01-11-2019, 06:19 AM | #61 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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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. 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.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 01-11-2019 at 06:23 AM. |
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01-11-2019, 06:25 AM | #62 |
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Luxembourg
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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. Last edited by Celjabba; 01-11-2019 at 06:30 AM. |
01-11-2019, 06:27 AM | #63 | ||||
Banned
Join Date: May 2017
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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The citizens will love it. Last edited by Alonsua; 01-11-2019 at 06:44 AM. |
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01-11-2019, 06:40 AM | #64 | |
Banned
Join Date: May 2017
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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Last edited by Alonsua; 01-11-2019 at 06:43 AM. |
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01-11-2019, 07:06 AM | #65 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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.
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The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. |
01-11-2019, 07:41 AM | #66 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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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.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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01-11-2019, 07:54 AM | #67 |
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Ronneby, Sweden
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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. |
01-11-2019, 08:01 AM | #68 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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.
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01-11-2019, 08:03 AM | #69 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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?
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
01-11-2019, 08:08 AM | #70 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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