From: Jinxie (Jinx999@hotmail.vega.fen)
To: Operation FIREFALL Mailing List (firefall@sovietairforce.fen)
Date: November 23, 2016
Subj: [FIREFALL] Re:Economics
Just to clarify. I was referring to large scale trade - the kind of thing with serious economic impact or for enough equipment to upgrade more than a tiny amount of their military. They can easily sell enough stuff to buy a load of books and enough guns to reverse engineer.
Speaking of which, I've had a couple of offers from people who think it'd be really original to smuggle some AK47's into the CSA. (Just because I hang around with the brown coats and run a tramp freighter, that does not mean I'm a smuggler, OK.) I told them that a) it would take only a few months to reverse engineer them and maybe a year to start large scale production with WWII tech and b) Fenspace needs a co-ordinated approach and they should go through the Con.
Oh - we're going to be REALLY alien and pretty disgusting to these people. For a start, a lot of us are OK with "sodomy" of all things, let alone "miscegenation". We don't blink at wearing clothes in public that prostitutes wouldn't wear in private. We would NOT have what they consider proper manners. We'd just be familiar enough that the differences would stand out, not what we'd have in common - basically the uncanny valley effect. Frankly, we're sufficiently nasty to their sensibilities that if we aren't careful and professional about this, we could end up with a US/CSA alliance against us, with a mutual horror of anything that might lead to them becoming like us.
To: Operation FIREFALL Mailing List (firefall@sovietairforce.fen)
Date: November 23, 2016
Subj: [FIREFALL] Re:Economics
Just to clarify. I was referring to large scale trade - the kind of thing with serious economic impact or for enough equipment to upgrade more than a tiny amount of their military. They can easily sell enough stuff to buy a load of books and enough guns to reverse engineer.
Speaking of which, I've had a couple of offers from people who think it'd be really original to smuggle some AK47's into the CSA. (Just because I hang around with the brown coats and run a tramp freighter, that does not mean I'm a smuggler, OK.) I told them that a) it would take only a few months to reverse engineer them and maybe a year to start large scale production with WWII tech and b) Fenspace needs a co-ordinated approach and they should go through the Con.
Oh - we're going to be REALLY alien and pretty disgusting to these people. For a start, a lot of us are OK with "sodomy" of all things, let alone "miscegenation". We don't blink at wearing clothes in public that prostitutes wouldn't wear in private. We would NOT have what they consider proper manners. We'd just be familiar enough that the differences would stand out, not what we'd have in common - basically the uncanny valley effect. Frankly, we're sufficiently nasty to their sensibilities that if we aren't careful and professional about this, we could end up with a US/CSA alliance against us, with a mutual horror of anything that might lead to them becoming like us.