• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

InStarSpec (minor spoilers, I guess)

Allensh

SOC-12
InStarSpec is listed as being the corporation which has a field office in the Alenzar system in Double Adventure 5: The Chamax Plague. While doing some research, I came upon another mention of InStarSpec...in the Mileau 0 Campaign! They are listed as weapons manufacturers! Is this actually the same corporation? I assumed InStarSpec was a mining operation but I went back and looked and I'm not sure it actually says that.

Allen
 
Like many current-day megacorps, I suspect it is a diversified company, with branches in many different fields and locations.

An example from the last century is Krupp... Primarily a steel manufacturer, they were started in 1587 when Arndt Krupp (a trader in Essen, Germany) purchased a large number of "gardens & pastures" from the families of victims of the bubonic plague.

His son married the daughter of a gunsmith, and joined his in-law's business.

By a little over 300 years later, Krupp produced rails and rolling stock*, household goods, cannon, guns, ships, machinery of all sorts, and mined their own coal & iron (from mines throughout Europe, Scandanavia, and into Africa). It ran chemical laboratories and financed inventors... Rudolf Diesel got the money (and facilities) to perfect the diesel engine from Krupp.

In the company-built (and owned) towns for its 43,000+ (1890) workers, Krupp owned & ran a police force, fire department, schools, hospitals, retirement homes, a separate telephone system linked into the national grid, and all industries needed to feed, clothe, etc. those workers & their families... all staffed by Krupp employees.


* Despite their justifiable reputation as arms manufacturers, Krupp's first product to see large-scale success, and the one which catapulted them into the forefront of the world's steel manufacturers (and paid for their large-scale tooling-up for arms manufacturer) was wheels & axles for rail cars... first displayed at the 1854 Munich Industrial Fair, the stunning success of which (15,000 per year by 1860) is commemorated in their corporate symbol of 3 interlocked circles (wheels).




Someone from another country who encountered Krupp in one of those other guises might think that that is all they did, but they would be wrong.

After all, that's why they call them "Mega-Corps". :p
 
InStarSpec is listed as being the corporation which has a field office in the Alenzar system in Double Adventure 5: The Chamax Plague. While doing some research, I came upon another mention of InStarSpec...in the Mileau 0 Campaign! They are listed as weapons manufacturers! Is this actually the same corporation? I assumed InStarSpec was a mining operation but I went back and looked and I'm not sure it actually says that.
The M0 InStarSpec is said to be positioned (?) to become the premier weapons dealer, broker and manufacturer in the Imperium. Since it isn't a megacorporation in 1100, it probably came to a bad end, possibly in competition with Instellarms. There's no real reason why the CT InStarSpec has to be related to the M0 one and some reason (like the distance between Core and Alenzar) to think it isn't.


Hans
 
Back
Top