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Smuggling

Wes

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I notice there's an interest in roleplaying smuggler type characters (e.g. like Han Solo from Star Wars) on Star Army. Which makes me think, maybe we should have a guide for smuggling in Star Army, or at least add a section to the guide for independent characters. Let's start with some assumptions:
  1. Smuggling is kind of like regular cargo transport, but the cargo is illegal, or the taxes on it are enough that people are trying to avoid those.
  2. Stuff gets smuggled because someone wants it and will pay for it, even though it's illegal.
  3. The profit has to be high enough that smugglers are willing to accept the risks.
Although there's a ton of references to smuggling on Star Army, I found there were very little references to that actual stuff being smuggled. So what would actually get smuggled?

Traditionally, it might be stuff like:
  • Weapons
  • Drugs or other banned substances
  • People (e.g. illegal immigration, could also be trafficking such as slaves)
  • Stolen goods (e.g. artwork)
But I would like to get more specific. So I want to know what you guys have for ideas on this.
 
I always imagined that tobacco smuggling was kind of like the first baby step in Yamataian counter-culture. Like, if you wanted to be a gangster, the very first thing you do is go and get some cigarettes. During the brief period that I was running a YNP plot, some of the villains I had lined up were these gangsters that sort of lived off the grid, living in these underground mud tunnel type complexes in the wilderness and running a fake 'underground railroad' scheme. For instance, a Neko might come to them and indicate that she'd like to leave the army with her superpowers intact and basically go become a space pirate or whatever-- and these guys would say "Sure, honey!" and then zap her and disconnect her from PANTHEON, only to sell her into slavery to some Nepleslian crime lord. I think a big heist for them would be to steal equipment to make their own version of the Neko body. Maybe old NMX equipment or just restricted government equipment. And then, these people would sell a Soul Transfer into one of their new bodies. Of course this would sometimes end up being slavery again. And all this has to be gotten off-planet at some point, because you don't want your shiny new body to get picked up by the omnipresent government.

Alternatively, Soul Savior Pods might be a commodity for criminals. Again, for use in creating slaves.

I think there's probably a huge market among Nepleslian crime lords for stolen art or museum peices from Yamatai and Elysia. A lot of these were in the Imperial army ten or twenty years ago, fighting the Elysians. The more 'sophisticated' criminals might want artifacts from worlds they served on, sitting in their penthouse or limousine. I can also imagine some of these guys getting the art just to fit in or show off, perhaps intentionally mistreating it as an insult. Imagine some big shot getting an ancient Elysian ceramic of some kind, something that barely survived the war, and he fills it up with ice uses it to chill his champagne. Or maybe even getting any sort of Yamataian art and using it as an ashtray.
 
I feel like gun running might be a pretty common thing with a lot of anti-Yamatai groups. Seeing as how there is a lot of resent towards the Yamatai, the demand would be pretty high on anything to your basic pew-pew firearms to some WMD made very FAR from most civilization. The real trouble in the weapons market would be trying to supply without getting caught. The Yamis would probably not want these getting to obvious tension spots along their territory so security would probably tight among customs. Using dead drops for small caches of weapons could be probable choice but disastrous if someone else found it first, not to mention probably cost-inefficient and slow. Probably the best choices would be to either have the deal go down between ships and let the buyer figure it out or pray that you can smuggle shipments past customs through hiding it or mislabeling it. There could also be small rings within the star Army logistics who take the shipments and do most of the smuggling themselves for a hefty sum, but I can't quite say it would happen if a most of everyone is extremely loyal to the Empress.
 
Smugglers doesn't always mean people smuggling illegal items. Often it can also mean legal items with high taxes or tariff avoidance. One of the biggest smuggling items of all time was actually Tea along the coast of North America.

