Plotbunny for sale - cheap

[drakensis]

Luna
Stations: Port Luna (nee Tranquility Base), The Bottle City of Kandor (a domed city on the surface), Moonbase Alpha (an underground complex specialising in hazardous wastes)
Main Belt
Fractions: Space Pirates, Heinleinians, Discordians, Belters, Village of Hidden Asteroid, Independents
Jupiter
Fractions: Hydrogen miners and Ice miners
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[ECSNorway]

Three Cheers for Mister Morden!
M Fnord: You forgot the Village of the Hidden Asteroid.
Oh, and random background plot point: NASA/TSAB is currently prepping a submarine for a Europa run....--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[M Fnord]

For some reason I keep forgetting the Hidden Asteroid, or conflating them with the Space Pirates.
But then, I suppose that's what the ninja want. ---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Foxboy]

Earth-Sol Lagrange L5 - Slaver Cartel/Organized crime
Now here's an interesting question:
Do we eventually have Space/Fen Mafia/Yakuza against their dirtside versions? Or are they still part of the dirtsiders?
{Because you KNOW there are fen who like Gangster Movies, and there may be "Mafia Families" that are like the Space Pirates of 6565 Leiji, based on the "romantic" side of the Mafia}
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[M Fnord]

I was thinking (always a dangerous proposition) that we should let the various crime cartels insinuate their way into the other habitats instead of just giving 'em their own station. On that note I favor giving L5 over to the two "superpower" fractions we haven't really seen in detail yet, the Trekkies and the Warsies.
As for Space Gangsters, I'm thinking that the majority of them are still connected to dirtside - that's where the money is, after all - but there's a few who prefer the "honorable gangster" archetype. Lunar Triads or something, maybe.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[drakensis]

If there are Fen gangsters, then in order to co-exist with the rest of the Fens I suspect they'd not be doing anything more criminal than fansubbing.

As for the Trekkies, I agree that their base would likely be in one of the LaGrange points - although that raises the question of what to call it: Spacedock? Utopia Planetia? (perhaps if it was over Mars); StarBase One?D for Drakensis
You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Black Aeronaut]

Oi! Hunterminator! I'm up for some bar-room brawlin' at the Tipsy Senshi. Ben may head in there in hopes that most of the fuku-clad girls are at least half-way self-respecting. In fact, that might just serve as the catalyst. ^_^

---

Black Aeronaut Technologies Group
Aerospace Solutions for the discerning spacer
"To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News
of this kind a danish requires."

---

[The Hunterminator]

---

Oi! Hunterminator! I'm up for some bar-room brawlin' at the Tipsy Senshi. Ben may head in there in hopes that most of the fuku-clad girls are at least half-way self-respecting. In fact, that might just serve as the catalyst. ^_^

---

Come on in, there's room for everyone. Oh and, how would you like to do the joint-post?
Oh and, I was thinking that the brawl would be caused by a Sub vs Dub debate.

[ECSNorway]

Now I have this image of Chris and Amy sitting back to watch the floor show (ie, brawl)...
-----
Among the many reasons fen find to throw a barroom brawl, two are most common at cons. One is Sub vs Dub. The other is 'Which would win, the Death Star or the Enterprise' (my own answer, of course, is Dahak.)
-------
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Foxboy]

And then of course, there's the Klingon-fraction insulting an intrepid engineer by saying his ship is a garbage scow, and the retracting it because he says the ship should be hauled away as garbage.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[M Fnord]

Nah, the Klingons just jump in for the fun of it. I mean hey, free brawl.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Black Aeronaut]

Okay then! I'm alright with RP through Instant Messaging du joir. Here's my contact info.
MSN - neoravenk7@hotmail.com
AIM - NeoRavenK7
Y! - BlackAeronaut

---

Black Aeronaut Technologies Group
Aerospace Solutions for the discerning spacer
"To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News
of this kind a danish requires."

