Posts: 7,138
Threads: 559
Joined: Apr 2003
Reputation:
5
I'm kind of failing on details at the moment, but you just have to have Mobile Oil around in some form, just for the "Mobile suit" puns. I was thinking in vague terms of some kind of general chemical supply corp with a product line ranging from rocket fuel to soda pop to plain old H2O, but meh.
Maybe crib the Venusian CHON trade info from Fenspace?
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Posts: 1,452
Threads: 58
Joined: Apr 2006
Reputation:
0
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.
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.
Posts: 7,138
Threads: 559
Joined: Apr 2003
Reputation:
5
I suspect that neither CCI nor SF are all that thrilled that F-rats work just fine as substrate for FungiMonkey's 4-cubic-decimeter self-contained Hydroponic Mushroom Flat (Fresh and delicious, grow them yourself!) and in fact slightly better than the official stuff due to limitations in working around patented/successfully-kept-secret production processes. But, since spore paste is only sold as part of a kit which includes FM's version of growth medium and using a case of F-rats to replace it means they bought a case of F-rats, combining the two products remains a bit of food service tribal lore that the companies put up with.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Posts: 1,452
Threads: 58
Joined: Apr 2006
Reputation:
0
SF isn't thrilled with that at all. FM doesn't mind it one bit... just that people know about it.
Why do you think their Fungal Gourmet (tm) line tastes better than the standard stock?
Here's the second-to-last of the major food producers, unless I've missed a major niche. Figure that anything else is taken care of by smaller, specialty companies, private farms, and the like. I'm only really covering companies big and rich enough to have their own asteroid bases and/or colony cylinders.
Quote:Demeter AgriculturalLocation: Several colony cylinders. One in Side 1, the others in the business Sides.Products: Wheat, rye, corn, free-range chicken/beef/pork, some fruits and veggies.Founded: 2107Likes: Space colonization (customers), Eurocorp (one of their bigger customers), the Federation government (the higher-ups in their capital like fresh food)Ambivalent Towards: Earth ('nuff said), Space Independence (they like the idea of cutting Earth out of the market, but combat? Nope.), Daikoku (different markets, some collaborative efforts (and a lot of top restaurants contracting both)Dislikes: SynthPaste, Soylens Fuscus, FungiMonkey, CCA (competition), some of the private colonies (for being self-sufficient), OmniConsumer Products (Demeter lost BILLIONS when OCP bought out New Detroit for themselves), UAC Jupiter (it's a long and expensive story)Liked By: Culturally European spacenoids (who can afford fresh food), Kubota-Deere (good customer), Degwin Zabi (the same way a shark likes swimmers- if Zeon wins, DA is up for 'nationalization', read: forced purchase by the Zabi Group)Disliked By: The competition (see 'Dislikes'), UAC Jupiter (the feud is quite mutual)Likelihood of Screwing Over Shadowrunners: Low, unless it'd hurt one of their lower-cost rivals... assuming it's a corporate contract. If it's an individual exec hiring you, all bets are off.
History: DA is, in many ways, a mirror of the Daikoku Group. Both were founded early in the UC as joint ventures, both provide quality foodstuffs to their respective cultures, and both are tightly in bed with their local manufacturing 'corps. The differences start with how they were founded. Daikoku is a creature of the business interests of Japan- it was founded by the 'corps, as a means to an end. Demeter, on the other hand, was a joint project of the European agricultural industry, created to go where the markets were- to space.
Where Daikoku had an easy time getting into space, having the resources of its parent keiretsu to draw upon, Demeter ran into a host of issues. Without industrial sponsors, getting into space was far more expensive; the first Demeter farm cylinder, its base started in 2108, ended up floating, inert, for fourteen months due to lack of funds. Construction resumed in 2110, after the original Demeter founders struck a deal with an American consortium; in return for a 50% share of the company, the American agricorps would provide funding sufficient to finish the cylinder.
Until Persephone Colony opened its doors in UC 0016, most of Side 1's population had been supported by Earth-based agriculture. Its presence was mutually beneficial; the local spacenoids got fresher food for a lower cost, and Demeter got all the business it could handle. It was a net win for the company- sure, 73% of their business came from Demeter investors back on Earth, but cutting the costly orbital lifting and transport out of the equation let the company cut prices and still make quite a bit more profit.
Where Persephone was a marginal success, Isis and Gefjun, located on more distant Sides, proved sizably more lucrative. Their sheer distance from Earth made them captive markets, without competition... until the advent of Soylens Fuscus, CCI, and the later SynthPaste. Profits dropped at that point- not from profitable to not profitable, but from massively profitable to acceptably profitable. Demeter's response was to steal a line from CCI, and turn an asteroid into a farming base. Appropriately enough, they secured the rights to Ceres.
