipped. 'We have already learned that you stand high among the sha-Terra. The highest ranking one, in fact, whom it was practicable for us to capture.

You will cooperate or suffer the consequences. Understand, to Forsi commercial operations are not merely for private gain, as here on Zatlokopa, but are part of a larger design.

You, Terran Traders corporation have upset the economic balance of this cluster. We extrapolate that the upsetting will grow exponentially if not checked. In order to counteract your operations, we must have detailed information about their rationale and the fundamental psychology behind it.

You have shrewdly exploited the fact that no two species think entirely alike and that you yourselves, coming from an altogether foreign civilization-complex, are doubly unpredictable. We shall take you home with us and make studies.' Another asked curiously, 'Did you search long before picking this culture?'

'We were lucky,' Sigrid admitted. Anything to gain time!

'We had... this sort of goal... in mind— a free enterprise economy at a stage of pioneering and expansion—but there are so many clusters.... After visiting only two, though, we heard rumors about yours.'

'We hope to leave within a few years,' Sigrid pleaded. 'Can't you realize our situation? We've made no secret of it. Our planet is dead.

A few ships with our own kind—males—are scattered we know not where in the galaxy. We fled this far to be safe from Earth's unknown enemy. Not to become powerful here, not even to make our home here, but to be safe. Then we had to make a living—' 'Which you have done with an effectiveness that has already overthrown many calculations,' said a Forsi dryly. 'But, but, but listen! Certainly we're trying to become rich. As rich as possible.

But not as an end in itself. Only as a means. When we have enough wealth, we can hire enough ships... to scour the galaxy for other humans. That's all, I swear! 'A most ingenious scheme,' the chief nodded. 'It might well succeed, given time.'

'And then... we wouldn't stay here. We wouldn't want to. This isn't our civilization.

We'd go back, get revenge for Earth, establish ourselves among familiar planets. Or else we'd make a clean break, go far beyond every frontier, colonize a wholly new world. We are not your competitors. Not in the long run. Can't you understand?'

'Even the short run is proving unpleasant for us,' the chief said. ' And as for long-range consequences, you may depart, but the corporate structure you will have built up—still more important, the methods and ideas you introduce—those will remain. Forsi cannot cope with them.'

(ed note: However, the women turn the tables on the Forsi, rescuing Sigrid and capturing the Forsi.) An Eyzka called the police corporation while the others secured the surviving Forsi. 'There's going to be one all-time diplomatic explosion about this, my dear,' Alexandra panted.

'Which... I think... Terran Traders, Inc., can turn to advantage.' Sigrid grinned feebly. 'What a ravening capitalist you have become,' she said. 'I have no choice, have I?

You were the one who first proposed that we turn merchants.' The Yugoslav girl hefted her gun.

'But if violence is to be a regular thing, I will make a suggestion or two.' She looked at the sullen prisoners.

Her head shook, her tongue clicked. 'So they thought to get tough with us? Poor little devils!' The Silk Road Convoy was almost three hundred years old. Its path roughly described a bent and swollen, meandering, broken ellipse along the edge of the rift and then out and across it and back again.

Too often in history a mercenary force has disappeared a moment before the battle; switched sides for a well-timed bribe; or even conquered its employer and brought about the very disasters it was hired to prevent. Mercenaries, for their part, face the chances common to every soldier of being killed by the enemy.

In addition, however, they must reckon with the possibility of being bilked of their pay or massacred to avoid its payment; of being used as cannon fodder by an employer whose distaste for 'money-grubbing aliens' may exceed the enemy's; or of being abandoned far from home when defeat or political change erases their employer or his good will. A solution to both sets of special problems was made possible by the complexity of galactic commerce. The recorded beginnings came early in the twenty-seventh century when several planets caught up in the Confederation Wars used the Terran firm of Felchow und Sohn as an escrow agent for their mercenaries' pay. Felchow was a commercial banking house which had retained its preeminence even after Terran industry had been in some measure supplanted by that of newer worlds. Neither Felchow nor Terra herself had any personal stake in the chaotic rise and fall of the Barnard Confederation; thus the house was the perfect neutral to hold the pay of the condottieri being hired by all parties. Payment was scrupulously made to mercenaries who performed according to their contracts. This included the survivors of the Dalhousie debacle who were able to buy passage off that ravaged world, despite the fact that less than ten percent of the populace which had hired them was still alive.

Conversely, the pay of Wrangel's Legion, which had refused to assault the Confederation drop zone on Montauk, was forfeited to the Montauk government. Felchow und Sohn had performed to the satisfaction of all honest parties when first used as an intermediary. Over the next three decades the house was similarly involved in other conflicts, a passive escrow agent and paymaster.

It was only after the Ariete Incident of 2662 that the concept coalesced into the one stable feature of a galaxy at war. The Ariete, a division recruited mostly from among the militias of the Aldoni System, was hired by the rebels on Paley. Their pay was banked with Felchow, since the rebels very reasonably doubted that anyone would take on the well-trained troops of the Republic of Paley if they had already been handed the carrot.

But the Ariete fought very well indeed, losing an estimated thirty percent of its effectives before surrendering in the final collapse of the rebellion. The combat losses have to be estimated because the Republican forces, in defiance of the 'Laws of War' and their own promises before the surrender, butchered all their fifteen or so thousand mercenary prisoners.

Felchow und Sohn, seeing an excuse for an action which would raise it to incredible power, reduced Paley to Stone Age savagery. An industrialized world (as Paley was) is an interlocking whole. Off-planet trade may amount to no more than five percent of its GDP; but when that trade is suddenly cut off, the remainder of the economy resembles a car lacking two pistons.

It may make whirring sounds for a time, but it isn't going anywhere. Huge as Felchow was, a single banking house could not have cut Paley off from the rest of the galaxy. When Felchow, however, offered other commercial banks membership in a cartel and a share of the lucrative escrow business, the others joined gladly and without exception. No one would underwrite cargoes to or from Paley; and Paley, already wracked by a war and its aftermath, shuddered down into the slag heap of history. Lucrative was indeed a mild word for the mercenary business.

The escrowed money itself could be put to work, and the escrowing bank was an obvious agent for the other commercial transactions needed to run a war. Mercenaries replaced equipment, recruited men, and shipped themselves by the thousands across the galaxy. With the banks' new power came a new organization. The expanded escrow operations were made the responsibility of a Bonding Authority, still based in Bremen but managed independently of the cartel itself. The Authority's fees were high. In return, its Contracts Department was expert in preventing expensive misunderstandings from arising, and its investigative staff could neither be bribed nor deluded by a violator. For a ship moving at near light-speed, time dilation requires that in terms of your subjective, shipboard life span, the voyage won't be much more time-consuming than, say, one of Francis Drake's pirate raids.

This brings us to problem number three: Assuming there are adequate ships and places to go, and the crew's lifespans aren't a problem, why would fleets of expensive vessels be launched to go there? That's another way of asking the Big Question, and we'll spend the rest of this essay trying to answer it. But before continuing, let's be sure we're all together.

I suspect that the Big Question may have taken some of you by surprise. After all, there are abundant examples of terrestrial, trans-oceanic trade, which at first glance seem to provide models for interstellar commerce.

For example, the Japanese import raw materials to their resource-poor islands, transform the materials into automobiles, send the finished goods across the Pacific, and sell them in the United States—and they make a lot of money doing so. Couldn't the same kind of thing work among the stars?

Not necessarily. The times and distances (and therefore the costs) involved are not analogous—not even close. The distance to the Sun's nearest stellar neighbor is approximately five billion times the distance from Japan to California. Therefore, the model of transoceanic trade is virtually useless. It's often been assumed that there would be interstellar freighters and ore ships based on the trans-oceanic model, but is this assumption realistic? Consider the importation of raw materials to the Earth.

Sure, resources might vanish from the Earth or become unimaginably expensive, although this is doubtful. Still, we won't be using starships to import raw materials.

We can always mine the asteroids, or Jupiter's moons. They're millions of times closer, and therefore far cheaper. So unless there are minerals out there we've never dreamed of, and that we can't synthesize closer to home, we can forget about interstellar ore boats. It's not raw materials that we'll lack in the solar system, it's cheap labor. But the cost of labor on Earth would have to be incredibly high to justify an interstellar flow of manufactured goods. It's conceivable, of course.

We can easily imagine a future political setup (the post office scenario) in which all nations on Earth are so bogged down with artificially high labor costs and archaic work rules that the 'cheapest' Earth-made automobiles would cost, relatively, what a Rolls Royce costs now. But ask yourself—would even that kind of economic insanity justify an interstellar transportation system, with a 10- or 15-year (Earth viewpoint) transit time? Probably not. The unions would take care (if they were clever) that terrestrial prices never got so high that the interstellar freetraders would have a competitive advantage. Even if Earth was devastated by war (a common science fiction scenario), we could rebuild our factories faster than we could import finished goods from the stars. Remember, after the destruction of World War II, Western Europe was back in business within a few short years. So we need to assume a really amazing manufacturing advantage that would make goods from the stars so valuable as to be worth the cost—and years of transit time—of shipping them to Earth.

Is that realistic? Some goods are unique—like the products of newly created technologies. Ah, but would new colonies develop such technologies? And even if they did, there's always the risk of industrial espionage; and anyway, by the time the products got to their distant market (Earth), would they still be state of the art?

A dozen years of transport time can dull a product's competitive advantage. Besides, absent a new terrestrial dark age (another common SF scenario), interstellar shipments are going to be pretty much a one-way street. Earth will have technologies the new worlds need, at least in the early stages of our interstellar expansion. They (the colonies) will need goods from Earth, but not vice versa.

In marketing terms, they're going to be like the natives of Bangladesh—we know they're out there, and they want what we produce, but what's in it for us? The problem for an interstellar merchant is finding something Earth can buy from the new worlds. Well, what can the new worlds export?

It'll be a long time until the new worlds are out-inventing Earth. All their technology will be old stuff, made with machines they took with them. But even old technology can be unique if it involves secret processes. Sure, but does Coke's secret formula justify the cost of interstellar freight? What else have they got? Artwork is unique.

Persian rugs are regionally specific, labor-intensive products. Havana cigars and French wines require special climatic conditions. Extraterrestrial analogs of such items could be traded. But it would take a lot of future Picassos, cases of Coca-Cola, bottles of Chateau Betelgeuse, Oriental carpets, and interstellar stogies to support a galactic merchant fleet.

Anything else? There's the possibility of Dune-like spice, or Star Trek's dilithium crystals, or some other wonder goods—but we can't count on their existence. For the moment, let's ignore this problem, and arbitrarily assume that something, say automobiles, will be worth shipping from one planetary system to another. This (the Toyota scenario) is our biggest, wildest assumption so far, but let's play with it for a while, and see how it goes. If you were a star-faring merchant considering the purchase of a shipload of cars from, say, Epsilon Eridani, which is almost 11 light-years away from Earth, how would you know what market conditions were like on Earth? It'll take you 11 years (actually 10.8 or so, but let's not be fussy) to send a message to Earth ('Cars for sale.

) and 11 more years to get a reply ('Yes, we'll take a few.' By the time you got that reply, the information would be 11 years out of date.

Perhaps Marco Polo could operate like that, but things were somewhat different then. Let's assume that you don't need to send an inquiry to Earth. Instead, imagine that Earth is always broadcasting its needs, so you touch down on a manufacturing planet circling Epsilon Eridani (which we'll call 'EE') and you get the latest info (11 years old) from Earth—'Hot market here for cars from EE.'

Now you start thinking like a merchant. What kind of mark-up could you expect that would justify buying a starship-load of cars and tying up your capital (or paying interest on a loan) for the dozen years you would need to get those cars to your destination? I said a dozen years, because your ship will certainly be slower than the communications system. Bear in mind that you'd be making an investment in goods that might very well be obsolete when they finally arrived. And if Earth is dominated by strong labor unions (as they would have to be to make scarce, extraterrestrial labor a bargain) they'll have a full range of protectionist legislation to keep out cheap imports. And what kind of import duties would you have to pay in order to clear your cargo through Earth customs?

The only way your venture could work is if you could know, a dozen years in advance of your arrival on Earth, what your sales price and other costs would be. It's possible for that broadcast of Earth's needs to be some kind of continuing offer, containing price and terms, and by acting on it you could be assured of selling your cargo at those prices—even though your cargo would be a dozen years old when your ship arrives on Earth. That would require an automobile dealer on Earth to commit himself, years in advance, to pay a healthy price for cargo he hoped would be arriving—some day. Maybe his broadcast offer would say, 'Irving's Interstellar Imports needs 100 cars, as of the year 2200. Will pay 30 Heinleins each, plus all import taxes, if they get here by the year 2224 (that's 11 years for Irving's offer to get to EE, and 13 more for the goods to be produced and sent from EE to Earth). This offer guaranteed by irrevocable letter of credit from Bank of Terra.'

The 'offer' would have to be officially registered somewhere at EE, and if you accepted it, that too would be registered, so the next interstellar entrepreneur arriving at EE wouldn't duplicate the order. Irving only wants 100 cars, not 100 million. A message would then be sent to Earth saying that the goods were on the way. Would that do it? Perhaps, if there were strict laws that made that kind of deal a binding contract, if the Bank of Terra were still in business when you arrived, if there were no currency depreciation, and perhaps a thousand other things.

Maybe a local branch of the Bank of Terra on EE would use that broadcast offer as collateral, and make you a loan equal to the cost of your cargo and the cost of the loan, plus some profit. Then you pay for the cars, leave the profit on deposit (with interest compounding) and you head for Earth to deliver your cargo to Irving. The bank should do quite well, too. The loan is secure (it's backed by the Bank of Terra on Earth, and your ship is insured by ).

Your profit deposit is going to sit on EE, waiting about 24 years until you return. With a loan portfolio and a deposit base like that, interstellar banking should be a super-profitable industry. When you arrive on Earth with your cargo in good condition, the Bank of Terra (on Earth) broadcasts to its branch (on EE) that everything's fine, and you can withdraw your funds. (We've just described how a 'letter of credit' works today in international trade.) And observe, future bankers, that it can take decades for funds to clear. That's one hell of a profitable float. Faster-than-light communications would probably be a banking disaster!

Now you dash back to EE, most likely with an outward bound cargo arranged in the same manner. Both the trip to Earth and the return to EE take a short time, subjectively (about 2 or 3 years altogether, depending on how much beyond 99% of light-speed you're traveling), and when you get back to good old EE, you're a rich man—depending on the tax laws that have been enacted on EE during the 24 or so years of your absence. That sounds like it could be workable, but does this Toyota scenario make any sense? Would an automobile dealer on Earth (or any other interstellar destination) offer to pay for a shipload of cars (or whatever) which wouldn't arrive for two dozen years? It's unlikely, but not impossible. A deposit of 20¢ now, compounding annually at only 7% per year, grows to $1 in 24 years. At an interest rate of 10% per year, you only need to deposit about 10¢.

So our terrestrial auto dealer only has to put up a small deposit now with the Bank of Terra to have the payment guaranteed in 24 years. And, if the deposits come from his customers, the auto dealer isn't even investing his own funds. The only risks are structural ones—the bank may fail, the laws may change, the currency may depreciate, there may be war, plague, and so on. But these are risks that could be faced, and gladly—if the lure of huge profits were there. It makes even more sense if the customer doesn't have to wait 24 years, which is possible.

He makes his 10% deposit, then goes off on an interstellar trip, and returns to Earth a couple of subjective years later, while 24 Earth-years have passed, and... His car is waiting for him, all paid for. Of course it's an old-style car, but that's OK. He's technologically like Rip Van Winkle. Unlike Rip, he's still young, but he's hopelessly out of date, and not trained to use new vehicles. (We're assuming rapid technological progress, remember?) Interstellar travelers need old-style goods (and probably live in behind-the-times communities with their contemporaries) so the years of transit time your cargo requires turns out to be a desirable feature. We're getting desperate now.

We've got ships, we've got places to go. Time and distance are no problem. Compound interest makes long voyages worthwhile, and we've worked out a system of interstellar finance. We can even imagine some kind of commerce going on. But how can we get interstellar colonies organized and self-sufficient?

Where will the funds come from? The Big Question looms as large as ever. Can it be done? Remember the tremendous profits to be made from the banking system, if only we could think of a way to get it started.