---

[Valles]

Mercury: Mundanes (Corporate), or independant assignees thereof.
Why: Because I figure that there are going to be metals that you just don't find in asteroids, things like tungsten, thorium... the heavy stuff. They're going to be most common on the really dense worlds - Earth, Io, and Mercury. Also, for someone without a wavetech drive - I figure that the 'Danelaw in general is handling most of what it needs in space with some implausibly powerful reaction drive that was produced by studying wavetech - Mercury makes a perfect mid-point for most journeys, as its short orbit makes Hohmann transfer windows relatively common. (If it needs to go fast, you hire fen) Likewise, unlike Luna, which is right near at hand, there's not much there to interest fen.
Mars: Trekkies, Pulpers
Why: The Trekkies are there because, well, they're just about the most numerous faction and that gives them the 'muscle' to move in on the second nicest bit of real estate in the solar system. The Pulpers are there because, well, John Carter of Mars, man! Probably the latter also have a presence on Venus that's mostly overshadowed by the Senshi.
Jupiter: Warsies, the occaisional Whedonite
Why: Because the 'asteroid field' in ESB has much more in common with a planetary ring system, and because both canons involve a lot of time with gas giants and multiple other moons in the sky. Also, while strenuous to live around, the Jovian subsystem has a lot of resources to play with, making it nearly as attractive - if in very different ways - as Mars.
Kupier Belt: retcon to n/a
Why: Because there's nothing there but dirty snowballs, and the gas giant moons are, well, really really big dirty snowballs. It's a long way to go for nothing.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[M Fnord]

Mercury: Could work, although the proximity to the sun might be a bit much for mundane gear.
Mars: Of course, the Warlords of Mars. I'd forgotten. Shame on me. As for the Trekkies... Mars and Luna are shaping up as the hubs for Fenspace as a whole, so I'd say all the major fractions have a base or whatnot on or over Mars.
Jupiter: This, I'm not so sure about. The environment around Jupiter is pretty hostile to every form of life, and almost all the really good resources are stuck down in the heart of the Jovian radiation belts. I'm sure there's people out there, but.... *shrug*
(For the Warsies, I had a mental post-it that said they were based at L5 with plans to move their operations to Mimas Any Day Now for reasons that are obvious. )
Kuiper Belt: Sure it's nothing but dirty snowballs, but they're movable snowballs. The terraforming projects demand lots of water and organics, and it's easier to farm the Kuiper than to tie up shipping tonnage in moving ice from Callisto.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[KJ]

In this crowd, I suppose an irate 6' tall redhead with daisho at her waist wouldn't draw much attention, even if they did know that I'd gone towards the market area with brown hair and a different gender. The other inhabitants of the Explain Star were even more used to this sort of thing happening every so often. Well, Elena seemed about to ask some question or other, but paused and reconsidered as she saw the irritated look on my face.
"Tell Mal I'll be right back," I grumbled as I stormed into the section of the 'Star that I'd more or less claimed for my own. The workshop was one of the things I'd talked Mal into as a necessity, and I was glad of it. I calmed down as I watched some finishing operations going on one of the automated machining centers. Not that I disliked the handwavium, but I was trained as an engineer, and highly advanced technology that I could understand was reassuring. Mundane technology, perhaps, but only in the sense that it was made to human blueprints. I'd fairly quickly realized that despite everything handwavium could do, there would always be a place for stuff that worked in comprehensible ways, without random... features. Conservative reaction, perhaps, but I made a decent income making bits for other people who realized how little we actually knew about the stuff and were a bit iffy on trusting their lives to it completely.
Okay, to be honest, I was cheating a bit. There wasn't room for a full assortment of machine tools, so I had to break them down and reassemble them into other things using handwavium. Fortunately, the quirks from this mostly manifested in the form of very strange units; the milling machine was taking a cut out of a piece of alloy that it measured in tiny little fractions of a light year, and none of the placards on it were in any langauge I recognized. Part of the reason I made Dee though.
I sighed and stretched, rummaging through a drawer and extracting a dry Hawaiian shirt and a bra. Truth to tell, the quasi-curse didn't bother me that much, except for two things. Of course, it seemed to follow Murphy's law; when I was in a hurry and didn't have the proper stuff to change into, I'd be more likely to walk into someone or slip into a puddle, or run out into a rainstorm, or whatever. That wouldn't have been much of an issue if it didn't hurt so much to change more than once a day.
"Oh well, whatever," I muttered to myself as I tied my hair back and adjusted the swords. "Sorry about the delay," I said as I wandered back into the common area.
"These things happen," Mal casually replied, and I couldn't help but break into a grin at the fact that we lived in a universe where that was true.

