OOC : In the Shadows Options

[IanW]

OK, Thisfox and Noll have completed characters to the GMs satisfaction, so Im kicking the game off.

This is the thread for OOC things, dice rolling and so on.

[IanW]

Brief notes on the economy of Seattle and it's Fringe

In my 2050, Seattle is not yet the main port for Tir Tairngire. It is a UCAS outpost, surrounded by unfriendly NAN.

It has a couple of million people in the legal parts of the Metroplex, and a couple of million in the Barrens, and they need to make a living.

First of all, the UCAS military spends some money there.

Secondly, its a Freeport, and it's the main port for the Cascade Crow and Cascade Orks. So if some Cascade Ork rancher are selling, say, 5000 head of live bighorn sheep for sale to Japan or somewhere, some of that money will stay in Seattle.

Thirdly, bonded cargos.

A cargo going into the NAN needs to be opened, checked, and have the medicine man recoil in horror from what he finds.

A bonded cargo going through the NAN is just passing through, so doesnt need to be opened - it just needs to have the seals checked, so whatever horror that the white man is poisoning Mother Earth with stays inside.

Therefore, MCT or whoever imports the cargo into UCAS territory in Seattle, bonds it for shipment through the NAN and opens it when its off the train and back in the UCAS.

Yes, you could send the ship through the Panama Canal, but following Operation Reciprocity in 2048, Aztlan is doing surprisingly *cough* little *cough* to stop maritime piracy in the Carribean, and good naval security is expensive.

Finally, the Barrens has more manufacturing than you'd think.

At the high end, if you want to do some illegal work involving, say, violation of Corporate Court recognised patents, then you'd like to do it somewhere deniable ... so you do the work in Redmond, and when you've made the 200 liters of expensively bioengineered Fac-9 bacteria, or whatever, you slip the can into a Bonded Shipment from the Sioux Nation, replacing another similar can of not-patented Fac-6 bugs. Ta-da, two layers of deniability, so even if Saeder-Krupp do find you're using a copy of their work, you've got a valid paper trail that will stand up under Truth spells that starts with a company you provably dont own in the Souix Nation provably selling you bacteria they provably bioengineered.

At the low end, if you want to build, say, ripoffs of AK97s, well, Puyallup has everything you need ... and a dwarf you can build you a cyberdeck could certainly turn his talents to laser sights. Theres more than one Combat Mage who's kissed her allegedly factory-built AFK97 as she Assenses it's the astral signature and said with a smile 'A human built this'.

In the big picture, some of the credits from all of these things leak out, and begins to circulate.