I tried to come up with a list of items to smuggle for each race and was only mostly able to boil it down to the following as a sort of setting wide smugglers hold:
-Flammable Herbs (Various)
-Baconburgers (Longpork or otherwise)
-People (")
-Pornography
-Firearms
-Iromakuanhe carpet rugs
-Relic items
-Scavenged Yamataian wreckage (Anti-tamper AM-payloads disabled, of course)

Drugs as we know them IRL are either not illegal, not-marketable, and/or just cheaper to make locally. Art has rarely been explored on SARP so it's profitability and availability was not something I could judge satisfactorily, since arts only value is often what someone is willing to pay for it.
 
Seeing 'Scavenged Yamataian Wreckage' on that list seems right. I feel like any pirate with a custom-built ship would consider a salvaged Aether Shock Array to be the perfect centerpiece to his or her flagship.
 
I think there is a consensus that smuggling is limited to just 'people and plants' for the most part. Items need to not only be illegal and profitable, but they also have to be nearly impossible to make on site.

Weapons:
I'd imagine there is nearly 0 black market for conventional weapons. There's no point in sneaking around to buy them when the nearest Awesomecorp Vending machine will dispense an SMG to anyone. You can even buy power armors, starships, and starship grade weapons on the civilian market.

The black market for Aether-bombs would be fairly small too. Anyone with a high-school diploma and a 12,000ks Hover Car from Origin can convert the Aether power plant into a bomb big enough to wipe out your local senate and much of the surrounding city. The market for 'anti-city-car-bombs' is probably limited to people who don't care that the authorities will come down on them hard after and who don't know how to do it themselves.

There may be a decent market for certain items that are hard to get through normal channels because militarizes don't sell them to civilians. Right now Uso is going to have a hard time replacing the missiles that Errowyn brought with her on her SAoY fighter craft, and she'll probably have to go to the reds. There are also things like NSPs from Yamatai or Moneyshot rifles from Nepleslia that may not be entirely illegal but would certainly be hard for a civllian to get ahold of. The quasi-legality of it makes it more of a grey market.

​
Plants:
Yamatai created a tobacco black market, and making complex things like plants isn't easy for fabricators. It makes sense that there is a grey market for the stuff, since it'd be easy to buy somewhere legal and bring it to Yamatai. Actually smoking it planet side would be hard... though I imagine you can knock on the door of the right starship, go inside, and get a private Yamatai-free-smoking-room to use.
​
People:
The most complex machine that can be built with unskilled labor. You can just buy labor, and prostitution isn't illegal, so it is hard to find a reason for large numbers of people to be black-marketed.

But there is a good reason for small numbers of people. Certain people have governments looking out for them, so there is likely a big amount of black marketry going on smuggling people through high-security check points. To get an NMX named 'frank' onto Nepleslia, Uso cut off his shell, implanted his key organs into cows, snuck the cows through customs, and then put him back together on the other side. (then rebuilt his shell with scrap metal).
​
Software:
Another thing that is illegal, easy to transport, and highly valuable is software, specifically for the ST system. Being able to control your own ST backup would be of big value to certain people. There has been some conversation about this recently and 'not being able to find the law against having multiple bodies' may change this somewhat.​
 
Someday Id love to put together a smuggling organization in SARP, something like what Talon Karrde had in the Star Wars EU where in addition to smuggling goods, he also traded in information.
 
Smuggling is just another form of Enterprise. You have a group of consumers who want to purchase something. What makes it smuggling versus normal commerce is that a government decided that they do not want their people to have access to that something. As we have seen in SARP, gum and tobacco products are illegal in the YSE. You can look at any market we have on earth, weapons, tech products, people, intellectual property, programs, books etc, art, and even porn could all be viable items.

The market is controlled by the level of risk/punishment that a the consumer faces and the risk/punishment for the smuggler.

Using the gum and tobacco example; there is probably a niche market in Yamatai for it, because it is not a major crime. Unlike smuggling a nuclear device.
 
Just a quick note on smuggling arms internationally.