[Valles]

---

Mercury: Could work, although the proximity to the sun might be a bit much for mundane gear.

---

Just an engineering challenge. Put all your mining camps down on the nightside, tunnel them deep before the first dawn, then burrow. Granted, ships'd have to get their on their own, but... I think that's doable. Icebreakers, like.

---

Jupiter: This, I'm not so sure about. The environment around Jupiter is pretty hostile to every form of life, and almost all the really good resources are stuck down in the heart of the Jovian radiation belts. I'm sure there's people out there, but.... *shrug*

---

Considering all the other things wavetech shielding has already been seen to ward off, I hardly think that Jupiter puts out enough power to be... mmm, more than inconvenient.

---

Kuiper Belt: Sure it's nothing but dirty snowballs, but they're movable snowballs. The terraforming projects demand lots of water and organics, and it's easier to farm the Kuiper than to tie up shipping tonnage in moving ice from Callisto.

---

The Venusian atmosphere is mostly CO2, right? If Venus ships in hydrogen (I think as a metastable solid, but not neccessarily), then between that and the gases already in its atmosphere, the VTP has all the building blocks to synthesize water, hydrocarbons, and amino acids at a potential profit while also forwarding their objective. I can see a triangular trade of hydrogen from Jupiter to Venus, water and simple organics from Venus to Mars or Earth, and food and finished goods from Earth or Mars to Jupiter.
Besides, unless my memory misleads me, aren't the outer system rings supposed to be made up of ice?
And, Mimas? I love it! And, from the Warsies perspective, Saturn is even more perfect than Jupiter.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[M Fnord]

---

The Venusian atmosphere is mostly CO2, right? If Venus ships in hydrogen (I think as a metastable solid, but not neccessarily), then between that and the gases already in its atmosphere, the VTP has all the building blocks to synthesize water, hydrocarbons, and amino acids at a potential profit while also forwarding their objective. I can see a triangular trade of hydrogen from Jupiter to Venus, water and simple organics from Venus to Mars or Earth, and food and finished goods from Earth or Mars to Jupiter.

---

Well, you need more than just carbon, oxygen and hydrogen to make organic compounds. You also need nitrogen, and there's not a hell of a lot of that handy in or around Venus. The best places to obtain raw nitrogen are the outer system moons & the Kuiper Belt.
Conversely, with the energy being thrown around it'd actually be cheaper to harvest Kuiper ice and crack that for hydrogen instead of mining Jupiter for it.
(Helium-3, now, that's a resource with potential for profitable farming in the outer system, especially if the Mundanes manage to 'wave themselves up a fusion reactor. Still, Jupiter's gravity makes getting it a bitch and a half; Saturn, Uranus and Neptune make for better "oilfields.")

---

Besides, unless my memory misleads me, aren't the outer system rings supposed to be made up of ice?

---

Yeah, but then you get into that portability thing again. It's like... well, the outer rings are about 50/50 rock and ice, but it's more profitable for rockrats to go after small-to-medium asteroids than to take a big bag and collect dust.
Plus, let's be honest. Even in the most libertarian fandom possible, if you're dumb enough to fuck with the jovian rings you'll be strung up for environmental desecration before the viewgraphs are dry. Some things are simply sacrosanct.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Valles]

---

Well, you need more than just carbon, oxygen and hydrogen to make organic compounds. You also need nitrogen, and there's not a hell of a lot of that handy in or around Venus. The best places to obtain raw nitrogen are the outer system moons & the Kuiper Belt.

