Just what it says...
Part of me says "Oh that's just so WRONG!" and the other part just rolls on the ground unable to breath!!
(I seriously wouldn't worry too much about the squirrel. They survive falls out of taller trees on a regular basis. The square-cube law works in their favor.)-Logan
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"Wake up! Time for SCIENCE!"
-Adam Savage
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As some of you know, Hallowe'en is a major holiday in our house.
And only in our house could one wake up in the morning, reach into the fridge and find this:

The crime trifecta, which is to say the three most profitable criminal enterprises, are Guns, Drugs, and Slaves (personally I think that corporate malfeasance should be there as well but it's not sexy as guns, drugs and slaves).
Now how do these three things interact with Fenspace, which is an essentially (because it's unenforcable [until Operation . . . uh something Justice presumably]) lawless area (libertarian, if you're feeling charitable and all-frontiery)?
Presumably this means that the import and export of pharmaceuticals (which includes alcoholic beverages, by the way) both to and within Fenspace would be unregulated and thus not technically illegal. If Chris Rock has taught us nothing, it's that people are geniuses when it comes to finding ways to f*ck themselves up.
So while the export from fenspace to Earth of controlled substances would be monitored, it's almost impossible to control the drug trafficking there.
However, it's also not likely that earth-side cartels would get much more than an initial foothold on the fenspace drug market because of two factors: local chemical manufacturing and distance. Fens would have access to their medical and chemical plants far closer than the poppy fields of afghanistan or the coca fields of columbia. Reverse-engineering the plants and recreating them at home or making new designer drugs shouldn't be all that difficult, particularly as the distance between earth-side supplier and fen customer would make the markup astronomical.
Guns, however, would be a large market for Fens. Because of the censor function of handwavium, weapons (other than their own ships, an argument i have made before) would be initially difficult to get and manufacture fenspace-side. So weapons from earth would be a large import.
Personally I think that the governments which allow handwavium launches would also be the ones which sells most of the guns to the fens in bulk. But I suppose enterprising criminals would also fit in there.
So if drugs, the traditional big-ticket item is out for "boskones" then guns would definately be a money maker.
Finally, slaves. This commodity is something that criminals already have a large infrastructure in place (as well as governments, by the way, cf. uzbekistan) and is something that fenspace does not have. Which is to say a very large pool of desperately poor people. A "surplus population" in the words of dickens.
The trafficking of people from Earth into Fenspace would probably also be a large money-maker for criminal elements in fenspace.
Though it must be stressed that because there is no enforcable law they are not strictly criminals. Except of the moral variety.
-murmur
also: fenspace as tax haven, tax shelter, data haven.

... and we'll have our first plugsuits.
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Epsilon

1) Okay, 1.5h to start? WTH? Aren't people running this thing 5x a day?
2) It's actually really frustrating to run this SF with people who have already run it like 20x. I had no idea where I was going, and just had to passively let the 'porters zap me aorund the place.
3) People *massively* underrate Energy Blast, and it's utility in dealing with fliers. "Oh look, it's Numina, and she's flying!" *plink* "Oh look, she hit the ground."
4) Someone explain to me why the 'Future Phalanx' can be split up with some vertical positioning, but we can't do that on the full Phalanx? Did I miss where Back Alley Brawler, Manticore, and Synapse could fly? (And for the record, I *so* want Synapse's movement special effect.)
5) Allowing us to use the Dom to cheapen the Vindicators is lame, especially since you prevent it on the other two mass-AV encounters.
6) I absolutely understand why people say you need the Nuke and the Shivans before doing this SF. We got wiped like 8 times on that last encounter, and eventually gave up.

For the record, our composition:
1 Mind Dom
2 Kineticists (one was idle most of the time, bastard)
2 Thermals
1 Rad (me)
2 Brutes
--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel
"Camaraderie, adventure, and steel on steel. The stuff of legend! Right, Boo?"

...is a must-read for anyone who cares about classic science-fiction. No prior knowledge of this UF is required.
Here's the strip.

-Rob Kelk
"Read Or Die: not so much a title as a way of life." - Justin Palmer, 6 June 2007
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

what are peoples opinions about a TF (or other group get-together) this weekend.
I would prefer sometime Friday/Saturday, but I'm flexible.-Terry
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"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupery
"Luge strategy? Lie flat and try not to die." - Carmen Boyle (Olympic Luge Gold Medal winner - 1996)
Mary Sue's theme music
-Terry
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"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy

Peggy and I are going on vacation on Saturday; we'll be away for a week. I'm hoping to find an internet cafe near where we'll be staying, so I can stay in touch, but failing that I just wanted make folks aware so you don't think I died or anything.

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.

For those of you who haven't been reading the status line at the top of the main page, we're almost done with the chapter.
If all goes well, you might expect to see it sometime early in August.

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.

I thought this up waaaaay back, as a way of having asteroid racing doable within the bounds of human reactions. OGJ-period, it'd likely be going open source.
Basic problem is that stuff happens too fast for people, and some manuvers are likely going to be too tight to maintain consciousness (depending on ships and inertial compensators and whatnot) so something needs doing.
The solution I had in mind is essentially a high-resolution autopilot combined with sensors and computer systems sufficient to (reasonably accurately) predict the motions of stuff in one's flightpath based on velocity vectors.
So how this works is that, say, coming to a stationary assortment of rocks, you program the course through them as far ahead of time as you feel comfortable; computer's going to know how sharply your ship can turn and accelerate and thus what you can and can't do. Then, as you get closer, you continually fine-tune things; maybe some of the rocks are moving and your prior course would take you into them, or from long range your sensors didn't see some of them.
In stereotypical dogfighting, you probably can't do things as far ahead, but with practice and skill one could probably figure things out a few seconds ahead of time. In traditional, non-inertial-compensated craft, the basic idea is that the pilot could sketch out controlled manuvers that have them blacking out but leaving periods in between to adjust tactics and figure out what's next.
Or yeah, we could just leave all of it solely to the AIs, but what fun is that?
(why yes, I am procrastinating working on schoolwork!)