Surely, with wealth like that waiting to be made, someone will think of a way. How about this: Our venturers might not have to wait decades for a return on their investment.

Remember time dilation—a round trip to EE takes about 24 years, Earth time, but only about 3 years, ship's time. Investors could get a much quicker payoff (subjectively) if they go along for the ride. Not that they'd have any desire to become settlers.

All they want is to stay alive long enough to reap the rewards of their enterprise. A rich man could put part of his portfolio at interest on Earth, invest the rest in an exploration company, and then climb aboard ship. After 24 years have passed on Earth, he returns only 3 years older, finds a potful of money waiting for him in the bank (his left-behind deposit has multiplied five or ten times, depending on interest rates) and he also owns the beginning of a thriving business on EE. After another trip or two, he's incredibly rich, still relatively young, and now his investment on EE should be starting to pay off. This is the scenario of star-traveling investors, who become centuries old by Earth's reckoning, with fortunes (and maybe families) established on several worlds.

It's quite possible that something like this will happen. In fact, this scenario is so tempting that it may be the answer to the Big Question! Star-traveling investors and bankers will pay for the first ships. In the May 1989 issue of Analog, in an article titled ',' I explained that even if there were no technological barriers to star travel, a species nevertheless needs economic incentives to build ships and go voyaging to other stars.

The investment required for star travel is huge; the payoff is centuries (or at best, decades) away. Why would any species bother with such a costly activity, except perhaps for the extravagance of a few exploratory ships? The only motivation I could think of to justify the multi-generational expense of establishing extra-solar colonies would be the combined benefits to be derived from time dilation and compound interest. Greatly simplified, my idea was this: What will ultimately lure investors' money into building starships won't be the stars, it'll be superfast compound interest (relativistically speaking). Your Earth-bound bank account, piling up interest over the decades, would make you rich when you returned, still young, after a long interstellar voyage. (This is relativity's famous 'twin paradox,' applied to you and your bank account.) I predicted that it would probably be star-traveling (and thus long-lived) bankers who found it profitable to invest in starting mankind's interstellar expansion. Only after the passage of centuries might other activities justify the continuing expense of maintaining fleets of starships.

And if I'm right about this, then we may seem to be alone for a very understandable reason—no other species has seeking motivation. To prove my point about the primacy of economics, consider the sad status of SETI—the Search for Extra-Terres-trial Intelligence. SETI is cheap; all it really requires is off-the-shelf radio technology. Yet in the absence of a profit motive, we can't even keep SETI afloat. You can imagine, therefore, how impossible it would be to raise funds for a fleet of non-profit starships—even if they weren't all that difficult to build. I don't want to minimize the technological end of things, but interstellar travel really boils down to this: Assuming a species' engineers can do the job, economics is the whole ball of wax.

Could economics be the key missing factor in the Drake equation, as well as an explanation for the Great Silence? Drake himself suspects something like this. Could this explanation apply to every intelligent species in the galaxy? Consider this: What does it take to develop our particular brand of economic incentives? It requires that a species generate several intellectual concepts, and that they take each of these concepts seriously. At minimum, they need: (1) private property; (2) money; (3) interest; (4) commercial banking; (5) merchant banking; (6) joint-stock companies; (7) financial markets; (8) accounting systems; and (9) a free-market economic system. Observe that none of these requirements is an engineering development.

None is a tangible technological achievement. Each is invisible, intangible, and abstract. None is inevitable. Therefore, it seems probable that our from being universal; it could actually be unique to us, and incomprehensibly 'alien' to other species in our galaxy. We have no difficulty assuming that many intelligent aliens will develop technology, because technology depends on observing and rationally responding to the tangible, objective world. Any reasonably bright, land-dwelling, tool-wielding species can eventually do that (although in retrospect, it certainly took us long enough).

But what is the likelihood of another species' hitting upon and adopting every single one of the abstract economic ideas listed above? Most of the human cultures in Earth's past (and even today) would fail such a test. A hive-like species, or a species that lives in communes, or that is always dominated by tyrants, or which consists of solitary individuals, may be scientifically brilliant and extraordinarily curious, but they will probably never develop the essential concepts of banking and interest and commercial finance that make interstellar travel a profitable, affordable activity.

To such aliens, our 'mysterious' banks, our profit-seeking corporations, our compound-interest calculations (so vital to time-dilated star travelers), and certainly our stock exchanges, might be viewed as exotic manifestations of a bewildering alien religion. Even after studying us, they may utterly fail to grasp our motivation (or would they call it obsession?) for transporting cargo between the stars. Well, I was looking for a 'good Great Silence.' I think I've found it. The economic explanation tells us why, with the whole shining Universe beckoning to them, no alien species has ever been sufficiently motivated to build and launch ships to the stars. They're isolated, not by necessity, but by their own lack of imagination.

They're not even sending out messages; nor are they listening for ours. The Great Silence, therefore, is the silence of poverty. The galaxy is stagnant, with each alien species tragically isolated from the others. Each is a potential supplier of products and information, each is a potential buyer as well, but there is no interstellar intercourse. That's because we haven't arrived on the interstellar scene. When we do, we can be the merchant princes of the galaxy. Who cares if the aliens never understand that our traders, engaged in a ten-year (subjective) voyage, are primarily motivated by a century of compound interest piling up at home?

As long as we're willing to build and fly the ships—and reap the profits—let the aliens think we're crazy! We can do for the stay-at-home aliens what was done for us by the great railroad and canal builders, the merchant sea captains, the leaders of caravans. This is not merely the business opportunity of a lifetime, it's the biggest opportunity of all time! The Great Silence is our clue that the galaxy needs us—it needs us very much.

There's a lesson in all of this for those who like to dream up exotic, Utopian visions of mankind's future. There are those who long for the day when we shall 'progress' beyond the need for private property. They imagine that when we achieve that glorious un-propertied state...

What happens then? They never say precisely what's going to happen. It's supposed to be obvious, and perhaps it is to them, but it certainly isn't obvious to me. Presumably they imagine that when we finally achieve that 'lofty' level of existence, we'll automatically start building starships—somehow. But it doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny. Your savings account and mutual fund shares and insurance policies aren't keeping mankind from the stars.

When the Utopian day of socio-economic 'liberation' comes, we'll have a society modeled after such 'noble' people as the North American Indians—people who, to their everlasting misfortune, had not developed our economic incentives, or even the concept of land ownership—people who therefore (causal linkage implied here) numbered among their greatest accomplishments such technological wonders as. The loincloth. (I can hear the knees jerking out there, so let me hasten to add that I'm criticizing an economic system, not a race.) Those 'thinkers' who imagine that we shall become an 'advanced' star traveling species when we have developed 'beyond' such 'primitive' concepts as ownership of private property are dreaming of a future that can never be. You can have a society without property, or you can have the stars.

You cannot have both. So there it is—the likeliest reason why we seem to be alone—we're the only capitalists in the cosmos. And if that's really true, then even though the Universe is seething with intelligent life and probably has been for hundreds of millions or possibly billions of years, we have absolutely nothing to fear. Ladies and Gentlemen of Earth, I bring you tidings of great joy: The stars belong to us! In the field of stability, perhaps one of the most useful ideas is the concept of feedback.

Feedback is a flow of information that has a reciprocating and moderating influence on organizational behavior. Information generated by the system and presented as output is fed back in as input via a 'feedback loop.' The system thereby keeps an eye on itself and becomes better able to establish and maintain a state of homeostatic equilibrium. Sudden stimuli applied randomly to the system and wildly oscillating inputs are quickly 'damped' out. Theoretically a well-designed extraterrestrial governmental organization possessing no time delays in feedback should be capable of instantaneous response to disruptive influences and should exhibit perfect dynamic stability. However, time delays are inherent in all real physical systems, and this problem will be further exacerbated in the case of interstellar systems because of the comparatively large lag times in transportation and communication between the stars.

And whenever delays exist in any system, any variation by one of the quantities moderated by the feedback loop may be perpetuated indefinitely. In other words, without multiple control loops certain disturbances introduced in one corner of a galactic empire could propagate throughout the system, reverberating in continuous oscillations instead of settling down. According to systems analysts, galactic governments should be designed to be 'resilient' with 'soft failure modes' (nonlethal), When unexpected events occur, a well-designed xenopolitical system will not collapse but rather will degrade gradually. Tim Quilici of Rockwell International has devised a very simple 'systems' model of an interstellar economics system to illustrate the basic concept of feedback (see below). Using a single loop mechanism, a socialistic alien government attempts to hold stable the price of some valuable trade commodity — say, 'positronic brains' — by controlling supply.

The 'brains' are manufactured on the Capitol World, a center of industrial development and political control, and are shipped to Outback 10 light-years away. Communication is via microwave, but interstellar freighters can only make 25%c.

Demand for 'brains' (to control the agricultural and mining robots on Outback) has remained virtually constant for the last century at 100 units per year. Suddenly, in 2400 A.D., due to poor weather and a series of unusually violent seismic tremors, demand begins to fall. Over a decade it drops to 50 per year, at which point it levels off and holds steady.

What happens to the price of 'brains' that Capitol World is trying to control? The demand for positronic brains on planet Outback is normally 100 units at the going price of $3×10 6 each, delivered F.O.B. From Capitol World. The government at Capitol wishes to hold the price constant by controlling supply. In the figure above, demand on Outback drops precipitously from 100 units/year to 50 units/year, due to bad weather. This causes the price to fall to $2×10 6.

By halving the number of shipments of positronic brains to Outback, the Capitol World government can force a return to the old price level. Above is a block diagram of the proposed systems model of Outback economics. P(t) is the price of positronic brains on Outback. Q(t) is the quantity supplied to Outback by the Capitol World government. C(t) is the consumer demand on Outback for positronic brains. Since Outback is 10 light-years from Capitol World, messages travel at 100%c, and interstellar freighters travel at 25%c, the communication delay d c is 10 years and the transportation delay d t is 40 years.

The system thus may be de scribed mathematically as follows: P(t) = e • Q(t - d t) + e • C(t) Q(t) = P 0 / e - P(t-d 0) / e + Q(t - d c - d t) where e is elasticity, equal to 20,000 $/positronic brain. When demand for positronic brains on Outback falls, so does price. The Capitol World government finds out 10 years later, by microwave communication. Shipments are immediately cut in half, but since 40 years’ worth of cargo is already en route, the effects of the cutback are not felt on Outback until 2450 AD. By 2400 AD, 60 years after the change in demand, price has returned to normal. As we see from (the above), the decrease in demand on Outback causes an immediate price reduction there. Suddenly there is a glut on the market.

The price remains low as too many new 'brains' continue to pour in from Capitol World — which has not yet had time to react to the changed circumstances. The situation, in this simple model, is not fully remedied for 60 years following the initial disturbance. This suggests some of the difficulties inherent in interstellar commerce and government. Systems theory should allow similar modeling of the dynamic behavior of vastly more complex galactic organizations, provided their modes of operation and multiple feedback loops can be precisely and quantitatively specified. Miller, pioneer in systems science and president of the University of Louisville in Kentucky, has developed what is probably devised to date.

Miller claims that his theory, and the principles which emerge from it, are applicable to all living systems from cellular lifeforms to organic societies. Xenologists expect that this work may profitably be extended to considerations of xenopolitical systems as well, primarily because of its general and universalistic approach to systems analysis at all scales of organization. In his fascinating 1100-page monograph entitled Living Systems, Miller considers living systems at seven different levels of complexity: Cells, organs, organisms, groups, organizations, societies, and supranational systems. Based on fundamental notions of evolutionary unity, he then derives nearly 200 cross-level hypotheses which he asserts may be general characteristics of any living system. The following are six of these hypotheses which xenologists believe may have relevance to the problem of stability in xenopolitical systems at all cultural scales: Hypothesis 5.2-2: The greater a threat or stress upon a system, the more components of it are involved in adjusting to it.

When no further components with new adjustment processes are available, the system function collapses. Hypothesis 5.2-10: Under equal stress, functions developed later in the phylogenetic history of a given type of system break down before more primitive functions do. Hypothesis 5.2-11: After stress, disturbances of subsystem steady states are ordinarily corrected and returned to normal ranges before systemwide steady-state disturbances are. Hypothesis 5.2-12: More complex systems, which contain more different components, each of which can adjust against one or more specific environmental stresses and maintain in steady state one or more specific variables not maintained by any other component, if they adequately coordinate the processes in their components, survive longer on the average than less complex systems. Hypothesis 5.2-13: Under threat or stress, a system that survives, in the common good of total system survival, temporarily subordinates conflicts among subsystems or components until the threat or stress is relieved, when internal conflicts recur.

Hypothesis 5.2-19: The greater the resources available to a system, the less likely is conflict among its subsystems or components. All ship’s personnel are eligible for compensation over and above earned salaries. That compensation consists of a share of the voyage’s profit as determined by the ledger and certified by the Captain. Share Distribution Table and Explanation: Share Explanation Owner The Owner’s share consists of 20% of total profit before crew share distributions Captain The Captain’s share consists of 10% of total profit before crew share distributions. Ship The remaining profit is distributed among the ship’s officers and crew based on their rank and/or specialty.

Officers receive double shares while crew receive full, half, or quarter shares depending on rank. Shares: Example If a ship completes a voyage with the following officers and crew and the profit consists of 10 kilocreds: Officers (each gets two shares): • Captain • First mate • Second mate • Engineer • Chief steward • Cargo master Crew: • Full share(5) • Half share (4) • Quarter share (4) Total shares: 20 Owner: 2000 cr Captain: 1000 cr Ship: 7000 cr The Owner would get 2000 cr. The Captain would get 1000 cr. The remaining 7000 cr are divided by 20. Each share in this example is worth 350 cr and distributed according to share rank with each officer getting 700 cr, each full share getting 350 cr, etc. Note that the captain, as officer, gets 1700 cr — the Captain’s Share plus a Double Share as officer.

(ed note: This is about how to reduce traveling merchant mortality in the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons. But it has some general principle that still apply in Rocketpunk, transferring it into science fiction should be straightforwards. In D&D there are the magic spells Revivify and Raise Dead to bring a dead person back to life. The magic spell Gentile Repose prevents a dead body from decaying. In Rocketpunk there is, freezing a person into a human-shaped block of ice and thawing them out at the destination. In D&D the two 'raise the dead' spells require an expensive diamond, because of reasons.

A 'cleric' is a priest or priestess of a god or goddess, they are the only ones who can cast raise-the-dead magic spells. 'gp' means one gold coin, the standard unit of currency.

A 'murder hobo' is a mercenary soldier for hire. The author is highly skilled at applying modern economic theory to fantasy situations.) On Trade How do great magic items, mystical cloaks, Elven and Dwarven armors, rare reagents, and unusual spell scrolls make their way across enormous distances to shops and ultimately the hands of Murder Hobos? Slowly and perilously, one laborious step at a time. For example, Elves sell their armor only at the edge of their remote forest. A group of merchants trades rare reagents for the armor.

Once bought, they pack the armor into a wagon and carry it over the mountains to a trading hub city. There, it goes on sale.

A second group of traders buys the armor at a markup. They move it in a great caravan with other goods over a desert to a different city’s bazaar. The armor flows through four or five different trading hubs on route to Murder Hobos. Each time the armor changes hands, its price increases. A merchant bought it for 100 gp here and sold for 400 gp there.

Once it reaches the local market, the 40 gp worth of Elven time, materials and effort becomes 1,000 gp in the Magic Item Shoppes a thousand miles away. Overland, long distance trade is dangerous and expensive. The roads are full of monsters, bandits, and weather-based peril. Routes shift with changing military and political conditions.

Even through politically stable areas, preparation for travel requires pricey letters of passage and introduction. Otherwise local governments are certain to loot rich, foreign caravans for a quick payday.

Sea travel is marginally faster, safer and cheaper simply by avoiding politically unstable areas and rapacious local rulers. It certainly isn’t more comfortable – an oared craft with a hundred men still lacks a bathroom. Any boat might fall prey to murder, piracy and disease – even at the hands of their own captain and crew when they want the cargo more than their payoff for delivery. The loss of men, ships and cargos on the seas is so common wharf logs simply note shipwrecks as “Lost with all hands” and a small shrug. Yet, the possible upside profit on a trading venture is so great people keep trying.

