Comment my megacorporation

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

I do not think it's so difficult to place dozens of android employees here and there who secretly have much superior combat capabilities than it seems. 0.336 km2 would store them all.

Heh. Do you know how many people are involved, all over the world, in making a simple pen or pencil?

Storing the androids is the least of your problems. Making them will be impossible to do without millions of people knowing about your secrets.

Not to mention that soldiers, android and living, are not particulaliry significant to winning a modern war. What about infrastructure?

Where are you hiding aircraft carriers, fleets, ports, airfields, stealth bombers, fighter planes, SAM sites and the massive logistical network needed to get ordnance and supplies to where the fighting will be?

It doesn't matter how fearsome the androids if your entire megacorporation is destroyed with air strikes, missiles and bombardment because you didn't have hardened, defensible bases with defence in depth and a worldwide logistics network to supply. And no, having a civilian, commercial logistical division doesn't replace having a military one. Different capabilities are needed and intelligence and security services will spot a difference, if only because corporate warehouses at commercial ports look nothing like the massive port facilities needed for aircraft carriers.

Your attempt to shoehorn having a secret military that can conquer the world into a trait meant to represent maybe one illegal experimental program that's a miniscule fraction of the total activity of an organisation is like trying to argue that the existence of secret compartments should allow concealing a Mack truck in your lunch box.

Originally Posted by Alonsua

The effective exercise of the antitrust law in these circumstances seems to me at least undesirable for any country involved.

You're right. If there is even the slightest suspicion that they are not actually an ordinary corporation motivated by profit concerns, but are actually working on an army powerful enough to fight WWIII, any rational state actor will seek the utter destruction of SuperVillains Co. instead of bothering with legalities. Expect to stealth bombs to follow if the first attempt to arrest the leadership is actually repulsed by illegal military hardware.

[Celjabba]

No-one deny that if you are the only one with a decent size TL11 army, you can crush any TL8 army.

BUT in order to have that army (and everything it implies), you need to build it first - which means money, labs, factories, training, workforce, time.

You cannot use your army-of-doom to grab the ressources you would need to build your army-of-doom.

So, either you handwave having seized a country back when it was easy (ie, before WW1 or thereabout) or in modern time you start small and out of the way and pray you can hide what you are doing long enough that when someone realize what you are, you have become too dangerous too obliterate/have evolved enough diplomatic ties to convince other nations to let you live.

Either way, we are as stated above in comic book territory regarding economy and politics.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Heh. Do you know how many people are involved, all over the world, in making a simple pen?

Come on. By TL10 you have biofabs and robofacs.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Where are you hiding aircraft carriers, fleets, ports, airfields, stealth bombers, fighter planes, SAM sites and the massive logistical network needed to get ordnance and supplies to where the fighting will be?

Steal them with Skynet if they are willing to wage war over the Antarctica.

Originally Posted by Icelander

It doesn't matter how fearsome the androids if your entire megacorporation is destroyed with air strikes, missiles and bombardment... You're right. If there is even the slightest suspicion that they are not actually an ordinary corporation motivated by profit concerns, but are actually working on an army powerful enough to fight WWIII, any rational state actor will seek the utter destruction of SuperVillains Co. instead of bothering with legalities. Expect to stealth bombs to follow if the first attempt to arrest the leadership is actually repulsed by illegal military hardware.

The infantry is the key to winning wars, and can occupy spaces very easily, even more so if we take into account that the androids do not need to feed, which facilitate logistics enormously. Add biological warfare on top right there.

The government bombs Detroit to prevent the birth of a new nation on a piece of useless ice.

The citizens will love it.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

... or in modern time you start small and out of the way and pray you can hide what you are doing long enough that when someone realize what you are, you have become too dangerous too obliterate/have evolved enough diplomatic ties to convince other nations to let you live.

Those are the keys. Biological warfare also helps by TL10/11.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

Come on. By TL10 you have biofabs and robofacs.

Yes. And once you start selling androids built with them, nation-states and corporations will start trying to get their people hired by your company. When they find out that you can change their people's loyalty relatively readily, you'll become an existential threat on those grounds alone.

You need space, money, people and materials to build your biofabs and robofacs, and the only place to get them on Earth is from the planetary economy. This leaves traces, and lots of people track events in the economy, because doing so allows profit.

Your scheme might work better if you did it off Earth, by asteroid mining.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

According to Mass Combat each 1$ invested by the corporation in defense would contest $4 invested by the NATO countries. Maximum military budget would be 100.8 billion dollars (before the merger, each company would be worth about 200 billion dollars and able to contribute 25.2 billion dollars to the shared effort), for which NATO would require 403.2 billion dollars for a 50% probability of success.

You're ignoring the time factor. Money doesn't just instantly and magically turn into military capability. If you're working on it, there will be a period of time before you have built it, but after it has become visible that you are doing so. Consider the pressures that have been applied to North Korea.

And on one hand, North Korea is already a sovereign state; however awkwardly, it fits into the international system of states. You are looking at a non-state actor attempting to shove its way in. Existing states are jealous of membership in their exclusive club; the resistance will be much greater.

On the other hand, your organization is a business corporation. Its very survival depends on having a steady flow of income from economic transactions with organizations in other states. That's very different from a tiny, poor, and economically isolated entity such as North Korea, which can keep things secret by having boundaries through which nothing passes. Every purchase an organization makes provides information to the world. And you cannot accumulate vast economic resources without buying and selling.

[Bengt]

Anti trust laws apply to every country or region (e.g. EU) you want to operate in. So even if you bribe/buy/coup some **** pot little country and place your HQ there you can't do business with any major markets if you don't comply with their laws.

I think this magecorp idea would be more plausible if they are secretly a megacorp. Officially they are all separate companies that play at competing with each other. Various agencies may suspect something is up, but they haven't been able to prove anything, yet...

For space assets I think you can get pretty far with Virgin Galactic like front and send up stuff in orbit under the guise of commercial satellites from fake companies you control. You wont be able to assemble big stuff in orbit of course, like a space station, for that I think faking asteroid mining is the way to go. You can send lots of probes and publicly you are just trying to get mining going and you are sure it will be profitable Real Soon Now.

[AlexanderHowl]

If such a corporation ended up taking over Antarctica, the permanent members of the Security Council would probably just nuke it out of existence (it would be a simple matter of getting UN approval as soon as the threat became apparent). I doubt that your androids are going to do well against the EMP of the first wave of nukes, which will blind sensors against the second and third wave of nukes). A fraction of the nukes of the USA and Russia, no more than 90, would probably annihilate every trace of the corporation from Antarctica and be considered well worth the expense. Better that no one gets the technology than having the other side get the technology. Plus everyone involved gets to field test their nukes, so there are plenty of happy generals and content scientists.

[whswhs]

An organization that has Enemy (Worldwide media) almost certainly is not also going to have Reputation +2. It's the worldwide media that mostly shape an entity's Reputation in our society.

What is the favorable Reputation meant to be FOR? You can have +2 for "carries out his promises" or for "charitable activities" or for "highly successful entrepreneur"; those will apply in different cases. And who does the Reputation apply WITH? Everyone? Some specific group?

[whswhs]

It makes no sense for the same personnel to have both a Sense of Duty and an involuntary Duty. The Sense of Duty makes the involuntary Duty unnecessary; the involuntary Duty is likely to imperil the Sense of Duty, as people don't usually care about those who control them with threats and coercion.