Privateer: Many star nations find potentially-disavowable and/or privately funded (i.e. Private Military Contractors) commerce raiders and other semi-official means of making war useful enough that letters of marque issued to shipborne mercenaries are still a standard part of the military toolbox in and near the Worlds.
When you think filk, you also think folk. Or I do, anyway. And recently, when I think folk, it’s been because my random writing music playlist has been bringing up Barrett’s Privateers more often than one might expect. (If you don’t know the song, you can hear
War for Fun and Profit: Mostly averted; the major arms manufacturers can make just as much money, what with upgrades, exercises, and replacements, from the peacetime market, especially once ongoing Space Cold Wars and loss-of-inventory-due-to-privateers-and-military-risks premiums have to be factored into the equation. And the usual run of security companies,
grubby shoot: military (primarily mercenary) slang for a mission or contract which pits them against a sufficiently low-tech opponent (q.v. grubby, slang for low-tech locals) that the conflict is hopelessly one-sided and victory requires little or no effort. Reputable mercenaries and regular military units tend to loathe grubby shoots,
The Habtech’s Peace referred originally to an agreement brokered between the various mercenary companies engaged on each side during the months of drift-habitat fighting that characterized the latter phase of the Black Web War, and continues to refer to similar agreements (again, usually between mercenary groups) up to the
“Listen up, you bastards! For the rookies and anyone who’s conveniently forgotten how we do this, here are the rules. Official loot – anything the client or the skipper wants – goes in the BLUE crates. Other loot of military value, in the GREEN crates. Plunder, in the YELLOW crates for
Have a random selection of answers to old questions and comments that came up while I was clearing out my e-mail: In our world, there is a Spanish proverb that runs: Ladrón que roba a ladrón tiene cien años de perdón (memorably quoted in translation by the villian of The
(Okay, so I found one more…) Names to Run Away From Really Fast: In the Imperial context alone, Imperial Hand, Fifth Directorate, and any Imperial military officer, agent, or private contractor whose House name is “Sargas” are the chief contenders. In the Worlds as a whole, Operatives of the Conclave
So why is that a Trope-a-No-Longer-Day, I hear you cry? Well, because I’ve run out of pre-written ones, and the demands on my time these days are such that – especially if I want to keep prioritizing writing at all – I can’t take enough time out to go through
Creepy Cleanliness: To more than a few foreign visitors, yes. As William Gibson said in Disneyland With the Death Penalty, “Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it? Singapore’s airport, the Changi Airtropolis, seemed to
Real Money Trade: The problem is that it’s hard to define what qualifies as “real money” versus “game money” when the Mythic Stars MMO alone has an internal economy bigger than some respectably-sized planets. The logical consequences of this apply in full, including the follow-up to the city guards