Despite wars, bandits, piracy, disease, and death, a 1,000 gp Elven Magic Chain Shirt is still 1,000 gp. Considering a typical background set-filling peasant makes 1gp through an entire year of backbreaking labor and subsistence living, that 960 gp profit could turn some enterprising Murder Hobo into a Lord – for a single sale of kit. And the wagon holds twenty more where that came from.

So they keep heading out into the great beyond hoping to come back and make their retirement. The God of Death The dangers of overland trade present a golden business opportunity for the right person or trans-planar being. A down on his luck God of Death contemplates the souls arriving on his Ferryman’s shores. Some are dead from disease, some from war, but a fair number from misadventure on the road. In recent years, the sea of souls turned into a trickle. His Church is in bad financial shape. Gods of Death just aren’t “in” this decade.

It’s all light and happiness and harvest now. With a lack of hard followers, various Gods of Death compete for scant believer gold coin to support their continuing faith. It’s bad financial times for Gods of Death everywhere. This God of Death, being in the typical Anubis Ferryman-over-the-waters mold, isn’t a stranger to travel or travelers.

It’s kind of his thing. He makes the same simple calculation the merchant Murder Hobos do. He can improve on the sad state of overland and sea trade and build a business model on this. He can change his nature from the pure Death business into the Death, Trade and Money business. This gets more believers into his church and widens his appeals to a certain kind of believer clientele with money to burn.

This God of Death sends his Clerics his plan via dreams and prophecy. And when the Clerics misinterpret that, via physical messenger. The plan will work and nothing could go wrong. It works something like this: At the beginning of the journey, the Clerics kill all the passengers with something pleasant and painless specifically made for their comfort. They offer a nice poison to drink or use a convenient spell. People go take a lie down and quietly die in the Cleric’s care. Souls of the newly dead collect in the realm of the Dead.

They receive little chits identifying themselves as part of the God’s new Dead Caravanning Service. The Ferryman separates these souls from daily soul-ferrying commerce and sends them to the plush couches of the comfortable, upscale waiting rooms. The God’s servants offer the newly and waiting Dead complementary phantasmal drinks. Meanwhile, Clerics cast Gentle Repose on their now dead merchant passengers (Gentle Repose is a magic spell preventing a dead body from decaying). A single 3rd level Cleric of the Dead can keep 10 corpses in gentle repose indefinitely.

A higher level Cleric can offer a more economical service of more corpses on a journey per day aggregating the cost keeping travel prices low. The caravaneers, still alive to drive caravan, goods, Clerics and bodies to its destination, pack the bodies in with the cargo. They figure body weight against the space of freight. The displacement is an overall plus: while bodies take space, the caravans no longer pack food, water, clothing, cooking goods, or other life or comfort articles for the merchants.

They re-allocate that space for more goods on the trip, raising the trip’s possible end profits. Once the caravan reaches the destination, Clerics cast Revivify. This is the lowest and cheapest tier of raise dead service costing the passenger 300 gp in cheap diamonds plus the cost of Clerical services (plus tip.) This is also the riskiest option – if the Cleric does not raise the client within one minute of waiving the Gentle Repose spell, the Ferryman waives the soul from the waiting area to the underworld ferry. However, richer merchant clients of the Caravans of the Dead pay 500 gp in diamonds plus service plus tip for the more expensive Raise Dead which not only raises the body but also casts healthy neutralize poison and cures all non-magical diseases.

Not only is the trip more profitable due to carrying more salable cargo, it’s a health tonic and spa. Merchants return from successful journeys healthier than when they left and free of all foreign diseases. Who doesn’t want to return from a year-long trip healthier than when they left? It’s a great secondary level of service marketing.

The Church allows borrowing the price of the Revivify and Raise Dead Services against the future profits of the journey for a certain low-interest rate back to the Church so full cash payment is not necessary up-front for those merchant companies just starting out. Merchants can also “pre-pay” for their death and resurrection and death and resurrection services (two deaths, two raises, based on trade location and trade route) to guarantee first raise and resurrection priority services plus added comfort services in the Underworld. The Church doesn’t bother with collections on deadbeats.

Failure to pay simply means the Clerics re-kill the client and the God of Death will exact his payment in other less pleasant methods in His Underworld. Sure, dying and returning is a traumatic ordeal but the Church provides “rest and recovery” rooms in their various franchised locations with attending Clerics waiting with glasses full of refreshing cucumber drinks on return from the Dead. The Glorious Upsides But why would anyone do this? And why is it suddenly so popular? Dead merchants on a caravan of the dead no longer worry about getting killed by war, famine, or bandits.

They won’t get fleeced by pirates, deal with a mutinied crew, or pay the dreaded Head Tax when passing through ports. Who wants to loot, steal or tax a big wagon full of dead bodies? Sure, they’re not actively decaying dead bodies (as long as the Cleric stays alive to cast Gentle Repose) but they’re still dead. It’s a real theft deterrent. And there’s no boredom! Merchants die at one end of their journey, travel, and come back to life in some glorious, strange and different foreign city surrounded by new meta-humans to meet and greet! They can get right down to the business of wheeling and dealing, filling the wagons, acquiring cargo, and buying cheap to sell expensively.

When it’s time to leave they simply die again, sit around in a comfortable quasi-death waiting room playing board games and reading the boardsheets from home (conveniently provided astrally) until it’s time to raise again. Should the absolute worst happen to merchant bodies on their travels, should the boat sink in a storm, or the caravan get caught in a warzone, or bandits loot the entire enterprise en-route, well, the merchants are already dead. They’re comfortably dead, not hacked to bits dead. It could be so much worse! A Ferryman working for the friendly God of Death takes the poor merchant to the Underworld in style with same-day service. Of course, the Church refund the price for pre-paid Revivify or Raise Dead to the nearest living relative or estate. Those who die permanently in transit will receive a very comfortable afterlife.

They are, of course, customers, and the Church hopes to service the next of kin on their next trade mission. The More Glorious Downsides So, this makes a ton of money for the Death Church.

It is no longer contemplating Church Bankruptcy. But this financial scheme is not without its downsides.

First, me-too knock-off Churches pop up and sell similar services cheaper. How can a competitor price their services cheaper than 500 gp + Clerical fees + tip for a full Raise Dead?

By raising the merchant bodies into undead to help with the journey and pay down the expenses. Undead don’t eat, they don’t need a bathroom, they don’t sleep, and they don’t take much more space than the original Gentle Reposed bodies. Now, of course, the merchants may experience some significant wear and tear on their bodies during the journey should they use a cheaper service from a second-rate Death God. But they keep more profits. Second, finding Murder Hobos (mercenaries) to guard a caravan of bodies to ensure it reaches its destination might have minor challenges like, for instance, telling the Murder Hobos the caravan is full of dead bodies. Some Murder Hobos with different and/or competing God and religious-based arrangements may take issue with voluntary death and resurrection. This may cause the price of the Death God’s services to increase depending on the contracted services and the other objections.

There’s plenty of Murder Hobos who will do anything for adventure, murder, plunder, and a dozen levels, so during protection contract negotiation the Clerics leave out ‘what is in the wagon.’ Cleric business, they say. Things become awkward when the Cleric’s wagon erupts with live merchants who, just as quickly, disappear again. But these are Death Clerics.

Around them, things get weird. Third, the diamonds. If this Death God’s business is successful, and assuming it is, the Death God needs a continuous influx of diamonds to power the entire business scheme. Diamonds, of course, come from Dwarves who run the diamond mines. Trade here is equitable – Dwarves like gold, Clerics receive gold from pre-paying rich merchant customers, Clerics give Dwarves gold, and Dwarves hand over diamonds.

Clerics burn diamonds on raise services. It all works. Diamonds, it turns out, are not all that rare.

The world’s crust makes them all the time. But they are difficult to extract from deep mines and that effort makes the Dwarven services valuable. The preferred route for a Death God who builds his Godly Business on a mountain of bodies, Revivify, and Raise Dead is to enter into an exclusive contract for Dwarven diamond-based services.

The negotiations are tense. The Death God must deal with Dwarven Gods.

It goes back and forth. Finally, the Dwarves agree to give the Death God and his followers an exclusive monopolistic line on the diamonds in return for a percentage of the successful fees and tips. Dwarves don’t care. They simply desire a constant delivery of gold for doing, in their minds, nothing. While they are merchants, they have their ways of dealing with the horrors and problems of the long distance trade. They don’t need the Death God’s services but they do like his money.

The other Churches do care because, now, they must find replacement diamond suppliers for their own Revivify, Raise and Resurrection services. They require a new source of mining expertise – Gnomes, perhaps, whose mining gear occasionally explodes. The overland routes to the Gnomes are sometimes long and dangerous. Many routes involve peril, pirates and Murder Hobos.

Big caravans full of diamonds are easy targets for greedy bandits and rapacious local lords. Maybe instead of going to Holy War against the Death God over diamonds like they are clearly contemplating, the other Churches should take advantage of the Death God’s Caravans of the Dead.

(ed note: the introduction to one of Poul Anderson's classic tales about interstellar merchant princes) As it has before, and will again. The comings and goings of man have their seasons.

They are no more mysterious than the annual cycle of the planet, and no less. Because today we are sailing out among the stars, we are more akin to or Greeks colonizing the than to our ancestors of only a few generations ago. We, too, are discoverers, pioneers, traders, missionaries, composers of epic and saga. Our people have grown bolder than their fathers, ambitious, individualistic; on the darker side, greed, callousness, disregard for the morrow, violence, often outright banditry have returned. Such is the nature of societies possessed of, and by, a frontier. Yet no springtime is identical with the last. Technic civilization is not Classical or Western; and as it spreads ever more thinly across ever less imaginable reaches of space—as its outposts and its heartland learn, for good or ill, that which ever larger numbers of nonhuman peoples have to teach: it is changing in ways unpredictable.

Already we live in a world that no Earthbound man could really have comprehended. He might, for instance, have seen an analogy between the Polesotechnic League and the of medieval Europe. But on closer examination he would find that here is something new, descended indeed from concepts of the Terrestrial past but with mutation and miscegenation in its bloodlines.

We cannot foretell what will come of it. We do not know where we are going.

Nor do most of us care. For us it is enough that we are on our way. (ed note: the word 'Polesotechnic' was coined by Poul's wife Karen Anderson from the Greek for 'selling skills'). It is a truism that the structure of a society is basically determined by its technology. Not in an absolute sense—there may be totally different cultures using identical tools—but the tools settle the possibilities; you can't have interstellar trade without spaceships. A race limited to a single planet, possessing a high knowledge of mechanics but with its basic machines of industry and war requiring a large capital investment, will inevitably tend toward collectivism under one name or another. Free enterprise needs elbow room.

Automation and the mineral wealth of the Solar System made the manufacture of most goods cheap. The cost of energy nosedived when small, clean, simple fusion units became available. Gravitics led to the hyperdrive, which opened a galaxy to exploitation. This also provided a safety valve. A citizen who found his government oppressive could often emigrate elsewhere, an exodus—the Breakup, as it came to be called—that planted liberty on a number of worlds. Their influence in turn loosened bonds upon the mother planet. Interstellar distances being what they are, and intelligent races having their separate ideas of culture, there was no political union of them.

Nor was there much armed conflict; besides the risk of destruction, few had anything to fight about. A race rarely gets to be intelligent without an undue share of built-in ruthlessness, so all was not sweetness and fraternity. However, the various balances of power remained fairly stable. Meanwhile the demand for cargoes grew huge. Not only did colonies want the luxuries of home, and home want colonial products, but the older civilizations had much to swap. It was usually cheaper to import such things than to create the industry needed to make synthetics and substitutes.

Under such conditions, an exuberant capitalism was bound to arise. It was also bound to find mutual interests, form alliances, and negotiate spheres of influence. The powerful companies might be in competition, but their magnates had the wit to see that, overriding this, they shared a need to cooperate in many activities, arbitrate disputes among themselves, and present a united front to the demands of the state—any state. Governments were limited to a few planetary systems at most; they could do little to control their cosmopolitan merchants. One by one, through bribery, coercion, or sheer despair, they gave up the struggle.

Selfishness is a potent force. Governments, officially dedicated to altruism, remained divided. The Polesotechnic League became a loose kind of supergovernment, sprawling from Canopus to Deneb, drawing its membership and employees from perhaps a thousand species. It was a horizontal society, cutting across political and cultural boundaries. It set its own policies, made its own treaties, established its own bases, fought its own battles and for a time, in the course of milking the Milky Way, did more to spread a truly universal civilization and enforce a solid Pax than all the diplomats in known history. Nevertheless, it had its troubles. The planet Zaonia () in the Vergant Subsector had a problem.

It was a rich agricultural world and numerous traders stopped there to buy food for other less bountiful worlds. The problem was many of these traders had forged identities to hide the fact they were skipping on their bank payments. Worse some traders came representing companies well known and licensed by the Zaon nobility for offworld exporting.

They refuelled using the companies' credit lines (and resupplied their ships) passed bad checks or paid with counterfeit credits and left never to be seen again. The banks that had mortgaged the ships that were skipping were not pleased. The companies that paid to be allowed to export goods from Zaonia were not pleased. The local merchants and starport authorities who were stiffed regularly were not pleased. The nobles who ruled based on their control and use of technology were made to look like idiots. High technology was just too good at copying documents their local technology could not discern.

There was a light at the end of the tunnel though. One of the local knights had traveled offworld in his youth and had a membership in the Outreach Association.

He used it to travel to a nearby spaceport and spoke with the various members there. The Outreach Association did not like when a world's commerce and star travel dried up. They sent him to the bank. The knight returned several months later with a number of binders. The binders and the paper sheets inside had to be specially ordered and cost nearly as much as his passage.

Everyone mortgaging a ship has to submit proof of identity you see. This consists of retina imaging, fingerprints, DNA and finally they sign off on the loan the old fashioned way. Banks are very traditional.

Zaonia didn't have the technology for retinal or DNA scans. Importing offworld gear would erode the nobility's authority.

Fingerprints could be faked with high tech prosthetics well enough to fool the locals. So the Zaons began checking signatures. Handwriting is very hard to fake.

People who use thumbprints and eye scans for ID don't know that. In fact the banks only took the signatures as a tradition. But the Zaons write quite a lot by hand: letters, legal forms, sometimes whole books! They also had a few graphologists who were very good for forensic work. They gave them new jobs at the starport and waited.

As soon as someone came along with a ship that was listed as mortgaged (or even not) his handwriting was checked against bank records and by the pros. They might hack and fake ship IDs and transponders and licenses but faking a signature on demand was too hard. They'd mess up their sign in sheet or sign a bad check badly and get busted on the way back to their ship.

The better writing analysts could tell from changes in signatures whether the signers were nervous or ill or under the influence which certainly interested the local creditors. Scams dropped to tolerable levels. The banks got several ships that skipped payments.

They were happy. The companies saw the license poachers jailed. They were happy. The local merchants had a reasonable chance of being paid. They were happy. The nobles seized several ships that were owned outright by their captains and began outfitting them as a small trade fleet for exporting handcrafted local wares. They were happy.

What did the nobility export?. Forgery can mean different things to people at different technological levels. Analysts can analyze a signature for authenticity and their expert opinion is admissible as evidence in many courts today. Some cultures may view signatures as a quaint custom, writing being hardly used anymore. This can bite them on the rear in numerous ways as indicated. Writing things down is one of the most secure forms of data entry.

Bad guys might hack your computer or use fancy gadgets to read your monitor from a distance. But a notebook is immune to all that (and also and ). Some navigators might even keep a written log or with information on charting the best course on a given route with precomputed steps they found to work. Of course this could also lead to the ultimate secure fund transfer system: the. The Tech Knights of Zaonia () saw more opportunity for economic growth. In an interstellar polity that had all manner of cyber crime their security was an order better than most simply because it did not rely on computers.

The First Bank of Zaonia worked on a system of handwriting. People who were recognized customers had their signatures filed and simply signed for things. That was the first level of security. The second level of security involved established handshakes, photos, mannerisms and yes passwords. That were spoken to confirm identity.

No hacker could break the system. Any impersonations would require a master forger, who was also expertly disguised, and managed to learn memorized passwords and recognition cues from the customer. That was a tall order for most. The subsector nobility noticed and began making deposits in the banks in the form of precious materials. Lock boxes were used to hold various secrets: letters for blackmail, contracts for unholy business alliances, family heirlooms, and artifacts. Zaonia now had a foolproof defense against offworld invasion. Any would be conquerors would have to deal with their depositors, who were not, the sort to let their valuables fall to others.

