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Voyager I posted:The first post of the LP does raise a rather poignant issue with the knight-errant picture of mercenaries in the MechWarrior universe. Even the smallest, most basic battlmechs represent substantial amounts of wealth for a private owner, they retain value very well (until they explode), and they have a healthy market. Even if you're like the character in the LP and you're too ambitious to cash out on your Commando and be merely comfortable without ever working again in your life; it's still enough money that you could start up a business where you aren't always one bad break from destitution or death, especially since being a Mech pilot is uncomfortable work that can come with all the usual hardships of being a soldier on campaign. The first rule of mercenary work is that you can't spend the money if you're dead and it seems like you'd pretty quickly hit the point where you're rich enough that you don't need to do this poo poo anymore unless you have truly opulent taste and no sense of self-preservation. I've never read a book set in the MW universe, but I imagine they solve this issue the same way we do now: Underwriting. The gist of it is that you solicit investment in your venture, which has some amount of risk and possible reward. The investors pony up capital with the expectation that they will take a cut of the result. You might say, "hey Bozart, who has that kind of space bucks that they can absorb having an entire lance blowed up?" The thing is, they wouldn't have to absorb the whole cost. They might invest only 1% of the cost of hiring (and insuring!) a particular lance of mercs. They can do the same thing in 99 other lances, each of which would be performing unrelated, independent missions, and they would have diversified enough that the risk of all 100 getting "blowed up" would be extraordinarily low. If the profits from the successful missions exceed the losses in the other ones, then they've come out ahead, yay! Of course, why would you tie up all of that money anyway? Instead, you'd take a loan from 1st Interstellar Space Bank, and as long as the cost of servicing the debt was lower than the expected return from your 100 merc ventures, you would still be coming out ahead, and you wouldn't need to line up nearly as many investors to do it (or rather, you've substituted the bank in place of the investors, but this way you don't have to deal with a bunch of other equity holders). Alternatively, you could IPO on the Neo New York Stock Exchange as Mercs R' Us (MRU) and own a bunch of merc outfits outright (or lease them...) and directly control their activities. You might want to do that if you thought you could gain something by coordinating them. For instance, scheduling and O&M would almost certainly be more efficient, which would allow you to collect more profit from offering them into a particular merc contract. You could expect that over time corporations like this would drive small outfits out of business. Honestly, you'd expect merc outfits to merge on their own due to this pressure. But hey, giant iron space shooty mans doesn't have to be realistic! 
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Sep 29, 2014 18:10
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PoptartsNinja posted:They're all available* at BattleCorps, for a monthly subscription fee. They've also got short stories written by various BattleTech authors (including a few by me!) Well, I hope your next one will include the subprime 'Mech space bubble.
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Sep 30, 2014 04:09
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Fwashman 2A
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Oct 2, 2014 02:58
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PoptartsNinja posted:I was working on the next update but someone broke my front windshield. So now I get to talk to my insurance company rather than talking to Audacity. Hooray. I think you should record the conversation and then use it as commentary over MW2. There's got to be mech geico.
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Oct 10, 2014 02:37
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