cbr wrote: ↑Fri Jul 30, 2021 8:07 am
Where would the pirate sell its loot/cargo?
I presume this is a preamble for what comes next....
Who buys and sells the cargo the pirate stations offers? An offender trader goes where next?
So the pirate stations, like normal orbitals act as a market for items traded between the planet and other places.
The successful pirates/offender traders will have clean ships or be able to store their goods on other clean ships, no?
An offender trader may well have a clean boa or anaconda with offender/fugitive escorts (and look just like a visiting legal trader!).
Where do you buy those permits in a clean system?
*Black market on the orbital (see the descriptions of Xezaor's orbital in
Dark Wheel Chapter 6)
*Rock Hermits selling smuggling compartments... (Smugglers oxp)
*Black market on Planet Surface
Perhaps a time based offender status visa ( so many days to conduct business and get out )
Good question. How do pirates really work?
Would there be some sort of organisation? - just because they are in an anarchy, does that mean that there are anarchic themselves? So would they be organised in gangs/triads/mafias/yakuza etc.? And would there be a transcendant over-arching organisation, controlling the disparate groups? Something like the Knights Templar from the
Imprint novella?
Gangs help the gangsters in operating in lawful areas - the criminal organisation helps in combating the organised police. But in an anarchy
without organised police? What then? Could it be that the law of natural selection would help the organised gangs succeed versus the unorganised? So that the successful pirate groups would be the more organised ones? And would they need to be organised to conquer an orbital station from GalCop?
So we have at least two different structures here: the structure of legal classification where GalCop decrees that some people are clean, others offenders and yet others fugitives. And then we have another structure - that of Triad Numero Uno. And Mafia gang numero duo has another structure, and Blackbeard's pirate clan have a third structure.
The fact that I have been decreed a fugitive by GalCop will mean precisely what to each of these three structures? Will it mean anything other than that they might see me as a potential member? Or a potential threat? Or a future traitor? Or an undercover GalCopian? etc... etc... After all, the classification is GalCop's! And I get it if I picked up enough parking tickets!
[/quote]
Another point: Galactic Navy To what extent is Anarchies parasitic on the currently unusable Galactic Navy? Who runs the Sentinel Stations? And the amnesty offers?
- would there be sense in making the Galactic Navy involvement optional via SysConfig or somesuch?
Another point: Markets How do market prices vary?
In a standard anarchy, the Coriolis is paid for by penny-pinching GalCop alone, hence the reduced GalCop police patrols. There is no assistance from the anarchy. So GalCop must raise money to help pay for their operation. Income seems to be solely through trade. So they also need to try and encourage this trade whose tariffs pay for the station. They have not enough money to pay for proper police patrols, so they are reliant on visits by well-armed/escorted traders.
So on the one hand, the orbital station markets must offer cheap goods for sale (so there will not be heavy tariffs on what is sold at the orbital market), and, on the other hand, there will be considerable tariffs on what is brought down to the planet. The expensive computers bought at the orbital will be much more expensive when they get down to the planet's surface and GalCop has recouped some of the running costs for the orbital and the police.
What might this mean for
planetary markets? These are
not controlled by GalCop. Are some of them controlled by pirate gangs? What are prices like down there?
No tariffs when I sell my computers, and the going rate is higher... But so are the risks - GalCop don't control the market, so I'm at the mercy of whatever ruffian wishes to diddle me. Food could be even cheaper! No transport costs to the orbital up out of the gravity well (but maybe those are paid for by the computer trade which is so lucrative that it pays for the traffic both ways), and if there are minor GalCop tariffs, I don't pay them. So:
better prices but
more risks.