Raids were the problem. The security forces had rifles and submachine guns. Manpower was there. They could get a lot of men with rifles or submachine guns and mass them at bank vaults. That wasn't good enough.

Raiders with battle dress would probably have surprise and high energy weapons. Worse, high energy cutters could let them into the best vault the locals produced in a few minutes. Offworld experts agreed.

The biggest most massive bank the Zaonians could produce would fall to a determined force of offworld pirates. The locals could hire mercenaries with high tech weapons to guard their bank but that involved offworld technology which the local technocrats did not produce. This would undermine their expertise and authority and what would keep the mercenaries from looting the bank themselves or looking the other way when bribed?

So the locals built not one bank but many many banks. They were still guarded pretty well. They all had smaller but hardened steel vaults. Most of them were empty. Armored cars shuttled between the banks on a daily basis. Most of them were empty but the few held valuables that were constantly shuttled between vaults on time tables known to only a few.

Each of the schedule writers only scheduled a specific route, one of many. If anyone did hit the right bank or armored car that schedule writer would have hard questions asked. The schedule writers included watermarks specific to each armored vehicle crew. Any photocopies could be tracked to the person who lost or sold them. Raiders could hit a bank. They would be shot at by a number of guards.

The hail of bullets would be too risky unless the raiders had battledress and still be risky even then. After fighting these defenders the raiders would open the vault, which could be empty. Ditto for the armored cars. Eventually the locals dug an underground roadway system (remember the cheap labor?) They dug stations under each bank to allow the cargo transfers to occur out of sight.

By now the banking business was really taking off. It became a major planetary industry between, security, excavation, construction, maintenance, tank manufacture, and administration. A few people attempted raids but they got squashed quickly.

Most of them hit the wrong bank or the wrong car or had a tunnel collapse on them. Oh yes: the tunnels were boobytrapped. They could make a suit of armor that could laugh at bullets, but no one made armor that stood up to a couple of tons of rock.

Fortunately low tech does not equal stupid. After all, there are barbarians in space.

Remember Zaonia (), the little planet that could? Zaonia had instituted a system of handwriting analysis to prevent fraud in its. The planet had created a secure system of that its more populous and advanced neighbors envied and made use of. It even had a small fleet of free traders operating in its cluster.

The Zaonians were secure. The dictator of Facesos, the ministers of Inerze, the recluse roboticists of Zerar were all customers of their banking system. Anyone invading and disrupting the security of their valuables would face their wrath. The Prince Admiral of Facesos, the plague ministers of Inerze, the recluse roboticists of Zerar didn't give a deuce about the fate of Zaonia, just the security of their valuables. A change of power that did not endanger those valuables was no concern to them. So when a young technocrat, one who had spent much of his life offworld, decided to make a push for power he first assured those offworlders he would respect their property (and in fact give them better rental rates on vault space).

Needless to say he told them this at about the time his offworld mercenaries commenced to land at the starport and major cities. The usurper was on a budget so battledress troopers were a small minority who seized the starport and secured the communications. The rest were troops with cloth armor and laser rifles who expected to wage a quick and relatively bloodless campaign of shock and awe. The poor bastards. In his years offworld the power monger had learned a little about high technology weapons. He had forgotten all about low technology warfare and that was his downfall.

Now maybe the Zaonians could not build one radio jammer that could follow enemy chatter across many frequencies, but they could build a lot of jammers and keep them hid away (remember all those tunnels they dug for the banks? As for their forces, they used telephone lines and signal flares and carrier pigeons in some cases. Maybe they didn't have the camouflage armor and orbital sensors the invaders had but they had an elaborate tunnel system which they used to mount a series of counter attacks on the starport.

When the battledress commandoes descended into the tunnels to root the locals out they faced a storm of heavy machineguns, flame throwers and demolition charges. The last straw was the armored cars the Zaonians had in the tunnels to transport valuables. It turned out bullet proof didn't mean you could laugh at an armored car parked on your chest.

They mutinied about the time they figured that they would run out of commandoes long before they ran out of tunnels. On the surface the invaders now faced an artillery bombardment that turned out to be sand canisters modified to fire from field guns. Their laser weapons were now degraded so badly they had a third the range of the rifles the locals carried. The invaders did not have heavy weapons.

The usurper didn't want to wipe out the planet he'd rule and well, he did have those pretty lasers and battledress commandoes! The usurper discovered the sand canisters were fired from a couple of destroyers off the coast. He demanded the landing craft commanders go airborne and shoot the destroyer up. The commanders, having seen the way the invasion was going stuck to the letter of their contracts and said 'No!'

That turned out to be very fortunate for them as they would have met the submarine with the offworld missile turrets (that was still very hush hush.) Okay he tried to tell everyone the other Tech Knights had used offworld munitions. The sand canisters were a starship's weaponry for gosh sake! The Knight Senior explained it away as a naturally occurring crystal, not manufactured, merely polished. What the heck. They played fair (so to speak) with all other tech. The submarine with the missiles was still a secret.

The Zaonians then turned to their depositors and explained that the rates were going to stay the same. No harm, no foul. The customers merely had stayed out of an internal dispute.

That was fine. Zaonia was an honorable society.

One less than honorable might put photocopies of a number of sensitive documents they were entrusted with onboard their small fleet of freighters to distribute to several interested parties should anything happen to their government. The offworlders thought copying documents required a computer. In fact carbon paper astounded some of them when they came visiting. As for the starport and capital that took a little repair work. It was awhile before they took the shot up and mangled battledress suits off the perimeter wall. They wanted to make sure people got the message. Better Low Tech than Dim Wit.

Besides all the so called legal banking business handled across borders and even worlds there are all manner of deals that no one in their right minds would ever call legal. Selling guns, bombs, and sex are all legal on some worlds, but none of these are legal on EVERY world if you get my drift. But bad people need to keep records of their deals and sometimes even a transcript to indicate exactly what one or the other had said.

At any decent tech level a transcript can cause you severe trouble. To make one a talk-to-text-system is needed and the audio files of course can be examined for speech patterns, voice characteristics, probably even DNA. Don't tell me that stuff gets wiped. It doesn't have to and then some punk has a shady deal to hold over your head. Note someone smart enough to make and secrete a copy of an audio file probably is smart enough to make several such copies and give them to various people for release upon their death. Enter the Zaonians yet again! Their handwritten records already put the brakes on forgery and fraud in their cluster.

It seemed only fair that they do something for the crooks now (for a fee of course). Now they stepped it up into a system of recording meetings and discourses of various types in great speed and and accuracy! If handwriting analysis was regarded (by those poor ignorant hi-tech folk) as mad science, steno was a glimpse of Great Cthulhu. You mean people can write as fast as they can talk?!

Untrusting souls would have to find a stenographer they both trusted or more likely hire their own and thus make their own transcripts. All this had to be carried out on Zaonia of course for complete secrecy. On Zaonia any built with local technology would be about the size of a beer cooler and the tech knights were keen on keeping offworld tech offworld. In fact they even used psionics to sniff out hi-tech smugglers. Psionics isn't a form of technology! But I digress. The people interested in having their meetings transcribed would be brought to a secluded conference chamber.

The recorders could in fact be ordered from several agencies with complete anonymity and ignorance of both parties to insure their honesty and impartiality. The stenographers would take dictation during the meeting using shorthand then typed out the transcripts. No voice files to incriminate. Accurate recordings of vital matters and agreements were made. Best of all no hard forensic evidence to identify the parties of the agreement in a court of law (though they knew who they were of course).

The Zaonians still were security minded. When their banking guild set up an official agency to license and monitor stenographers they added additional procedures, such as the stenographers using a newly constructed system of phonemes for their note taking. Previously they used a more or less accessible phonemic writing system that could be discovered on library systems because it was commonly used in the past. The extra benefit of phonetic writing was the stenographers no longer had to know the language of the parties meeting. They could record it in their notes in their scrawl and type it up using a common in the cluster. The original notes would only be of use to another agency scribe who knew the con-lang. The Agency was in business!

Near Zaonia () lies the planet INERZE (0202 B997A84-C 2 Hi In Cp 124). Inerze is everything that Zaonia isn't. Overcrowded, high tech and governed by an extensive bureacracy that rarely accomplishes much. The tainted atmosphere is due to the people. Inerze has regular outbreaks of new viruses due to the crowded living conditions.

Mostly they cause sniffles and headaches to the people who have evolved a truly scary immune system. This also makes them a threat to anyone from offworld. The ills they think nothing of can incapacitate or kill those without the proper antibodies. You would think a high population world like Inerze (usually spelled in capital letters) would be a ready market for a small agricultural world. But that is not the case. A transport fee of 1 cr.

Per kilogram ( 1000 cr. Per ton) will make many staples more expensive than locally grown products (we're talking algae, yeast and fungi here, an acquired taste but cheap). Also shipping to Inerze was by intermediaries after the first Inerzan Flu Epidemic on Zaonia. The risk caused increases to shipping costs.

Also many of the captains wanted to buy the merchandise outright and then sell it at inflated prices. All this reduced the market even before the Inerzen bureaucrats began adding transport licensing fees and taxes. So shipping plain old taters was not going to see much profit. From my previous posts you may have guessed the Zaonians were neither quitters nor stupid.They already arranged loans to get their own subsidized merchant ships.

Then they had to find a market that for this fleet. The Zaonians began raising hemp. They weren't trying to get anyone high. They raised the hemp, then turned it into paper to make books.

They began exporting paper and books to Inerze. The bureaucrats and a tiny wealthy fraction loved notebooks. It was a super secure place to put notes in (especially if you had a locking cover with a self destruct and a DNA reader).

They saw how the Zaonians had profited with their knowledge of handwriting and it became a fad among them. The Zaonians also sold barrels of hemp slurry that could be converted to paper in Inerze. It also contained enough seeds and plant parts to make a paste you could get high on or bake into a brownie. The laborers working with it and doing clean up learned that.

It came as a surprise to the bureaucrats but anything that kept the laborers mellow was a good thing. Pretty soon many locals began buying the slurry and turning out lovely brownies and other foodstuffs with it that the elite found delightful, legalized and taxed. The Zaonians briefly experimented with wood pulp based paper but raising trees took more water, land and time than hemp and the process was more polluting.

Zaonian also never heard of Randolph Hearst. When they heard what the Inerzans were doing with their hemp slurry they did a facepalm over actually meeting people more resourceful than they were (the labor class at least). They then had a good laugh and increased the price of the slurry. The Inerzans paid without batting an eyelash. The elite had their secure notebooks.

Subsidized merchants had a commodity they could hall. Everybody could have brownies fairly cheap. Everyone was as close to happy as spacers, politicians and grunt laborers could be. Then some character on Inerze set up a filter and got some viable seeds from the slurry and after a little experimenting began growing his own hemp. The increase in it ed to sluggish unproductive workers and more industrial accidents.

Inerze's government decided they needed to get a handle on this and slapped an embargo on Zaonian imports. The Zaonians were left with a small merchant fleet with nothing to ship and loans to pay back and cargo containers full of hemp paper and slurry that Inerze had contracted for but was not buying. An economic crisis was looming and the Zaonians prepared for a war. The planet Zaonia () had managed to create a niche market on INERZE (0202 B997A84-C 2 Hi In Cp 124). They succeeded in creating one for their paper products (notebooks!) and even a hemp slurry (make your own paper kits!) The hemp slurry was to make paper products cheaply on Inerze, however the laborers working with it discovered that it was food grade and it provided a cheap high. That and the slurry had hemp seeds in it.

The hemp seeds were used to produce hemp plants locally. These were used to produce cigarettes (ironically rolled using stolen paper imported from Zaonia) and what at first became a new fad became a problem.

The skimming of paper and slurry was of course theft and a loss of materials that were paid for and shipped. The stoned workers caused a fair share of accidents and loss of productivity. Imports of the slurry were stopped despite the Zaonians refining their process to filter the seeds from the slurry. The slurry still could be put to illicit use and there was still a problem with locals raising their own plants and using paper to make joints. So both markets were hurt and what was worse the Zaonians were left with a lot of hemp slurry and paper that Inerze had contracted to buy. The shipments were slated for a number of subsidized merchants as well as many lots for speculation.

Furthermore passages to Zaonia were now discouraged because it was thought many Inerzans were merely buying hemp for smoking. This was an economic crisis in the making. An appeal to the Polity to make Inerze (the subsector capitol!) honor its contract could take years and the economic damage would be done. Finding or creating another niche market was going to take too long and potential customers would doubtless take advantage of the Zaonians' plight. Threatening the accounts of the ministers of Inerze could result in a truly massive invasion.

Thousands of soldiers in battledress and combat armor would arrive. Inerze could field as many soldiers and ship them as there were Zaonians. So the Tech Knights were stuck with coercing a planet with 10,000 citizens to every one of theirs and a similarly massive armed force, fleet and economy. None of that was any good against a rumor. The rumor started that Zaonia was accepting individuals for citizenship. Equal citizenship. Who started it?

Who is to say? A rumor can't have it's mind read or be arrested and dosed with truth serum. Inerze had 10 billion people. Out of them perhaps one in a million was a member of a psi institute. That's ten thousand psis.

Maybe 1% of them decided to check this out and go to Zaonia. They found the technology on Zaonia low and boring.

Media meant sound or print. Flivvers instead of air/rafts.

Medical care was rudimentary. But the media had its own charm. Reading was cool. So was writing. Driving a vehicle yourself was cool.

As for medical, more advanced care was a week away and the local medicine was good enough to keep you alive that long. Most importantly The press of billions of minds on yours was gone! That was worth wearable media and high speed grav craft and cloned replacement parts even. Imagine living on a high gee world and suddenly moving to a small moon.

You felt the release. They contacted the institutes back home and more psis came, a few hundred.

The offer of citizenship was valid. Anyone could immigrate. There were a few provisos. To be fair everyone underwent these tests (since last week!) A lengthy interview involving polygraphs, truth serums in extreme cases, and many, many questions were required before the psi.

Immigrant was deemed worthy to take the oath of loyalty to Zaonia. Interviews were often held one after the other as well as polygraph tests to run the batteries down of psis with who might otherwise spoof the tests and just make sure people were serious. Questionable psis were assigned at least two guards before deportation. Psis deemed trustworthy became guards and helped with the screening process. A new neighborhood was set up for the psionics inside the starport boundaries.. Basically short of murder, rape, or mass destruction anything was cool.

The psionics were quite able to defend themselves. A pass was required to exit but then everyone else had to use them too. The rest of Zaonia remained a little wary but polite but it was open and there were no lynch mobs. They go off the port. Tech Knights insisted on this. Of course beyond the boundary using psionics in an unlawful manner could get you arrested or even deported. But the psionics minded their manners as far as anyone else could tell.

The quiet was very persuasive. The people with went a little insane. Their squirreled away funds, their hidden art collections, all that stuff had to be in an inventory somewhere and known to someone and now these mind snoopers were there to ferret them out.

The situation was intolerable for Inerze and ther highly developed worlds that had to be listened to. The Zaonians explained since their niche markets had dried up they needed a new influx of citizens with offworld funds to avoid economic collapse. Well the depositors insisted, buy some! Sorry, no capital available since the economic crunch Inerze created.

Besides there was this whole thing about importing offworld technology, remember? The Tech Knights specifically prohibited that sort of thing with a sort of reverse. The other worlds looked long and hard at Inerze and after some shouting behind closed channels Inerze paid for all the hemp goods it had contracted for. It then paid for a system of psi shields for the banks that could secretly be put into place. The Tech Knights and bankers all got free fedoras with hidden psi shields. Zaonia quickly began seeking new markets for their paper goods.

Faceso was nearby and learned from Inerze's mistakes. Hemp was imported in new products. The seeds were filtered out. A vegetable extract was added as well to make it unpalatable (and unsmokeable). The Inerze market for hemp was replaced with timber. The Inerzans used wood grown on Zaonia to make paper under Zaonian supervision in traditional low tech style mills and studios.

All cultivatable land on Inerze was used for living space or food production of course. Forests were long gone, possibly eaten. The new stationary sold well. The Inerzans who had grown to enjoy smoking their hemp still raised it quietly in their closets and basements and store rooms. It was no worse than most and better than a good many synthesized drugs that were already there, illegal and available, just cheaper. The Inerzan ministers looked at their neighbor world occasionally and gritted their teeth.