---

As Wiki has it, Venusian air is about 5% N2. Granted that isn't a huge share, but you're making water - which is HOH - and hydrocarbons of various flavors, all of which can be written completely using the C and H keys.
I won't argue about needing more of it to set up an Earthlike atmosphere on Venus, though.

---

(Helium-3, now, that's a resource with potential for profitable farming in the outer system, especially if the Mundanes manage to 'wave themselves up a fusion reactor. Still, Jupiter's gravity makes getting it a bitch and a half; Saturn, Uranus and Neptune make for better "oilfields.")

---

Thank you! That helped me identify the biggest problem I was having with your version...
As presented, the primary limitation on fennish activity is not supply, delta-v, or energy.
It's travel time.
Say - for very rough, back-of-the-envelope purposes - that the Kuiper belt starts at about Neptune's orbit.
That makes its resources six times as distant as Jupiter's. That's, what, at least four more round trips that the Jovian miner makes while his Kuiper rival is still doing his first?
And, yeah. I think that fusion power can be taken as a given.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[M Fnord]

---

As Wiki has it, Venusian air is about 5% N2. Granted that isn't a huge share, but you're making water - which is HOH - and hydrocarbons of various flavors, all of which can be written completely using the C and H keys.

---

Though if you want a nitrogen atmosphere it'd be better to leave that 5% alone.
I dunno, still seems kinda silly to charge all the way out to a mining rig around Jupiter for hydrogen & rush it back to Venus for synthesizing into organics when you could just mine the organics off Titan, Triton, Pluto, Sedna, Quaoar or Eris. Saves that extra step.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Valles]

---

I dunno, still seems kinda silly to charge all the way out to a mining rig around Jupiter for hydrogen & rush it back to Venus for synthesizing into organics when you could just mine the organics off Titan, Triton, Pluto, Sedna, Quaoar or Eris. Saves that extra step.

---

True, but...
1. Then the organics are being sold by the rock rats, not the VTP, removing that source of revenue and making the project's survival and future less secure.
2. Your mining ships are making only - at best! - half as many round trips - and selling only half as much cargo - as they could be coming from Jupiter.
3. Importing things from outsystem does absolutely nothing to thin the Venusian atmosphere. (As opposed to very little, granted, but still.)
4. Metallic hydrogen is denser than ice, and therefore, if I understand correctly, likely to be more profitable for the miners.
5. Diving into the stormy depths of the largest planet to reach the refinery floating deep in its thunder-lit abyss... is cool.
6. Floating Islands are cool. If they aren't synthesizing salable stuff, there's much less reason to have them, or as many of them.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[drakensis]

As currently envisaged, there is indeed a significant demand for Hydrogen on Venus. It's one of their more significant imports in fact.
Because the big plan for making permanent changes to the atmosphere involves taking vast quantities of CO2 and splitting it. Now carbon on it's own has some uses - graphite is exportable and industrial diamond is actually used as a construction material, but you don't want raw oxygen around because that's volatile as all hell. And dumping it back in the atmosphere is no good, there's a very significant need to reduce the atmospheric pressure - the 'sea level' pressure is currently 90x that of Earth.
But if you have hydrogen available then you can bond the oxygen to it and produce water which is very useful in terraforming. And if you have more carbon than you can use then you can bond that to some hydrogen and get CH4 which is actually very marketable on Earth if you can get it there.
So I there are two lines of trade relatively obvious: carrying hydrogen from, say, Jupiter to Venus; and then carrying natural gas from Venus to Earth. Possibly even in the same ships.
So what we need is a third leg for a triangular trade. What could be carried out from Earth to Jupiter?
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[M Fnord]

---

Then the organics are being sold by the rock rats, not the VTP, removing that source of revenue and making the project's survival and future less secure.

