Trope-a-Day: Courier

Courier: Once common, taking messages everywhere in the planetary Empire where routine caravans didn’t run. Still common today doing the same job on a rather larger scale, because there are lots of exclaves, small colonies and outposts that aren’t regularly visited by anyone in particular, and while the extranet can get a message there, it can’t get some types of physical goods – those which can’t be sent as a recipe and reconstructed at the far end for whatever reason – there. (And also because certain very-high-security data is, by intelligence organizations of appropriate paranoia – never entrusted to any device connected to the extranet, and thus has to be hand-carried wherever it’s going.)

And since they travel through lightly populated or unpopulated regions, often alone, bearing goods of high value… why, yes, they do tend to be notoriously badass.

One thought on “Trope-a-Day: Courier

  1. Not to mention those moments when to keep up with your competitors, you need to cooperate with an expert from elsewhere in designing and making something. If that thing is something you want to keep from the extranet… then you’ll have to have a mobile meeting point where you can work on your own designs to save time, whilst you make your way to that individual. You’ll need raw materials to make working prototypes, and thus you’ll be lugging that around as well (yes you could take a small and faster personal craft to get there sooner, but then you can’t work on practical designs with raw materials to test your preliminary theories prior to the meeting can you?).

    Voila! Even in an era where almost everything is transmitted as a 3d printer recipe, you’ll still need large space freightors/factory-lab ships for those innovators and entrepreneurs that want to cooperate with experts in other systems.

Comments are closed.