The worst part was they couldn't even get a good hemp cigar or seed cake to mellow out anymore. It was a happy time on Zaonia (). In fact the newspapers were calling this The Happy Times. • They had established a banking system for heavy offworld investors who wished to. • They began their own ship loans and.

• They had (though the leader was homegrown and many polities claimed that didn't really count.) • They had established small but. • They made the and make good on their contracts and staved off a recession. • They had established a and had a few hundred they vetted who were deemed loyal. Pretty good for an underpopulated and low tech backwater. The Tech Knights who ran the show sat back and had a cold one and some cigars. About a million klicks from Zaonia is her sister world: Nuon. During the Big Flame Out, when the Sunless Days began, interstellar trade disappeared, and the Zaonians were dying from numerous cascade failures as supplies and parts from offworld failed to arrive.

The Tech Knights were formed to salvage whatever technology they could and stave off famine caused by offworld fertilizers not arriving and grav combines breaking down. The Tech Knights (more properly the Order of the Flaming Sword) succeeded in preserving a late industrial age of technology. They banned higher technology from use until they judged that the society and economy could build it localy and support it.

No more cascade failures here. There were some who said the Order of the Flaming Sword were despots (not true), who thought they were all wise (somewhat true), and wanted to get rich being the ones to introduce higher technology (bingo!). They stole/liberated the last shuttle on Zaonia and fled to Nuzon to keep their freedom.

Very dramatic story. More likely it was a number of trips to drop off undesirables and prevent starvation on the mainworld and an overworked shuttle gave out on Nuzon. Hundreds of years later the Nuzons were still there and had learned to survive on their little patch of hell. People do that. They were somewhat helped by a botanical research station that was creating adapted plants for colonists. The Zaonians could see the settlements slowly growing through various telescopes and occasionally muttered threats at the sky. As commerce resumed slowly they had access to Nuzon through passing ships.

Those ships brought back some trinkets to Zaon: local plant products and crafts and an occasional Nuzoni who wanted to relocate, though the Zaonians said that would merely lower the average IQ of both planets. One of the subsidized merchant captains was on an extended layover while his ship was having maintenance work done. After hitting the clubs, a smoke easy or two and other adult entertainment he trudged back to the starport diner for breakfast or dinner. He found a Nuzoni trying to palm off. This captain had a merchant sixth sense. Rather than saying, 'F**k off it takes electricity to do math!

Any cadet knows that!' He grabs the sticks. The captain sees the little numbers that bunch together on one side and all the math sines and coefficient symbols and such and wave it under his navigator's nose. The starhound took the bunch of flat sticks and the Nuzoni aside and began fiddling with the gadget under the local's instructions. Then he checked some numbers on his wrist computer.

'It's a computer captain. A computer that doesn't use metal or batteries for sake.' We can take the gig (starship's boat capable of interplanetary travel) to Nuzon and buy a bunch of these if you think there's be a market,' the captain said. I gave the little squib 50 credits for this. It works nearly as fast as a wrist computer and it works anywhere. The magnetic fields and zerfs in engineering always screw with our electronics after a while.

This thing is immune and pretty good for fast calculations by the gear heads!' 'Shoot let's go. Must be some kind of genetically engineered wood it's so smart.' So they got in their gig and took a day off to hit Nuzon. They succeeded in buying a bunch of the 'slipsticks'.

The locals explained the things were and were made of the finest native 'bamboo'. The merchant captain asked.

Come, let me show you,' the local merchant said smiling. That was the start of the biggest threat to Zaonia yet. To be continued. No one can win them all.

No person, no planet, no empire. Only someone who does nothing makes mistakes. The same applies to Zaonia. The Tech Knights are fallible as any Zaonian citizen would tell you (strongly in many cases) as this should illustrate.

I do not like setting up someone as a Mary Sue, or a gadget as a Katana or a planet of organization as the Good Guys who must win. Just because I created you doesn't mean you get a free (or even easy) pass. Read the if you need a clue how low I can stoop to make a story fun (for the reader). Zaonia (0104 C885655-5 Ag Ri) shares a star with Nuzon (0104 E653555-4 Ag Ri). Contact between the two planets was sporadic and often antagonistic. The Nuzoni fled Zaonia during the Time of Things Going to Hell. The Nuzoni maintained that they were exiled.

The Zaonians insisted they did flee and that they stole the last working shuttle and broke it. Now the Nuzoni made contact with one of Zaonia's subsidized merchants who was intrigued by wooden computing devices made locally. These could be used in various areas of a ship where magnetic fields or radiation interfered with regular computers and were keen besides. The devices were made of bamboo, a local plant. The captain doubted he'd fill a hold with the little gadget or more importantly sell them all.

So he asked what else the bamboos were good for. The short answer was:! You could build with it, create fabrics, containers, medicines from extracts, fodder for some animals, decorations, even make —paper! Word of this got back to the Tech Knights while they were slapping themselves on the back and pouring libations and figuratively speaking a group occurred. The Tech Knights called the bankers and explained that it was time to use their leverage of holding mortgages on ships to maintain their markets. Meanwhile they got hold of the lawyer and told them how badly they'd fuck him up if he didn't do something fast. Any Tech Knight can be called out into a gun duel over a political issue at any time.

This was felt to assure only people with a commitment would take on the job. Their threats were not taken lightly. The merchant captain knew law. He pointed out the contract spelling out his subsidized route mentioned the star system but not Zaonia specifically. The Tech Knights' lawyer went into hiding.

They then looked nervously at Inerze, their major customer despite a recent bit of unpleasantness. Those contracts were coming up for renewal and the prospect of replacing Zaonian hemp with a plant that had even more uses was pretty enticing. That would be where the subsidized merchants would go to as well. The fact the Inerzans would also be giving the uppity Zaonians the finger, hell the whole hand, was icing on the seed cake. Bankers, Tech Knights and some merchant captains met behind closed doors while the citizens went about their day working, hitting smokeasies, and listening to the tubes.

The secret council drew up several plans. Invade Nuzonia: very bad. Planetary invasions were hard. They had only experience in repelling one and it would lead to a long occupation and a permanent enemy.

Carpet bomb the bamboo fields: illegal, immoral and did you see how fast that stuff grows? Unless they hired a ship just for that it was unfeasible and probably cost more than it was worth. Also the Polity would probably notice at that point. Coerce the merchants to stop shipping bamboo: unlikely. Keeping a merchant from profits was nearly impossible.

The contracts were no help. The new lawyer said as much. A solemn delegation went to Nuzon to discuss the matter. They received a friendly if guarded welcome. Then they had another meeting. The Nuzon emerged with a 'sweet deal'. The banks of Zaonia were going to float a large and low interest free loan so that Nuzon could subsidized their own merchant ships.

One way to keep a merchant from profits was to stick one in his place who made more money at it. In exchange for this Zaonia received a decent portion of the bamboo business. The Zaonians could use the bamboo themselves or just let it rot or ship it far away. Reducing the amount of bamboo on the market would protect their timber and paper industries. It would also drive the price of bamboo up which thrilled the Nuzoni.

The timber and paper industries still took a bit of a hit but other markets were opening for them. Zaonia would just tighten the belt for a while (meaning the ordinary citizens, the Tech Knights got to keep their imported flying cars and death ray laser pistols.) Their former lawyer even turned up, on Nuzon where he began a new practice representing subsidized merchants. He told everyone of the dangers of messing with low tech planets and that truly terrible biological weapons wouldn't kill you, they'd leave you broke but alive. (W)hat are some reasons for this technophobia (or at least apathy)? Here's the background for Zaonia though these reasons could be extended to other worlds. Zaonia once had a higher level of technology (early interstellar at least). After a catastrophe in my setting called the Flame Out jump drives had a bad habit of turning into a cloud of superheated plasma due to unknown jump space shenanigans.

Worlds that previously were connected with trade were suddenly cut off. Space travel failed. Technology and industries supported by offworld parts and know how came crashing down.

In the case of Zaonia, a bucolic agricultural world, the offworld imports were fertilizers, crops, farming tools. Farming is fairly technological even today. The Zaonians suddenly had to relearn basic farming at a early industrial level of technology or lower. Famine followed.

Other technologies faltered as everything was put into growing food and ranching. Zaonia today is governed by an oligarchy of technocrats: the descendant or successors of those who seized power during the disaster and got the farms and basic services working again.

In the time since since space travel resumed these Tech Knights wielded great power but only so long as they maintained the services they were in charge of. 'Knight' meant you were granted rights and privileges and status but you still had constituents and they could vote to recall you. In the old days replacing a knight was a lot more bloody. You'd think a technological oligarchy would welcome new technology. But the Tech Knights viewed offworld technology as dangerous. Technology requires support, infra-structure. If that then you are beholding to that ship and that world.

If the ships stop coming you're screwed. If they keep coming they can own you body and soul. So the oligarchy limits imports and aims at self sufficiency.

The population has the old tales of the Great Famine to keep them scared of too much offworld influence. More to the point the Tech Knights base their rule on being masters of technology. Bringing in smart phones and robots they do not understand or control would erode that authority. Regardless there are offworld influences. The only way to stop that is to blow up the starport and shoot down every ship that tries to land and jam any radio signals. The Zaonians aren't even particularly violent. Also the Tech Knights are not above making excuses to get some top gear for themselves.

In some cases they could cite humanitarian interests. A person who gets cybernetic legs and returns home will not face amputation and a wheel chair. In many cases they cite the technology as depending on different kinds of unobtainium. They import, for example, and tell the locals it's a sand gathered on the beaches of a far away world. The same goes for various drugs.

In the most wonderful case locals will salvage or replace some piece of local technology from before the Great Famine. This happened with a number of gravitic modules. Eventually they began.

Their grav modules are more fragile. They are prone to overheating and in general an airplane is cheaper and faster. The gravitics powered aeros are important because they demonstrate just what the locals can do on their own. The final exception to offworld technology is imminent need. Zaonia faced one force equipped with battledress and laser weapons. They beat them back using weight of numbers, strategy and exploiting their own ignorance and over confidence. Some of those captured suits of battledress were hung in public as a warning.

Some of the suits still functioned and those found a use. The same for the laser weapons (and a few gauss rifles). You can look the other way when the defense of your planet is at stake. You can also import more battledress and laser weapons since no one really keeps records of how many weapons and armor suits were captured. In fact the Knights used a number of exoskeletons from damaged battledress to build new suits replacing the destroyed armor using metal plates.

They are knights after all. Transcript of Tech Knight Senior Dame Ranna Morrigan at Zao Plaza, Life Day Speech 'They call us backward because we drive cars and fly propellor planes. Our electronics are primitive because they use tubes and transistors. Our phones have wires and dials. Our media is sound only or black and white.

One of those offworld fools laughed himself sick watching me ride a horse once into the starport.' 'We have our merchant fleet made of ships built offworld. That is the answer to many planets, buy it from offworld. That is what the great corporations and banks want, to make consumers and workers of us all, their workers! That is not our way.

We build it and we own it. It is time to send a message to these spacers, that we are every bit as good as they are! We are building a rocket!' 'Think about it. Mankind was no more advanced than we are now once. Centuries ago. They made that leap into space with far less knowledge than we have now.

We know how it was done. We have Belters ready to sell us materials in bulk, not just steel and titanium but fissionables. We have basic lifter technology. We can get to orbit and beyond in a ship build solely on this planet! We are going to do this. It will be hard.

It will be expensive. We won't see a profit from this ship. Our grandchildren will. We will spread to the stars again in our our ships built by our own hands and we will be no one's slaves!!'

*** There is something afoot in any Traveller setting that uses the the standard starport system. Either interstellar travel is way less common than actual play and most settings suggest, or something is happening with starship construction. There's a definite shortage of starports capable of producing starships. That shortage is even greater if you look at whether a world with shipyards also has a population and technology level that supports building a number of ships with many being marked for export. In fact I think on average 2-3 worlds per subsector will control the bulk of ship production despite other worlds having higher technology or population. I think the reason boils down to control.

Certain people (like the Company) want to restrict and control space travel and private enterprise or exploration of space. They deliberately restrict the number and quality of of shipyards in a subsector. They have a very simple way to do this. They sell starships. Building a starship or even a shuttle is a complex enterprise. It's way easier buying one (if you don't mind paying 220% of its value in the long run). Build the ships, sell the ships and free up that industry to other things, like luxury items to keep people from wondering where the hell the post scarcity economy went.

Worlds that are not habitable could put that industry to work terraforming or building bigger and better habitats. Balkanized worlds might have enemies close by that require defense plants. In a few years universities won't even offer courses to become a naval architect. Those who want to become naval architects will have to travel off planet for education and discover most employment opportunities are at existing shipyards. It's a delicate system. The ship builders do not want people realizing they too could work their way into space.

Let alone that they have technology (like lifters) that will make such a leap easier than it was for the homeworld to take those first steps. It is a fragile lie and one planet or even a few exceptional people might shatter it and usher in holy Hell (from the powers that be perspective). Dame Ranna, one of the younger and more hellacious Tech Knights made a decision. She loved her homeworld, Zaonia.

She'd already lost an eye in its defense. She knew the people were clever and tough and that soon none of that would matter. Zaonia was failing to progress technologically and surrounded by star drive capable worlds. The longer Zaonia waited playing with internal combustion and vacuum tubes the less likely it would ever amount to anything in the face of more advanced and expanding worlds. There was a glimmer of hope. Old Earth had gone from Zaonia's level of technology to interplanetary flight in about a century and it didn't have more advanced neighbors to steal from emulate. Earth however made a good deal of its progress due to two global wars.

A costly but certain spur to progress. Ranna needed something similar. Then she started the buzz. The offworlders considered Zaonians backward, a stupid pastoral people. There was some truth.

Most offworlders who knew Zaonians respected them. A few were a little scared of them.

They had achieved lifter technology with their vacuum tubes, at least on a limited basis. It was easy to discount their opinions.

They were friends and clients. But those other nameless and faceless offworlders.

They had an attitude according to Ranna. Her half truth worked wonders.

If someone insulted their customs or theology the Zaonians would haul off and give them a poke in the eye. But saying they could build things better, faster more powerful? They were up for that! They'd prove to them they weren't stupid the only way that mattered. They'd build their own spacecraft, even build a real jump ship! A race to space would replace war as a driving force for human advancement.

Call a man a heathen or slob and he'd argue with you. Tell him he can't do something and he'd kill himself to make a monkey out of you. Ranna expected developing spacecraft to be a long drawn out affair. In fact developing them was unimportant to her and her vision. She expected technology from the research to trickle down and spur inventors and engineers on a planet wide scale. Unfortunately her plan hit a snag. The Zaonians figured out a way to actually build a spaceship in the next few years.

That was when the various interested in keeping starship construction their monopoly sat up did a and started making plans of their own. The cutting the brake lines on Dame Ranna's roadster was the first sign of their disapproval. To be continued.

The most densely settled area of Zaonia was called the saddle, a fertile valley between two spurs of a mountain range. The frates River ran through the valley. The Tech Knights and ultra wealthy (the dozen or so) lived in villas on islands or on the riverbanks. The fertile banks of the river held farms. The foothills on either side of the river had hunting lodges and summer homes for the more important regular citizens.

The Mayor had a hunting lodge at the foot of one hill, secluded and the scene of many a backroom deal. It was a bitch to reach by car, unless your car flew. Jorge Pierre Guttman's car flew. The beat up aero came down precisely in front of the cabin. Jorge jumped out to hold the door for his passenger who annoyedly waved him off and hooped out on her own. She was no fragile flower. 'Well what do you think?'

Ranna regarded the cabin a moment and asked, 'Were there any survivors?' Jorge bristled a little at that. He had found the cabin and persuaded the Mayor to buy and renovate it.

'Sheesh, you're not here a minute and you already insult the place.' 'Did I break the record?' He showed his annoyance by holding the door for her. 'Dame Morrigen,' he snapped clicking his heels. 'I'm under censure. It's just Ranna.'

'Cowards,' Jorge snorted. I can continue managing Project Venture as a private citizen and my fall from grace will make me less of a target.'

