In a Gundamverse, oil is a good bit less important, I'd suspect. Mostly useful for lubricant and plastics production- still very, very important, but you don't need it for power production on much of anything. Can it be synthesized, given the right building blocks and FUSION POWER? If so, you have one or two Earth-based oil drilling companies, and (possibly) one space-based oil creation outfit. Either that, or the process becomes something any ol' chem firm can manage- not sure how I should handle it.
I'm not a chemical expert, so I may want to crib some of it... though Venus? Without 'wavium? Yaright.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
I'm not a chemical expert, so I may want to crib some of it... though Venus? Without 'wavium? Yaright.
Quote:Soylens Fuscus, Ltd.Location: No dedicated colonies, but offices in most colony cylinders, and plants in most of those.Products: Well, it's edible, but would you really trust it? You know where it's been.Founded: 2024Likes: Low-income spacenoids (primary customers), starship manufacturers (SF reprocessing units are installed on lots of ships by default), collectivist regimes (Feeding The People in space)Ambivalent Towards: Ideology, except when it interferes with business.Dislikes: All other food production companies (the competition is violent), environmental/organic ideological groups, SynthPaste (their most direct competitor)Liked By: ...anybody? Anybody?Disliked By: Just about everybody. They're a necessity, not a desired product.Likelihood of Screwing Over Shadowrunners: Yes.
The waste has to go somewhere. This is a universal truth. On land, it can be piped away, but in space? There's not much of anywhere to send it.
Soylens Fuscus started as an Earth sanitation company (under a different name), specializing in reprocessing human waste into clean water and fertilizers. The corporate sovereignty acts of the 2060s led to the founding of hundreds of new settlements across the globe, and the company that would become Soylens Fuscus took the opportunity to expand its customer base. Over the next few decades, they entered into a series of quiet partnerships with various megacorps, expanding across the European continent, and into the Americas.
With the start of the Universal Century, the corporation that would become Soylens Fuscus saw the future... and the future was colonial monopoly. As their partners founded colonies, they naturally followed, only to leverage that experience to land even more contracts with even more colonies. By 2120, the proto-SF had secured exclusive contracts with 34% of all colonies founded at the time.
It was in 2126 when the company's science division made a breakthrough. They had invented a process that could take human waste, both liquid and solid, and reprocess it directly into edible solids and drinkable liquids. The company changed its name to Soylens Fuscus in 2127, began setting up waste conversion plants on a number of colonies, and started to aggressively market its reprocessed foods.
Results were mixed. Even at the low prices SF charged, few people wanted to eat their reprocessed meals. Market research indicated that those who did purchase SF Helpers (tm) were the poorest of the poor- people who had no other way to support themselves. Instead of abandoning the concept of reprocessed foods, the SF executives set their science division a new task- develop a line of SF converters suitable for installation on mass-produced spaceships. In the meantime, SF Helpers (tm) were taken off the market, and retooled into the F-Series of emergency rations.
This approach proved rather more successful. Most major shipwrights signed contracts with SF, integrating their patented AntiStarve emergency ration generators into ships of all sizes from 2129 on. The colonial poor also proved more willing to purchase emergency rations than reprocessed food... despite there being no real difference between the two.
The rise of CCA in the 2130s sent Soylens Fuscus into a slump. Asteroid miners, one of SF's captive customer bases, were thrilled to have fresh... well, fresher... food available to them for reasonable prices. Once they were given the option, SF sales to the asteroid miner population decreased by 95%. Naturally, the SF leadership wasn't about to take this laying down. Instead of improving their product, or reducing the price still further, Soylens Fuscus engaged in a war by proxy, sending bands of mercenaries to disrupt several key CCA farming and distribution centers over the next few years. It wasn't enough to shut them down, but between the repair costs, lost product, and a few lots of tainted product, SF was able to recapture a good chunk of the asteroid miner market from CCA.
Since that time, SF and CCA have been at each other's throats, competing for every market and every contract. It's not a particularly secret war- just about every spacenoid out there knows not to eat CCA food near the local SF plant, and vice versa. They just don't know the full extent of the war. By the late 0030s, CCA had discovered (by capturing and interrogating an SF merc) who was behind the attacks on their property; for the next forty years, the two companies would engage in a bloody war to the knife- a shadow war only ended by the Principality of Zeon in 0079.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.