---

There's raw carbon, which is very useful even when inorganic. Diamond plate, nanotubes, stuff like that for the next generation of 'wavetech.
Though in the end, I will bow to the necessity of Cool if needs be.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Sirrocco]

had some thoughts about what's where...
- The lagrange points are valuable for Danes, due to the whole "easy stable platform" thing. The only *particular* value they have for fen (who generally have enough grav tech to grab any number of stable points in just about any frame of reference) would be the "hey, they're lagrange points. They're nifty." factor. They are far more valuable to the danes.
- Dane space programs are *expensive* in ways that fen space programs just aren't. Even piggybacking ont he back of local fen to get out of the gravity wells and such, there are enormous economic disincentives to trying to stay 'wave-free. If it's a purely commercial venture, like mining, then there's simply no way that a company that refuses to use handwavium can compete with one made of Fen - or even one that hires Fen. At this point, if a country doesn't have a serious space program to start with, then they'll never grab one - there's simply no advantage to doing it with hardtech that could possibly be worth the startup costs.
- Specifically, the advantages to having your own hardtech presence in space, rather than using Fen contractors or equivalents come down to reliabiity and trust. Reliability because it is possible to know exactly what your equipment will do. Trust because they're *your* people, rather than anyone else's. The reliability advantage means that we'll be having hardtech satellites (lifted by handwave lift assets) in orbit for quite a while to come, and that there are good and sufficient reasons to have ongoing hardtech labs in space. The trust advantage means that you'll still have consulates and embassies and the like in some of the major pop centers - because for those, you want people who've had long, established careers already, and that pretty much means 'Danes. On the other hand, just about any country out there that has open borders and decent living conditions can manage to scrape up some folks who'd be interested in going into space but would still feel a fair bit of loyalty to the old homeland when they got there. They exist, and in larger numbers than you might think. Also, a fair number of fen have pretty strong senses of honor, and decent senses of pragmatism. You find the right kids in High school, offer them enough money to put them through college debt-free and/or set themselves up with a ship afterwards, and in return they promise to act as an information source while they're up there (or some such) (with ongoing payments as appropriate so they don't get resentful).
Money is precious in Danespace, and hardtech footprints in space are expensive enough theat they'll only really have them where they need them.
- image: a random fen with a humorous streak who goes around doping existing satellites with handwavium just to see what they do. Not that he'll be able to keep it up *forever*, but...
Oh - and another group that'll be in Fenspace: migrant workers. As soon as it becomes known that Fenspace is a decent place for people who can work hard to make money, there will be dedicated folks from poor countries heading into space for jobs, and regularly wiring money home.
Of course, those guys fit in *easily*. It's the *refugees* that you're going to have issues with. Mind you, it may not happen right now - or even soon, but eventually a few of those refugees fleeing on a boat are going to start fleeing up - and they may not have much of a plan on how to survive once they get up there.
Also... to what degree has the average Australian embraced handwavium?

[drakensis]

transferred
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[M Fnord]

I think we've been sliding away from one of the core premises in the OP.
That is, the mundanes aren't interested in space.
And why should they be? It's not like there's life or anything out there. There's metal and ice and rock, maybe that's useful to somebody but it's not like there isn't metal and ice and rock on Earth just as much.
Besides, look at the people who go into space. They're all freaks and geeks and nerds, anarchists and communists and terrorists, oh my. Not the sort of folk decent people mingle with, oh no. Buying their trinkets is one thing, maybe going on holiday to Port Luna or Phobos, get your picture taken with the natives, but living up there? Surely you jest!
You see where I'm going? The 'danelaw isn't interested in space; not enough to fund mines on Mercury or habitats at the Lagrange points or anything like that. They're focused on Earth. They'll have satellites in orbit, embassies or even a small moonbase, some representation on the Island, a military base at L4 but beyond that they don't see the rest of the Solar System as their concern.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"