The door was unlocked and she slipped past him and into the lodge. Rain began to fall. There was a roaring blaze in the fireplace inside and two men with pistols. They both rose from their seats and motioned for Jorge to come inside with gun barrels. 'Good day to you. Morrigen We'll make this brief,' the smaller man said.

This meeting was expected,' she cautioned. Morrigen, you have a trade embargo begun by the bankers on Inerze. They've styled your planet as a backwater run by feudal drug lords. They've threatened every ship owner they hold a mortgage on and changed the subsidized merchant ship runs. You're sitting on hundreds of tons of hemp products, timber and some luxury items,' he began.

I can speak exposition. She answered sitting down. Well I represent a number of people who can move your products for you,' the man continued. You're smugglers?' 'Think of us as entrepreneurs. ' Warships are not the only weapons in an interstellar war.

Money, influence and politics can combine to make a thriving world a backwater or to destroy the promise of a new settlement if people are upsetting the status quo. Are one major weapon. Find a reason, or make one to place an embargo on a world and you can choke off trade if you're important enough.

Your trade partners will follow your lead or face sanctions. For that matter trade can keep high tech items rare to retard local progress and keep worlds as backwaters that can only earn revenue by gathering natural resources or agriculture and remain a ready market for your manufactured goods (no tablets please!) Traveller among other games paints a picture of a number of worlds at different levels of technology.

Some justifications were that Earth's progress in the last hundred years or so was not typical of human society and evolution and a fluke, that some societies do not seek technological progress or that conditions are so harsh survival slows progress. It's often been said that we now have sufficient technology to automate most jobs and usher in a non-working layabout utopia. It hasn't happened because the powers that be are not big on sharing. There's no reason to assume that will change anytime soon. Many businesses in history made a fortune trading to less technological people (remember Manhattan Island?) Assuming cheap interstellar travel (and shipping) the model could be extended to entire worlds.

The homogeneous worlds empire is built for trade. A factory or office might have to junk its office computers and replace every few years if they are on a thriving progressive world. Rather than taking the loss or selling locally they could trade them to a lower tech world for full price. If an economic system is making someone money they will attempt to preserve that economic system. People who can't make money under that system will find work arounds or starve. Are usually regarded as criminals but they may be a lifeline to a world with embargoes.

Zaonia faced an embargo. For some worlds this would be an economic disaster and for other literally a slow death.

Zaonia had water, breathable air and a biosphere that you could work with. What was more, during the Great Flame Out they had learned self sufficiency. They still felt the bite. There was a shrunken market for thier goods.

Subsidized merchants had their routes changed to exclude the world. Free Traders were strongly encouraged to look for bargains elsewhere or face the mother of all balloon payments on their ship mortgages.

Zaonia had a small merchant fleet, a shoestring operation. It had some grey area opportunists (smugglers) and it had other small local operations who owned their patched together little ships like Belters and tramp freighters. Shoestring operations usually do not employ navigators. Instead they buy a jump tape. It isn't recorded on tape but the name persists due to the tape you unwind to unpack the storage media that holds coordinates for a jump. It's usually cheaper than a navigators on ships that can't manage high jump numbers like Belters and tramp freighters. The tapes are sold any starport that is more than a cleared field and outhouse.

Zaonia used an offworld computer on their starport. The starport was legally a separate territory from the planet. The offworld computer failed soon. The embargo excluded sending repair parts to Zaonia's starport. The Zaonian's lawyered up and demanded the parts saying the starport was not part of their territory and hence excluded from any planetary embargoes and tariffs. The reply was the the embargo specified the planet Zaonia and not the government.

As the starport was affixed to the lithosphere it was part of the embargo. Accusations flew that the computer breakdown was the work of industrial sabotage. Possums weren't that destructive. A microwave couldn't explode with that much force.

The spontaneous fires were kind of hard to explain as well. The answer was the same, take it to subsector court (where they would wait months) or sector court (wait years at the least). Trade slowed still more for a week or so until jump tapes were made available. The tramp freighters and rock miners came back. The economy was definitely not booming but it was at least now breathing on its own. The embargo barons did a spit take and (after refilling their glasses) called an operative to go to Zaonia and see what in hell went on.

The operative packed a few incendiaries, bombs and possums in low berth carriers for good measure and left. He returned a month later. It took him a while to get to see the inner workings of the jump tape computers.

'Computer S?' Banks wanted to know.

'Computers,' the operative said reaching for a glass that was slid out of his reach. 'They call these guys, can run numbers in their heads — computers, They got about 40 of them and they use these to calculate the jump coordinates.' The operator held up a contraption that looked like bunch of rulers held together with a clear plastic band. The Director of Starports grabbed the slipping sticks and ponder them working them against each other slowly. 'It has jump logarithma on it,' he finally announced. 'They have all kinds of similar things. Also mechanical adding machines and hard copy books of logarithmic tables.

They use them all to calculate jump tapes. There's a pool of secretarial labor to input the numbers on tape. —It's amazing,' the operative said grudgingly. It was also hard to take out with a couple of easy to smuggle bombs or GMO marsupials. 'Humans can't figure out jump navigation —you need computers!'

Banks sputtered. Starports shook his head. 'Humans can figure out jump coordinates. It takes a little longer is all.' The salaries!' Banks protested.

'Sir, do you have any idea how little mathematicians make in academia? They were cranking out tapes when I got in and saw them,' the operative said enjoying Banks discomfort. 'Okay, you go back with a bio weapon. ' Banks began. The operative was about to protest he wasn't a mass murderer.

One at a time was as far as he went. But Starports cut him off. 'Embargo on the starport is over. Ship them a new computer on the next merchant. He slid the glass back over to the operative who drained it gratefully. 'Do you know how much the Starport Authority makes selling jump tapes?

Selling computers to compute jump tapes? If this gets out that a bunch of egg head number crunchers could do it for peanuts, we'll be ruined!' Sandoval yelled excitedly.

She was waving a folder excitedly. 'Yeah,' the Captain, also the deck master and busy as hell, looked up from his bill of lading. A vape stick hung from his lip.

'Do you see what the low techies did here?' Their computer went down a week or so ago and they're doing navigation calculations. Hand I guess or using their brains,' Sandoval said. Impressive,' the Captain allowed slowly.

He pondered it a moment and asked, 'How do they manage to do it in a timely fashion? They must have to come up with a couple a week at least.' 'They're amazing. They have these sort of rulers to figure jump logs. They use these projectors with mathematical designs called that represent the various jump factors and they got thousands of pages of they look stuff up with. It doesn't even use one computer or any power.' That'd be a great back up if it didn't all take up several staterooms worth of space.'

'Well that's the good part sir. I figured out how we could use it,' Sandoval puffed out her chest obviously proud of herself. The Captain braced himself for it. It wasn't his first rodeo. 'I got it all on computer disc sir! 'Jorge, you know lifter technology, even our patched together version,' it was a statement, 'I do,' he replied working the ball of her right foot.

'How are you. Naval architecture?' 'I was studying it before. Before I came here,' he said cautiously.

When did you find time to get this good at foot massage? How far along were you in your studies?' 'I was in the middle of my final year. I was getting ready to begin my internship,' Jorge said softly. Worse he stopped rubbing her feet, thinking furiously. 'You may be the closest thing we have to a starship designer.' 'Then God help us all,' Jorge snapped.

Ranna's face fell and he continued. 'Maybe you should have asked someone before you risked your reputation and life on a speech promising the masses a starship. We have lifter technology.

That has limits: beyond ten diameters or so it becomes nothing.' 'We could get to orbit!' 'Yes but getting to orbit and achieving orbit are two different things. You'll get up there but you won't be moving at orbital velocity. When your power cuts off you'd start to fall.

Any ships moving in orbit couldn't dock with you. Any bits of debris (and believe me there is debris in orbit) could hit you like teeny bits of high explosive.'

'We could build a maneuver drive. Those use components similar to lifters!' 'Their similar yes but refinements, that require special materials and production techniques we just don't have here.

Making a drive that uses a planet or moon in place of reaction mass is one thing. Making a drive that fuses fuel, uses it to generate a plasma rocket and then dumps the heat and exhaust into jump space on a massive scale is another. Your lifters can't even manage the lateral thrust conventional gravcraft do. You need secondary propulsion systems. Then there's the fusion reactors. Your technology is nowhere near building a fusion generator to power a jump drive or rocket.' Ranna drew her feet back and scrambled to her knees on the couch leaning in close.

She hissed angrily, ' Stop telling me what we can't build and work on what we can! No one built gravitics using vacuum tubes and resistors before we did! No one turned back an invasion force equipped to modern standards before we did! You're a fucking genius. You built that flyvver outside out of junk!

It flies circles around the ones the Tech Knights have. They kept an eye on you Jorge.

Now put your mind to this. The mark of true genius is to see the simple solution everyone else overlooks.'

Okay I'll put my mind to it. But only because you ask me so nicely,' he said. The fire in her eyes. Eye subsided somewhat. She inched closer to him on the sofa. He had to admit he felt like a mouse confronted by a mousetrap.

How to get what you want without getting your neck broken? Well so far so good. 'That planet. That Goddam planet! Bunch of fracking lunatics.

The banker sputtered. The reports so far show they've salvaged a derelict ship out in the desert. Some belters had tagged it for salvage but decided it wasn't worth the effort. The jump drive was trash. The maneuver drive likewise, and the fusion plant couldn't possibly sustain a reaction. That's all standardized technology we make available to customers buying ships. But they claim to be developing their own technology that can be reproduced locally.

Now we have several reports of belters selling fissionable materials to them.' 'Neutrons screw with lifter tech, maneuver drives, jump drives. Oh it will kill a crew too,' the starport administrator said.

'No one screws with fission anymore' 'Apparently they are. With fusion generators, fissionables become so much toxic garbage. But they don't have fusion reactors.' 'Why the hell couldn't they just buy our reactors!?' The shipyard tycoon asked.

'Balance of trade, high mortgage rates, dependence on off world technology and technicians. ' the analyst began. 'You want to see the morning or not?' The banker growled. That's were we are with Zaonia,' the analyst summed up. 'This is bad.

Very bad,' the banker muttered. 'I still think you're over reacting. A nut case shut down the starport for a few days.

Required new fuel and tanks flushed. Stuck your branch for a few million in spares for a bunch of D rated bots.'

The tycoon chuckled a bit at that. 'Over reacting?

Those ship captains have big mouths. We're getting investors bailing on projects. We may be looking at a subsector or sector wide bank run in a couple of months. W're getting runs on some of our banks already. Tell them the rest, Numbers!'

The banker jabbed a vape stick at the analyst. The analyst continued, 'I have made a number of inquiries. Gentle beings it is important to remember two things. First, you are publicly owned corporations for for all that you own a majority of your stocks you do not own all of it. Second, humans in a group are a panicky thing. We are seeing people selling your stocks, even seeing them sell short.

There is unrest among your larger investors. You may be looking at a stock market crash in the near future.' 'It's one frigging planet!' 'That's all it takes. All it has taken in history. Runs have started based on rumors,' the analyst said closing up the displays. I guess we show them what happens when you don't play by the rules,' the tycoon said.

She spared the analyst a dirty look for the bad news. 'I'm out,' the starport administrator said. He got up suddenly. 'You do whatever it is you want. Make sure you leave my ports open and undamaged. I will show you what happens when you don't play by the rules.

I'm always going to have ships that need fuel and services. I can whether a crash.

I can't deal with a scandal and having a few holes shot in my golden parachute. For what it's worth. I wish you luck.' The banker broke into a cold sweat as the administrator left. He looked over at the tycoon and said, 'Call Major Leogan.' 'Call him your own damned self!'

'You're out too?' I'm just not your damn secretary!' 'Oh fair enough. I have another meeting to attend to.

So I'll just have time to make that call if you.' The banker swore softly to himself. Zaonia was going to see what happened when they didn't play by the rules. He promised that.

A light blinked on his desk and he hit it and slid it left to the affirmative. He stood up as the door opened outwardly composed as his guest entered.

He came around the desk to greet him in the process noting the analyst, Numbers, still idling. He gave the robot a swift kick to get it moving and jerked a thumb at the door. Number complied.

No one saw it pause a moment to regard the guest. It was a robot. You didn't notice what robots did. The banker bowed formally to his guest and the tall Inerzan returned it, his green eyes dull and haunted. 'Captain Xibalboa, I have a job for you.'

If you are an undeveloped colony or base and own no trader spacecraft, you are at the mercy of the off-planet traders. If the various trade ships collude in their pricing; you either pay it, hope for a trader willing to undercut the colluders, or do without. And if a trader has a monopoly on your planet, you are shafted. About the only thing that can be done is for the colony to build or otherwise obtain their very own trade ship (or make a plea to an off-planet government, good luck with that).

In some science fictional universes, a powerful group manages to obtain a monopoly on all spacecraft and starships. This is called a. A good example is the Spacing Guild in the DUNE novels. 'Where are you going to sell that stuff?'

He asked, pointing at a passing skid. 'There's enough combat equipment around now to outfit a private army for every man, woman and child in Poictesme.' 'Storisende Spaceport.

The freighter captains buy it, and sell it on some of the planets that were colonized right before the War and haven't gotten industrialized yet. I'm clearing about two hundred sols a ton on it.' The skid at which he had pointed was loaded with cases of M504 submachine guns.

Even used, one was worth fifty sols. Allowing for packing weight, his father was selling those tommy guns for less than a good cafe on Terra got for one drink of Poictesme brandy.

(ed note: the point is as long as Poictesme has no starships, the freighter captains can give the planet a pittance for the cargo and the planet has no other option. The only way out of the trap is for Poictesme to build its own cargo starships and eliminate the middleman.).And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, if we don't have anything else.' 'You can say that again, Kurt.' That was one of the distillery people; he'd remember the name in a moment. 'When this new crop gets pressed and fermented.'

'I don't know where in Gehenna I'm going to vat mine till it ferments,' Klem Zareff said. 'Or why,' another planter added. 'Lorenzo, what are you going to be paying for wine?' Lorenzo Menardes; that was the name. The distiller said he was worrying about what he'd be able to get for brandy.But I was serious about the ship. An idea hit me. You gave it to me; you and Klein Zareff.'

'Why, I didn't say a word.' 'Down on the shipping floor, before we went up. You were talking about selling arms and ammunition at a profit of two hundred sols a ton, and Klein was talking as though a bumper crop was worse than a Green Death epidemic. If we had a hypership, look what we could do. How much do you think a settler on Hoth or Malebolge or Irminsul would pay for a good rifle and a thousand rounds? How much would he pay for his life?—that's what it would come to.

And do you know what a fifteen-cc liqueur glass of Poictesme, brandy sells for on Terra? One sol; Federation money. I'll admit it costs like Nifflheim to run a hypership, but look at the difference between what these tramp freighter captains pay at Storisende and what they get.' 'I've been looking at it for a long time. Maybe if we had a few ships of our own, these planters would be breaking new ground instead of cutting their plantings, and maybe we'd get some money on this planet that was worth something. (ed note: the obstacles to a planet making their own starship are [1] requires an industrial base to build and maintain a starship, [2] requires lots of money to pay for buillding a starship [3] requires lots of money to run and maintain a starship. But once you get over the hump they can be very lucrative.).At the same time, reports of the near completion of Ouroboros II were monopolizing the newscasts, to distract public attention from what wag happening at Force Command.

Cargo was being collected for her; instead of washing their feet in brandy, next year people would be drinking water. Lorenzo Menardes had emptied his warehouses of everything over a year old; so had most of the other distillers up and down the Gordon Valley. Melon and tobacco planters were talking about breaking new ground and increasing their cultivated acreage for the next year. Agricultural machinery was in demand and bringing high prices. So were stills, and tobacco-factory machinery.

It began to look as though the Maxwell Plan was really getting started. Predictably, as soon as a merchant tries to move his imported goods out of the, the tax and tariff man shows up. As Terry Pratchett said, there exists Death and Taxes, and taxes is worse since at least death doesn't happen every time you try to cross the customs border. If some trade goods landing at the spaceport are destined for another port, they are unloaded into a spaceport bonded warehouse, and later loaded into another merchant spacecraft. The point is the goods are just passing through, so the local customs agents can do nothing. However, if the spaceport is at the market for the trade goods, the port will probably be inside a sovereign nation, and the sovereign nation wants their taxes. The nation will have its customs and immigration agents controlling the flow of goods and people into and out of the spaceport, enforcing the nation's customs and immigration laws.