Negotiations with UAC Jupiter... went poorly, to the tune of billions in cargo (and a small flotilla of megafreighters) lost; neither 'corp will admit to what happen, even to this day, but they went from cordial potential partners to sworn enemies. Discussion with Poseidon Helium went significantly more smoothly, and DA secured another steady stream of income.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
Posts: 7,138
Threads: 559
Joined: Apr 2003
Reputation:
5
The major public relations initiative pursued by FungiMonkey is the Copernicus Hosting Environment for Extraterrestrial Scientific Experiments, aka The CHEESE Station. This small, wheel-type installation has a dozen laboratory sections with completely isolated environments, which can actually be detached in quesa emergency, and are leased to various groups wanting to do research off-world but unable to afford orbital facilities of their own. It is best known, however, for the one that is dedicated to hosting field trip groups from various (high-end) schools, performing procedures designed by their members or other school-aged children, the feeds from which are around half of a 24-hour video stream, the remainder being made up of cooking shows and commercials for products from other members of FungiMonkey's parent megacorp. The CHEESE Station video stream is rated #14 among non-fiction, non-sexual streams according to CCI's market research.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Posts: 1,452
Threads: 58
Joined: Apr 2006
Reputation:
0
I see what you did there. Getting a bit punny?
So it's a cold-hearted PR move on the part of FM, right? Don't tell me they're also the ones who produce the Kerbal Space Program educational cartoon series. That'd be too much.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
Posts: 7,138
Threads: 559
Joined: Apr 2003
Reputation:
5
Their company mascot is a cartoon monkey, riding a cow as it jumps over the moon. FungiMonkey's public image is VERY family- and kid-friendly, even if their attitude toward outside shadowrunners (note that this does NOT include their own employees nor CCI Black Ops) is that they're chum that doesn't need a bucket because it walks on its own. As such, the stinker of a name for the station was indeed a calculated marketing decision after getting a look at the wheel design with its wedge-shaped, self contained lab modules, and the concepts curdled from there. Management was skeptical at first, but it grew on them after a few focus group studies - turning a potentially controversial setup designed from the outset to facilitate the kind of research where if something goes wrong you cut the whole lab/dorm free and use robots to push it into the sun staff and all into a positive PR asset by making it too ridiculous to get worked up over has proven successful and quite profitable.
Segments have had to be disposed of only four times, twice for bio-weapons that escaped the inner containment (one air-transmissible, organics-eating strain of a silicon-based bacteria analogue, the other a human-preferring variant on Mad Cow disease) once for an unrestrained AI robot that started killing the researchers, and most damagingly for a Grey Goo incident that also managed to infect one of the adjacent modules, requiring both to be jettisoned and "towed away for decontamination and reclamation" - which is to say, decontamination by fusion-induced plasma and radiation and reclamation in a solar furnace the like of that which originally produced their atoms. The reparations to be paid for jettisoning the unrelated module that had been contaminated by grey goo would have made for a rather tight quarter for FungiMonkey had CCI not bought out the lessor company to headhunt their staff into various branches and bury the incident.
Naturally, some pains are taken to put less volatile projects on either side of the field trip science module.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Posts: 1,452
Threads: 58
Joined: Apr 2006
Reputation:
0
So I've not forgotten about this idea. I have, in fact, been spending my free time marathoning UC Gundam... mostly while playing Gihren's Greed. It's been giving me no end of ideas, which needed to be put in order.
So I think I'm going to change gears. I'll get back to individual 'corps later; for now, I'm going to develop the setting a bit more, starting with Earth.
Earth is a shadow of what it once was. The megacorps have long since moved their operations off-planet, taking their employees with them; as a result, the planetary population has shrunk from an approximate ten billion in UC 0001, to a mere two billion as of UC 0079. The remaining megacorp presence is barely sufficient to be called a token; most of it consists of vacation estates for the elite, a few stores catering to the earthnoid population, and the guard forces necessary to secure both.
With the departure of the megacorps, Earth was thrown into chaos. Imagine what would happen if your government- and four out of every five people in your country- simply left. That's essentially what happened, albeit over the space of multiple decades, planetwide.
The remnants of Earth's old governments, the nation-states, came back into the picture at this point. Funded and led by old, rich political families, governments began to coalesce. Order began to be restored- first within old national borders, and then outside of them, as viable governments stepped into areas that failed to recover on their own. When the dust settled, there were ten governments ruling the world between them.
The new Earth governments... aren't really that 'new'. When the 'corps went to space, all the old elites, the ones displaced during the war? They came right back, picked up the pieces, and got back to ruling the world... powerful as ever, and far more bitter.
Case in point? Jaburo, the greatest military base ever constructed. Built underground, so that the 'corps couldn't find it, and can't bomb it from space. Mobile, self-sufficient, and capable of creating weapons at a frightening rate- that way, corporate forces can't pin it down, can't starve it out, and can't attrite it down. Jaburo is the key to Earth, and its ace in the hole against the spacenoid megacorps.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
Posts: 1,452
Threads: 58
Joined: Apr 2006
Reputation:
0
Wow. Been a while. I blame other projects and my new job- five months old yesterday!
In that time, I've watched the vast majority of Gundam. I've played the games. This idea- UC Gundam, based off a cyberpunk Earth- still strikes me as worthy of being told... but it's just a tiny bit huge for me. If I want to see it done justice, I'll need to get people writing it with me- omake, stories in the setting, or something- and that means getting interest .
