BAFH Cruft and Stuff

The first Lunar Colony was put in place as a low-G research space and has since become something of a tourist destination with new tunnels and housing being dug so often that sometimes the environmental plant gets a bit testy. But the corporations that put it there don't really care - all they care about is the money that it generates for them. And boy, does it ever generate money - one of my targets was an accountant for Davidson Biosciences and their stake in the colony pulls in about 2 billion nuyen a quarter. Note: Unless you are willing to do things silently and make it look like something other than what it is, don't take an assassination job where the target is in the colony - sound carries through lunar basalt too well and the environmental plant doesn't handle the smell of gunpowder all that well.

The L5 colonies are the center of activity for the asteroid mining that goes on. Looking like little more than large cylinders they fill the area with kilometers of open space between them. Housing large populations complete with families they are considered the safest and most crime free places to live. Complete with zero-G research and production facilities they do make money for the Corporations that own them, but not so much to give them a good police force. However... The port controls on them make getting weapons onto a colony a problem - so you're left needing to acquire materials on-site for any jobs that target people on an L5 colony.

The asteroid colonies are rather rough places - and inaccessible unless you're employed as a deep-space miner by the Corporations. No job targeting a miner can be completed unless you're willing to "borrow" a hauler and get your ass out there the old-fashioned way.

Transport to any of the colonies is done via one of three methods - chemical rockets (these are cheap but don't have a lot of payload capacity), ION/VASIMIR thruster driven sleds after a hypersonic orbital transfer or the new Nuclear jobs that use jets of gaseous metal heated by a powerful pile. Of the three the chemical rocket is the cheapest choice, but the ride is horrendously noisy and sensitive equipment might not survive the vibrations of launch. The VASIMIR thruster driven sleds are used for orbital transfers and movement between colonies - the latest versions can give a steady .2G thrust and are excellent work-horses, but anything using them generally uses their lower-thrust modes and hence it takes hours to get anywhere. Now the new nuclear jobs are never used near the earth or L5 colonies, but are used from Lunar Orbit to transport things to and from the asteroid colonies. They are extremely powerful - I have seen reports of one that managed 7 G's of sustained thrust during its testing.

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