The magic line is called the. Goods land at the spaceport inside the customs border. The instant the goods are shipped across the border they have to be cleared by the customs agents, and the relevant duties, tariffs, and taxes paid. And some goods are contraband, which are restricted or prohibited from crossing the customs border. Depending upon the law, contraband items are refused entry or confiscated. If the nation's list of contraband includes lucrative items, or if the tariffs are too high, there will be a strong fence around the customs border patrolled by customs agents on the lookout for. The spaceport area inside the customs border is usually a.

In this zone, goods may be landed, handled, manufactured or reconfigured, and reexported without the intervention of the customs authorities. The agents cannot interfere at all with goods that are through the port. Trade goods inside the free trade zone are stored in. If however the customs border is drawn around the entire planet at orbital height, or even around an entire solar system or interstellar empire, then the job belongs to the. Sometimes the entity controlling the flow of trade is a hostile fleet from an invading foreign power. If they cannot conquer the planet (or are unwilling to pay the military cost) they will invest the planet and try to starve it out.

The enemy fleet is constantly on the lookout for trying to sneak stuff in. Things get really messy if there are several colonies on the planet that belong to different star nations, so the investing fleet is only trying to stop trade to Colony X, but allowing it to Colony Y and Colony Z.

Another issue touched upon above that deserves more discussion is the concept of a blockade. There are several different concepts of a blockade, ranging from a total blockade intended to prevent the victim from leaving his planet, to a ‘pacific blockade’ intended to merely apply diplomatic pressure. While some of these concepts belong in other sections, they will all be discussed here for the sake of clarity. A total blockade is the most extreme, and most difficult, form of blockade.

The objective is to stop all travel to and from a planet. What separates it (or any other blockade) from a simple attack is that the blockader does not venture into low orbit to engage any fixed defenses, and leaves the orbital infrastructure more or less intact. However, all ships attempting to transit the blockade are turned away or destroyed.

This is fairly simple to implement, provided the attacker has sufficient firepower to do so. However, it is definitely an act of war, and risks aggravating neutral parties in the conflict. It also violates current international law, which only allows passing ships to be stopped and searched for contraband. This form of blockade is also relatively easy to implement. As discussed in the section on boarding, ships approaching the blockade would be instructed to rendezvous with the blockading ships and be boarded. It has been suggested that a “blockade missile” would be sent to rendezvous with the approaching ship and attach until it reaches the blockade.

The problem with this idea is that the delta-V requirements for rendezvous are significant, and that a missile fired at a noncompliant vessel would be just as effective. The general feasibility of boarding is significantly improved by the long acceleration times characteristic of nuclear-electric vessels. Even with miligee drives, reaching escape velocity will take tens if not hundreds of hours. Avoiding such a blockade is not totally impossible, however. A blockade runner could use chemfuel to put on delta-V much faster than possible pursuers, or take suboptimal launch windows to avoid blockading craft.

Both of these approaches work best for a blockade runner coming from the blockaded planet, as a blockade runner coming from another planet will give the blockader time to set up an intercept with minimal delta-V expenditure. This leads to the concept of a Launch Window Blockade, which simply increases the cost to get to (or more likely from) a planet without annoying the inhabitants too much.

Even if such tactics are commonplace, they do not mean that the blockade was a failure. The Union blockade of the South during the American Civil War only intercepted about 1 in 10 blockade runners. However, the commerce that did move was forced from conventional, efficient merchant ships into far less efficient blockade runners, driving up shipping costs and restricting supply. Much the same would occur in space if blockade runners were forced to use inefficient orbits to avoid the blockading forces. An even softer blockade would be a ‘pacific blockade’. This concept originated in the late 19 th century as a means of diplomatic pressure by the great powers short of going to war. The concept is best described by the 11 th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: PACIFIC BLOCKADE, a term invented by Hautefeuille, the French writer on International Maritime Law, to describe a blockade exercised by a great power for the purpose of bringing pressure to bear on a weaker state without actual war.

That it is an act of violence, and therefore in the nature of war, is undeniable, seeing that it can only be employed as a measure of coercion by maritime powers able to bring into action such vastly superior forces to those the resisting state can dispose of that resistance is out of the question. In this respect it is an act of war, and any attempt to exercise it against a power strong enough to resist would be a commencement of hostilities, and at once bring into play the rights and duties affecting neutrals.

On the other hand, the object and justification of a pacific blockade being to avoid war, that is general hostilities and disturbance of international traffic with the state against which the operation is carried on, rights of war cannot consistently be exercised against ships belonging to other states than those concerned. And yet, if neutrals were not to be affected by it, the coercive effect of such a blockade might be completely lost.

Recent practice has been to limit interference with them to the extent barely necessary to carry out the purpose of the blockading powers. The exact same can be said of a pacific blockade in space. It will only be implemented in cases where the blockading power is so much stronger than the blockaded power that it does not have to actually defeat the planet’s defenses.

Another point is that the stated goals of the blockade will often be different from the actual goals. One example might be a blockade to prevent a terrorist leader from leaving the planet. While it might achieve its goal directly, it can be effective even if the terrorist has no desire to travel. The blockaded planet will have every incentive to hand the leader in question over to stop the inconvenience of the blockade. Another potential case for a pacific blockade is a planet without a functioning government, effectively the equivalent of Somalia in space.

This is perhaps the most likely scenario, given the logistics of power projection in space, although the idea of a planet without a functioning government and large amounts of interplanetary trade is somewhat questionable. The target of the blockade also has a major effect on how it is conducted.

Targets can be divided between statistical and non-statistical goods. Most modern blockades target statistical goods such as military equipment or oil, where the objective is to restrict the flow of the good to or from the target planet. Success or failure is measured based upon the relative amount that gets through, not on the absolute blocking of all trade. In this case, the idea of a decoy blockade runner is rather silly, as it would make more sense to split the cargo up among each ship instead.

A non-statistical good is one where preventing the good from penetrating at all is critical. A good example might be a terrorist leader, who cannot be divided between multiple ships, and must be captured if the blockade is to be considered a success. Another example might be a nuclear weapon, which requires the entire lot to get through to be effective, with the converse that there is no gain to be had by spreading the parts out across multiple blockade runners.

(This assumes that only one weapon is available. If there are multiple identical weapons, then splitting them up might allow one working one to be assembled from the parts of several.) The only reason that such a cargo should be split up is to aid concealment if it is to be smuggled.

In the case of non-statistical goods, decoys do make sense, reducing the chances of the good in question being captured. In many cases, the blockade can be targeted on traffic in one direction or the other, and even on traffic to or from specific locations. The unlimited visibility of space and the constraints of orbital mechanics make it fairly easy to predict the destination of any departing craft. This would be useful if, for example, customs at the far end could be counted upon to search the craft in question, or if there are reasons to believe that the target is headed for (or from) a specific body. Political and legal constraints can also have a serious impact on a blockade. One example of this is the searching of Iraqi oil tankers during the pre-2003 sanctions.

The forces detailed to do so were required to board the tankers in international waters and physically take control of them. The Iraqis responded by welding up the tankers, and the boardings forces were not allowed to use explosives to breach the defenses, turning it into a race between the boarders cutting their way in and the Iraqis racing for someone’s territorial waters. A similar situation in space could require each target to be chased down and boarded individually, with the blockaders unable to inflict more damage than is required to cut their way in. The discussion on opposed boarding above is obviously relevant in this scenario. Even an inability to simply destroy a noncompliant vessel would be a major influence on the conduct of a blockade.

A disabled blockade runner headed towards a planet would be difficult to intercept and bring to a stable orbit, and maintaining such a capability would take significant resources. There are several other types of operation that, while referred to as ‘blockades’ do not meet the strict definition used here. One is the Argus Blockade mentioned in Section 9. Another is the idea of destroying the orbital infrastructure and preventing the blockaded planet from going into space at all. The reasons that this would be done are unclear, as it would rapidly become more expensive than a full-out invasion, and it only makes sense if done over the long term. Destroying ground-based infrastructure and occasionally sending a fleet by to make sure it stays destroyed would probably be cheaper. The only plausible scenario that would require this is if the planet in question had to be quarantined for some reason.

A somewhat softer version of this is the Kessler Blockade. This uses the orbital debris problems mentioned above to complicate the defender’s rebuilding of their infrastructure after it is destroyed. While the effects would not be total, any new missions would have to be heavily protected from debris, and certain orbits (notably those previously most popular) might be uninhabitable altogether. Depending on the setting, clearing of the debris could take months or years, particularly if most debris was previously cleared by orbital platforms instead of ground-based ones. At this point, it is worth looking at the classic ‘’ scenario in some detail, along with the intimately related question of claims of sovereignty in space. What would it take for such a revolt to succeed, and what would constitute success?

The standard model, most famously described in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is based on the American Revolution, and is probably the one with the most interesting story potential. In this, a major colony decides that it is fed up with misgovernment from Earth, and wants to go it alone. The government that previously had jurisdiction over the colony is unlikely to be happy with this, and will probably send an expedition to put down the revolt.

There are serious problems with this scenario, however. In nearly every revolt against a ‘colonial’ power, a significant fraction of the population supported the occupying power, and the premium that operations in space will put on group unity suggests that a full-scale revolt will be somewhat unlikely unless the occupier is totally unreasonable. Essentially, all revolts or attempts at independence succeed only when the cost of suppressing them exceeds the benefits to be gained. In fact, the same could be said of any attempt to exert sovereignty on a celestial body, but in many cases, the balance is so skewed that the outcome is inevitable. These will be examined later.

There are many factors that can influence the cost-benefit ratio of suppressing a revolt, most of which are tied into setting politics and economics, and will not be examined in detail here. Instead, the focus will be on the effects of the factors directly related to space warfare. Ultimately, any revolt can be suppressed in one of two ways. Either it can be made too expensive for the revolt to be sustained, or it can be put down by occupying the colony directly. In many ways, the first is more likely. Unless some fantastically valuable resource is discovered on a body, any colony is likely to be more dependent on Earth than Earth is on it.

In this case, a simple blockade would be the most effective way to suppress the revolt, and a successful revolt would require that the blockade be made ineffective or impossible. The feasibility of a blockade can vary widely depending on scenario details. The simplest case for a blockade is one in which all colonies on the body are in revolt, and an embargo can thus be slapped on everything headed in that direction.

As most ships capable of interplanetary flight probably belong to the power or powers that are attempting to suppress the revolt, only minimal military force is necessary, and what force is necessary can probably be exerted at the points of departure, without ever having to get close to the body and run the risks of any orbital defenses that may have been assembled. However, this is also rather unlikely on anything but an asteroid, where there is a possibility of having only a single colony that is developed enough to be able to potentially become self-sufficient. On a moon or a planet, there will likely be multiple colonies from multiple nations, and the chances of a simultaneous rebellion are slim. If there are colonies that are not in revolt, then the situation is obviously more complicated.

An embargo against all colonies on the body is clearly going to anger many people, both on Earth and on the body. However, allowing trade to the body raises the risk that some of that trade will find its way to the colony, either via ships filing falsified destination plans, or via transport from the destination colony to the revolting colony. Stopping such trade would require a much closer blockade (See Section 11), and that in turn potentially exposes the attackers to any defenses the revolt may have constructed. The defender would probably have to prevent the attacker from reaching the body’s orbit at all, as there is no particular reason a blockade would need to be conducted within range of any point defenses. The matter is more fully covered above, but the scenario generally does not end well for an unsupported revolt.

In a scenario with minimal space warfare preparation, where both sides are working from scratch, a defender might be capable of defeating the initial attack. However, the Earth-based power would have a significant edge in terms of technological development, and any follow-up expedition would probably brush aside the defenses.

This applies to even the first expedition if the government has made significant preparations for space warfare. An expeditionary force, let us say, has set forth from Mars, heading toward Earth. Its mission is to establish and enforce a blockade of Earth — or of the rest of the Solar System, depending on how you look at it. Specifically, certain persons are to be embargoed, forbidden to travel from Earth. To any other planet, moon, or other astronomical body. Travel to good old Luna may or may not be included in the embargo, depending as much on operational as policy-objective considerations. (See below!) Violators are subject to arrest.

If they resist arrest they may be fired upon. We will not, for this discussion, trouble ourselves with who 'certain persons' are, or why someone on Mars wants to keep them from leaving Earth. For our purpose, it is sufficient that a) The relevant Earthside authorities have zero interest, or less than zero, in helping Mars bottle these certain persons up. A polite request would reach Earth a lot faster, easier, and cheaper than an expeditionary force. But a polite request, by itself, would be ignored. B) Somebody on Mars (or at least in Mars space) has means and motive to issue more than a polite request. Namely send the expeditionary force.

C) Whoever this somebody is, their objective is to control outbound traffic from Earth, not eliminate it — especially not permanently. Slagging Earth, its launch sites, or orbital infrastructure are not objectives, or even acceptable outcomes. Slagging individual transport-class ships is dicey, depending on the circumstances. Military craft, however, are fair game.

Human interplanetary travel uses electric propulsion, on the general lines often discussed here. Main drive acceleration is in the milligee range, and the ships have either very large radiator fins or very large solar wings.

Hardening these is a nonstarter, so deep-space ships are inherently vulnerable. On the other hand, punching a few small holes in the wings will not cripple them, so the vulnerability should not be overstated. Spaceships won't sink, or become aerodynamically unflyable. Delta v will be a constant preoccupation of commanders. This has been discussed here before, but it is almost impossible to overstate.

The Martian expeditionary force probably take a slower orbit than civil transports, because transports can refuel at their destination. The expeditionary needs to reserve propellant for a (slow!) abort orbit back to Mars. And while milligee drives preclude 'tactical' maneuver, at least some of your deep space ships likely have a few km/s of delta v for 'operational' orbit changes in Earth space. At a rate of about 1 km/s per day.

By bringing along plenty of tankers for support, a few ships might have a couple of dozen km/s for operational movement. Chemfuel spacecraft can have pretty much as much acceleration as you want, but unless they start out as mostly propellant drop tanks they will carry only 2-3 km/s of delta v. Which means that a 1 km/s burn is huge, a sizable chunk of your entire maneuver capacity. Nuclear thermal propulsion is intermediate, but much closer to chemfuel. And for human missions much of the advantage may be lost due to shielding mass. Just on a practical level, all of these constraints are a good reason to seek mutual understanding through dialogue.

But of course you won't. On the flip side, the technology of deep space travel makes 'distant blockade' a surprisingly viable concept. Departing ships spiral out for a week or more, their orbital speed (relative to Earth) gradually decreasing to a couple of km/s, before they finally pass escape velocity and break loose into solar orbit.

This gives ample time for ships in high Earth orbit to intercept would-be blockade runners, the interception taking place somewhere between geosynch and lunar distance. This sort of space chase is more than a bit odd to contemplate. Both prey and pursuer are circling Earth throughout the chase, which unfolds over a period of days due to their extremely sluggish acceleration. But the scope for evasive maneuvers is extremely limited, since the blockade runner must keep spiraling outward if it is to proceed on its journey. One possible tactic is to feign a departure, either to draw the blockader into battle with a heavily armed ship, or as sheer bluff — forcing the blockader to expend its limited propellant, then 'reverse course' and spiral back inward toward low orbit. The ship performing the bluff has also expended propellant, but it can refuel at LEO, an option not available to the blockaders.

Such peculiar chases are complicated by the possibility of chemfuel (or nuke thermal) ships — or munitions — making far more abrupt orbit changes, leading to an engagement in a matter of days. Earth-Moon travel is, or can be, entirely different, carried out using chemfuel or nuke thermal propulsion, blasting straight out of LEO into the lunar injection orbit. The challenge of intercepting Moon-bound ships is equally different, to the point that the blockader will either have to make separate provision for it (a ship positioned at the lunar L1 point, or in lunar orbit), or else not attempt to enforce the blockade with respect to Luna. If blockade runners were pre-parked in lunar orbit — and the Earth-based defender had months to position them, while the blockader was en route from Mars — then the blockader must extend enforcement to lunar space. Otherwise the blockade might be evaded simply by going to lunar orbit first. So far I have said nothing about weapons.