When you're pulling gigs like this, you don't count in single weapons, pistols, rifles, machine guns. You count in boxes of guns, crates of them, even entire shipping containers. Weapons smuggling goes for everything from large scale infantry armaments, missiles and support systems for them, tanks, helicopters, vehicles. Smuggling by single guns is small-fry, but one cannot simply order enough rifles to equip a battalion and not expect somebody to notice, even if the government doesn't care certain competitors may.

As a tangent, always get rid of any company advertising or other identifying features off your utility vehicle before auctioning it off, you never know if a government (or otherwise) agent is in the market to ship it to a warzone.

ai.dailymail.co.uk_i_pix_2014_12_17_241A8A8C00000578_2876735_T6834fad410d1b9e13039e130b0c6db0a.webp

The story of this particular truck is well documented even if I can't recall the whole of it from hand, it's certainly not the largest or most exotic shipment, but it gives an idea on how mundane the process really can be, especially when you're buying dozens of them to move troops around.


A slightly even quicker note on smuggling as an enterprise.

I've stated before that smuggling is not only illegal items, but items which aren't illegal but which certain people either don't want the government knowing they have, or they don't want to pay taxes on them. Intellectual Property heist is less of an act of smuggling and more corporate espionage as insiders a brought out and paid for to simply pick up a briefcase with a copy of the plans to foreign countries, or sometimes are outright stolen via data theft.'

As for the sale of nuclear devices, it is stupid easy to get your hands on a plutonium nuclear detonator as one reporter found out when it was shipped to his house. An MI5 team in London managed to recreate the entire process of creating a home-made nuclear bomb and "detonate" it all while being hunted by their compatriots just to test their own security.
 
One thing that occurred to me is that if we want there to be more smuggling opportunities for independent characters, maybe we should make a few more things illegal, for example maybe it's not a good idea to sell starship engines to randoms who might put them on rocks and shoot the rocks into planets their ex lives on.

Edit: Also I think we should make a master wiki article on smuggling in SARP as a topic like we did with slavery.
 
Perhaps we should make a list if we dont already have one of the illegal products or things.

Slaves, obviously, hard drugs, etc. And get FMs to make a list each of illicit goods found to be regularly smuggled in their borders or out of them that are often smuggled be it gum, smokes, uncensored images of hand holding between two neko who arent sisters, broken Mindys from 10,000 battlefields, Zesu scavenged, blackmarket neko, counterfeit Delsaurian pillows, organs or kidnapped/trafficked people for various reasons, etc.

As for starships im sure there are entire scrapyards to pick and choose from scrapped stuff considering how abundant space travel is and any PC can just buy an entire starship if they had the money with no actual training on it, no crew available, and has big guns on it so im sure the starship parts market isnt hurting especially with hundreds of thousands of recently scuttled or abandonded ships from the kuvie war.
 
I've always had this idea with the Ikemen/Yakuza that, other than the stuff they explicitly smuggle (cigarettes, gum, mindware, Neko bodies), they also smuggle anything and everything. Like that any given planet, depending on who is running the RP and the story they want to tell, has its own litany of things you cannot import for some minor reason. So if someone wanted to be smuggling radioactive aether fuel they could do that through the Ikemen or they could just go with "we're bringing Jiyuuian oranges to Anisa and that's HIGHLY ILLEGAL because of agricultural regulations."
 
Now that I made an article for drugs, maybe we should make up a few banned drugs as well, which didn't make it to pharmaceutical use due to complications and side effects, but some people still want them.
 
Wes said:
Now that I made an article for drugs, maybe we should make up a few banned drugs as well, which didn't make it to pharmaceutical use due to complications and side effects, but some people still want them.
Click to expand...
Would be neat to elaborate more on sarps criminals, the "underworld", black market and such. I barely see it being referenced and it's a quintessential part of a lotta Sci-fi stuff
 
It'd have to be deep deep deep in the boonies. Though the way the Reds are going to clone "rapid replacements", pirating and strolling through space battlefields to harvest bodies for biomass might be a thing in the moderate risk areas.
 
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