So I'm going back to basics. I'm rewriting my original idea into something less expository and more fic-ish. Hopefully, I can get it polished a bit, maybe even get it out of beta, and then get a good story thread going from there- so please! Comment! Let me know how I can make this better!
**********
Why now? Spirit, why did it have to happen now?"Hey!" I looked up, right into a pair of mischievous blue eyes and a sea of neon-pink hair. Sara. Of course it'd be her. She never lets me brood in peace. "No time to mope, sis! Cap says we launch in two minutes!"
Despite myself, her attitude rubbed off on me. I found myself quirking a grin as I stood up and checked my seals. "Acknowledged." I pushed off, floating over to the gear locker. Didn't take long to grab my kit for the job- my best shock knuckles, a collapsible sword, some grenades- and make my way through the cramped room towards the airlock. Sara was already there, of course. Light as it is, my gear doesn't carry itself.
We stood there for a few awkward seconds, boots locked to the deck, staring at the blackness of space through the viewport.
"Hey."
I turned to look at Sara. She looked up at me, uncharacteristically serious.
"Want to talk about it?"
I dithered for a few seconds. "Well... remember what I told you about the bells?"
Sara scrunched her face up in thought. "That's... that family curse thing you told me about, right? The one that hit your mom?"
"And her mother, too." I shifted awkwardly- a hard thing to do in nullgrav. "They're ringing in my head, now."
She opened her mouth to speak... but I held up a hand. "We'll talk about it later." The rest of our party- two men in their own suits- floated up next to us. "Dieter, Redman. Glad you could make it. Ready?"
The taller of the two straightened up, hand snapping up towards a salute... before he realized what he was doing, and lowered his arm abashedly. "Sorry. Old habits." He turned towards the viewport, icy blue eyes looking into the distance. Looks like something personal. Best not to pry. "I would not miss this... not for anything."
Next to him, the other man was sitting on the ground, busily digging through some of the many pockets festooning his suit. Typical. "Redman? Side 3 to Redman!" He jerked upright, dropping the box he'd been fiddling with as he floated up to the roof. "Yes- AH! MY CHIPS!" He dove for the ground again, carefully grabbing the box and the half-dozen memory chips that'd popped out of it when it hit the floor, before stashing it in a pocket. "Yes, Boss! Ready, Boss!"
It took all my patience to stifle a sigh. Why, of all the deckers in the Sphere, did we have to pick THIS one? Thankfully, the pilot cut in at just the right moment.
"Thirty seconds, everyone. Fit your helmets, check your seals, and hold on; we're turning in five!" I grabbed my helmet, fitting it to the rest of my suit, and braced myself.
With equal parts rattling and roaring, thrusters kicked in. Gravity hit us like a sledgehammer, forcing us into the deck. Outside the viewport, the stars drifted downward as our transport spun end-over-end... and then we were being forced up towards the roof as the pilot stopped the spin.
"Twenty seconds!" Behind us, the inner door of the airlock sealed itself.
"Woooooooow! Look at that!"
I settled myself, reacclimating to nullgrav, and looked out the window. So what, Sara? It's just another colony. You've seen one colony, you've seen them all.
"That," spoke up Dieter, a touch of wistfulness in his accented voice, "was once Das Volksrad... my home. Now," he snorted, scorn coloring his words "it is only Zeonic Corp, Laboratory Three." Bitter much? Good motivator.
"Ten seconds! Shut off maglocks!" The room went from quiet, to breezy, to quiet again as the atmosphere was pumped out of it.
"No, it isn't." Dieter and Sara looked over at me quizzically as my transmission reached them. "It's our target- nothing more."
"Braking in three seconds! Opening outer lock!"
With a rumble of machinery- I could feel it through the deck, even in vacuum- the door in front of us opened, exposing us to the vastness of space.
"Braking now!" For a brief moment, I could feel the thrusters engage-
-and then nothing, as the world of the transport fell away. Nothing but the sound of my own breathing and the quiet whirr of my suit's life support. Despite the presence of my team around me, I found myself relaxing.
It was peaceful out there, in a way inside never gets. I relished it for as long as I could.
All too soon- far sooner than I'd've liked- my helmet comp started to beep. A timer- red and blinking in a way I was sure was designed to be impossible to ignore- appeared in my HUD, counting down from 00:30. Time to get back to work. I feathered my suit's thrusters, neatly somersaulting end-over-end, and reached my arms out.
Dieter's hand was there immediately, gripping mine firmly. Sara's smaller hand was there shortly after. Good. Now, to close the circle... I looked up, at the side opposite me... and saw Redman flailing, still upside-down. ...damnit. No comms yet, can't get over there- how do I-
Before I could act, I saw Dieter reach out, grab a flailing arm when it came close enough, and give him a firm spin. Well, that'll get him spun around, but how do you plan to-
Redman spun back around. Through his faceplate, I could see the terror in his eyes- incoherent, unreasoning, animalistic dread- fade, as Dieter clasped his arm on his way back around. Sara followed shortly after, mere seconds before we felt the jerk of our thrusters kicking in, slowing our descent onto the surface of the colony. That's a relief.
**********
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
|