The scenario as described does make one negative presumption: that lasers (or whatever beam weapons) have an effective range less than about 50-100,000 km — whatever turns out to the the distance from Earth at which departing electric ships reach escape velocity and transition from geocentric spirals to their solar transfer orbits. Otherwise the prime intercept zone lies within direct zapping range of lasers in low orbit — or even on the ground. In that case the expeditionary force must either engage in a direct laser battle, or blockade from a higher orbit, outside the range of 'shore guns.' Intercepting blockade runners then becomes more difficult and propellant-costly, since they are already above Earth escape velocity on outbound solar orbits.

Kinetics, or missiles generally, have no 'range.' If they are on orbits below escape velocity they will orbit Earth (or Luna) indefinitely; if above escape velocity they will head out into the void on solar orbits. More relevant for missiles is flight time, which defines the target's window for engaging the missile or evading it. Electric ships can, potentially, outrun any chemfuel or even nuke thermal missiles by running them out of delta v. But with milligee acceleration they can only do so if the flight time is in days. The drawn-out evasive maneuver will cut fairly deeply into reserve delta v, and leave the target far from its previous orbit, therefore probably off station.

I have also said nothing about the ships involved, save that they have the broad characteristics determined by their propulsion. It is by no means a given that either side has craft that fit our image of warships, especially if lasers or other beams are not an important factor. The expeditionary force must come closer, since its deep space craft must be able to deploy weapons in some way. But the Earth-based defender might well rely entirely on missile buses pre-positioned in patrol orbits, with its ships providing purely logistic support. Finally, bear in mind that the scenario outlined — distant blockade — is pretty much the most favorable for an expeditionary space force. The blockader is not seeking to land anywhere in force, or even contest control of Earth's inner orbital space, only interdict outbound deep space traffic. It need not come close enough to Earth to be at risk of short-warning attack by surface-launched ASATs or surface-based lasers.

Trade improves pretty much all economies, so a planetary colony will find their economy enhanced by interplanetary and/or interstellar trade spacecraft. My question is what happens to such a colony who relies upon off-world trading if the trade is cut off?

Is this a minor inconvenience or does it cause a major recession that crashes the entire planetary economy? Such interruptions can happen due to trade embargoes, blocades by hostile starfleets, or by the. That question is above my pay grade, but I suspect that either outcome is plausible enough for an author to utilize it in their novel. (ed note: the Colonial Union, a group composed of Terra and all her colonies, has managed to cheese off the Conclave, a consortium of alien civilizations around it.

Some of the Conclave aliens attack with warships, other attack by other means) The Kristina Marie had just docked at Khartoum Station when its engine compartment shattered, vaporizing the back quarter of the trading ship and driving the front three-quarters of the ship directly into Khartoum Station. The station's hull buckled and snapped; air and personnel burst from the fracture lines. Across the impact zone airtight bulkheads sprang into place, only to be torn from their moorings and sockets by the encroaching inertial mass of the Kristina Marie, itself bleeding atmosphere and crew from the collision. When the ship came to rest, the explosion and collision had crippled Khartoum Station, and killed 566 people on the station and all but six members of the Kristina Marie’s crew, two of whom died shortly thereafter of their injuries.

The explosion of the Kristina Marie did more than destroy the ship and much of Khartoum Station; it coincided with the harvest of Khartoum’s hogfruit, a native delicacy that was one of Khartoum’s major exports. Hogfruit spoiled quickly after ripening (it got its name from the fact Khartoum’s settlers fed the overripe fruit to their pigs, who were the only ones who would eat them at that point), so Khartoum had invested heavily to be able to harvest and ship for export its hogfruit crop within days of ripening, via Khartoum Station. The Kristina Marie was only one of a hundred Colonial Union trade ships above Khartoum, awaiting its share of the fruit.

With Khartoum Station down, the streamlined distribution system for the hogfruit ground into disarray. Ships dispatched shuttles to Khartoum itself to try to pack in as many crates of the fruit as possible, but this led to confusion on the ground in terms of which hogfruit producers had priority in shipping their product, and which trade ships had priority in receiving them. Fruit had to be unpacked from storage containers and repacked into shuttles; there were not nearly enough cargo men for the job.

The vast majority of hogfruit rotted in its containers, delivering a major shock to the Khartotun economy, which would be compounded in the long term by the need to rebuild Khartoum Station—the economic lifeline for other exports as well—and bolster th.

The Amplifire promises great sound, plentiful options, ease of use — and the ability to load your own cabinet impulse responses. Atomic Amplifiers’ founder Tom King was one of the first to recognise the need for specialist amp-modeller amplification, and the company’s current offering, the CLR (Coincident Linear Reference) range of compact active and passive cabinets, based around a proprietary 12-inch dual-concentric driver, has earned Atomic an excellent reputation. In 2014, Atomic announced that they’d teamed up with amp-modelling software company Studio Devil to develop the Amplifire, a new hardware guitar-amp modeller and multi-effects unit, in a floor-pedal format. Visually, the Amplifire is quite arresting, its compact brushed-metal chassis cover resplendent in an almost-metallic red. Three programmable footswitches and their associated LEDs sit on an angled front panel, with the remaining controls and a back-lit dot-matrix display positioned on a slightly recessed plateau behind them.

The single guitar (or bass) input sits on the right-hand side, whilst the TRS balanced L-R stereo output (left only for mono) and a headphone mini-jack occupy positions on the opposite end. Other I/O sit on the rear of the cover: a mono send and stereo return for the effects loop (the latter doubling as expression pedal inputs), MIDI I/O sockets, balanced XLRs for the aux output, a USB connector and, finally, a non-locking socket for the included 9V DC 1A wall-wart power supply. Two 400MHz SHARC DSP chips give the Amplifire considerable processing power, enabling it to run the amp- and cabinet- modelling software developed by Studio Devil. Founded by amp-modelling pioneer Marc Gallo, Studio Devil’s patented approach to tube-amp emulation is based around highly detailed DSP analysis and recreation of classic 12AX7 (ECC83)-based preamplifier stages, push-pull power amplifiers and speaker cabinets. The Amplifire’s simple (but not simplistic) on-board user interface uses a push-to-edit/turn-to-change continuous rotary encoder.

With this, you can access all editable parameters, the results being displayed on a 12x2 dot-matrix display. Left and right arrows step backwards and forwards through the selected menu, and a Save button flashes as soon as any changes are made to the loaded preset. Physical knobs for Gain, Master Volume, Bass, Mid, Treble and Presence give instant access to these parameters, and any alterations made by these or the rotary encoder to the loaded preset can be saved instantly, using the Save button. A non-programmable Level control allows you to set the Amplifire’s overall output volume. The Amplifire Editor software, available for both PC and Mac, communicates with the Amplifire via USB and gives access to all editable and programmable functions. Its four screens (Edit, Cabinets, Global and Backup) are clearly laid out, extremely functional and completely intuitive in use. Cleverly, the global functions that you’re likely to want to change or audition while in a preset (for example, the gate threshold) are also programmable from that function’s Edit screen, which avoids unnecessary interruption of the creative flow.

The Cabinets tab is where you import, organise and store third-party cabinet IRs (impulse responses), which you can then incorporate into any preset. The only drawback in the software’s operation is that communication is entirely one way from computer to Amplifire, which means that, although changing a parameter value on-screen simultaneously updates the Amplifire, the reverse is not true.

It is only when a preset is recalled in the Editor, or the displayed preset is refreshed via the file menu, that the Editor screen is updated, and I kept wishing for a dedicated on-screen refresh button. As can be seen in a diagram in the owner’s manual, the Amplifire has the potential to sit happily at the centre of your guitar-amplification universe. As with any guitar or bass amp, you can either plug your instrument straight in or use any pedals that you wish. The Amplifire’s processing pathway is made up of five building blocks.

After the A-D input conversion takes place, the first section, Pre-Effects, is best thought of as models of those pedals that you’d have in front of your amp in the real world: noise gate, volume, wah, compressor, a single-band parametric EQ, boost and graphic EQ. This is followed by the amp model, of which you have the choice of 18 types — 14 thinly disguised emulations of classic and contemporary amplifiers, plus four generic types (EL34, EL84, 6L6 and KT88, but, sadly from my point of view, no 6V6). The effects loop comes next and, unusually, its returns can also be configured to act either as a stereo aux input for backing tracks, or as inputs for two expression pedals. The post-effects block follows the effects return and is made up of three single-band parametric EQs. Next comes the ‘EFX’ engine, with its four time-domain modulation effects, followed by the Echo segment. The latter gives you exceptional control of its five basic types, and a similarly comprehensively controlled Reverb follows, offering three rooms and one spring.

The volume, compressor, graphic EQ, parametric EQs, effects, boost and delay can be repositioned in the signal path pre or post the amp model. This facility is sensibly constrained to always give you a signal flow that essentially corresponds to how you’d probably set up the movable models in real life. The OS X/Windows control software allows you to fine-tune your presets, and even offers the ability to load your own speaker impulse responses.The Amplifire’s processing chain is completed by the Cabinet component, containing the Amplifire’s killer feature and major selling point — its ability to load and store 32 impulse responses of your choice, to complement the cabinet models from the TAF and Singtall presets and those from the 18 Amplifire models.

To put the icing on the cake, if you happen to have more than 32 IRs in your collection, you can load one into the active preset straight from your computer. As you’ll probably have gathered by now, combining the considerable amount of sonic flexibility available via the controls of the 16 individual components in the signal chain with the variable positioning of nine of those is not only going to give you almost limitless possibilities, but also (and more importantly) is going to enable you to build or to sculpt a guitar sound to fit almost every occasion. Connecting the Amplifire up can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. If you’re using it on its own to feed into a DAW interface and/or a pair of FRFR (full-range, flat-response) cabs, then all you have to do is to connect the appropriate output in either stereo or mono (balanced TRS on the main out and/or the balanced XLR on the auxiliary output), make sure that the tube power-amp and cabinet models are enabled on the required outputs, plug in your guitar, select a preset and you’re all set. The power-amp and cabinet-model switching threw me a bit, in that whilst the cabinet emulation can be active on the main and aux outputs individually, simultaneously or not at all, the power-amp emulation may only be switched off globally. This means that you can’t feed the aux output with the amp and cab emulations active to a DAW or FOH desk whilst simultaneously feeding the main output without these emulations to, for example, the effects-return of your favourite tube guitar amp to give you a bit of real amp feel.

Using the effects loop involves another set of choices: do you use it as an effects send and return, as an auxiliary input for a backing track, or as the input for one or two expression pedals, to control the on-board volume and wah functions? Decisions, decisions. If the Amplifire is on a desktop or being controlled via a MIDI foot controller, you won’t necessarily have to worry about its three programmable footswitches, but otherwise you’ll want to set their functions to suit your setup: there are 21 options to choose from.

Almost all the settings I’ve mentioned in this section so far are part of the Amplifire’s Global settings. There’s not the space here to go into all of these in detail, so I’d recommend that you download the owner’s manual and peruse these at your leisure. As you might imagine, there’s an extensive list to work through. I began by monitoring the Amplifire through its built-in headphone output (which has the amplifier and cabinet emulations permanently enabled) and ran through the amp models with all the effects switched off.

I immediately noticed not only that the Amplifire’s 12AX7 preamp model was genuinely touch-sensitive, but also that the modelled amplifier presets manage to convey the characteristics of their corresponding originals. Feeding the Amplifire into a JBL Eon 10 PA system produced the same level of results, although I did have to start tweaking the parametric and cabinet EQ settings to get the presets to where I wanted to be, sound-wise. It was much the same story when I ran the Amplifire through my studio monitors: time spent on individually EQ’ing elements of each preset really paid off in terms of getting the amplifier and speaker cabinet emulations to sound the way I wanted them to.

Following on from there, I listened closely to the four time-domain modulation effects, the five echoes and the four reverbs, all of which I initially placed post-amp. The tremolo, chorus, flanger and phaser sounded very good indeed in that position, and were just as effective positioned before the amp as if they were pedals. Two unusually named controls, Tweaks A and B, allow you to modify two parameters for each effect, the precise parameter depending on the chosen effect. The echo emulations were, to my ears, very convincing. Having the control capability to tailor their sounds to the requirements of a particular preset and guitar part is just outstanding. The reverb section has even more parameters available, and allows precise modification of the reverberation characteristics of the space or spring selected. The Amplifire’s effects-loop returns can double up as expression-pedal inputs.The ‘pedal’ effects (gate, wah, compressor and boost) were all excellent emulations.

As with the echo and reverb, the amount of control available on the wah is extraordinary and should enable you to set precisely the sound that you’re looking for. Since expression pedals don’t often incorporate switches, Atomic have come up with a neat global Auto-Off function, that automatically bypasses the wah if it has been inactive or parked for a set time (programmable from 10 to 2000 ms).

The Compressor has the control complement that you’d find in a studio compressor, allowing you to tailor it precisely to the needs of each preset, and the boost’s screamer, overdrive, distortion and fuzz modes perform effectively and realistically. I enjoyed playing through the Amplifire, especially when I had it hooked up (cab emulation bypassed) to the effects return of a solid-state 1x12 guitar amp. In this setting, I got a considerable part of the sound and feel of playing though a real tube amplifier. All my own tube amps are vintage ones from the days before effects returns were invented, so I could only run it with those as an effects pedal board (albeit very successfully!).

To me, the Atomic Amplifiers Amplifire can be thought of as two units in one — it’s both a full-blown tube-amp modeller and a well-specified digital effects unit, when its entire amplifier/cabinet modelling is disabled. As a digital effects unit it can’t really be faulted and has to be given major bonus points for the amount of control that it offers, especially over its echo and reverb functions.

As a tube-amp modeller, the Amplifire is extremely impressive. Its touch–sensitivity feels natural, the models sound as you’d hope that they would, and time spent fine-tuning a preset is time well spent.

The results record very convincingly and, if you run them into either an FRFR cabinet or (even better) the power stage of a tube or solid-state guitar amp, it can feel pretty much like the real thing. The PC/Mac editing software is simple and intuitive, and it makes building, optimising and saving presets quick and easy. The ability to load third-party cabinet responses adds to the Amplifire’s versatility and is, in my experience, unique at this price point — it’s a striking feather in the Amplifire’s cap. The Amplifire can be used in a number of ways, and the manual usefully includes suggested connection diagrams.There are some relatively minor operational restrictions, but they’re sensibly chosen and the only one that I felt would actually inhibit me operationally (unless I used a MIDI controller) was being forced to choose between having a stereo effects return or two expression pedals — and given the Amplifire’s retail price, I can live with that restriction. Considering what it delivers operationally and sonically, and the competitive price, Atomic Amplifiers’ Amplifire is a device that anyone looking for an effects unit and tube-amp modeller, to record with or play through live, really needs to check out. As you’ve probably surmised already, the review unit won’t be going anywhere any time soon!

There are now several high-quality software amp and effects modellers, but the serious competition for anyone wanting to play live is rather more restricted. Although relying on a very different approach, the Kemper Profiling Amp is worth consideration.

So too are Fractal Audio Systems’ Axe-FX II and Two Notes’s Torpedo family of processors. Of those mentioned above, only Two Notes offer anything of comparable price. So too do amp-modelling pioneers Line 6, their nearest competitor probably being the Pod HD500X, though they’ve recently launched the more ambitious, and correspondingly more expensive, Helix. Atomic AmplifiersAmplifire £469 $600 pros • High-quality, great-sounding effects and amplifier emulations. • Simple, direct user interface plus intuitive operation.

• Can load third-party impulse responses. • Very powerful editing options, accessible via physical controls and software editor.

• Superb value for money. Cons • Requires a MIDI foot controller to exploit its full potential on stage. • Using expression pedals means losing the effects loop.

• Lacks a USB recording interface. • Non-locking wall-wart power supply. Summary Simply put, the Atomic Amps Amplifire is a high-performance guitar amp modeller and effects unit in a compact, floor pedal format that sounds great and is capable of delivering convincing results at an extremely competitive price for what’s on offer.

All contents copyright © SOS Publications Group and/or its licensors, 1985-2017. All rights reserved. The contents of this article are subject to worldwide copyright protection and reproduction in whole or part, whether mechanical or electronic, is expressly forbidden without the prior written consent of the Publishers. Great care has been taken to ensure accuracy in the preparation of this article but neither Sound On Sound Limited nor the publishers can be held responsible for its contents. The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the publishers.

Web site designed & maintained by PB Associates & SOS.