Brigade XO wrote:Using the Streak Drive to manipulate fiancial and news markets would take some very carefull footwork and caution. Sure, getting there first and feeding the info/instructions to your agents in-place lets you set up any number of things, BUT if you are not careful, someone is going to notice that X "quite often" seems to be acting one what seems to be early information about some event/s that happen elsewhere. Do that a couple of times in stock trading and people are going to get curious about just how X made some very interesting trades days before the word of something that then causes a stock to shoot up arrives though Regular Channels.
You would need to fairly widely spread the accounts (and the nominal owners of those accounts) so that the same person or company was not making some really good calls in advance of the regular news.
Not quite so much of a problem on couriers who are bringing in military or political information to your networks or just orders. When a ship shows up and there is no regular schedule against which people in the industry (shipping, astro control, anything else) could notice that P ship seems to be making (consistently) a shuttle or trade route run several days to several WEEKS faster than any other ship, that will bring curiosity. Ships with no particular schedule - "tramp freighters" courier ships with no set route, private ships (Ms.Abrovonova- sorry, spelling- for instance) who are not tied in with any regular routine- can show up, transact business (and drop/pick up information) and move on to real or fictional destinations and not have anyone notice they are extraordianaly fast over inter-stellar distance. Streak drive -until it becomes noticed by places like Mancticore- would not only get information back to Darius faster, it will badly throw off estimates of where the ship has been given the times at places it is discovered where it has been
Absolutely true, it would be tricky to pull off the kind of market manipulation I talked about. But it would not be any more difficult than the massive coordination and planning that they have put into their current operation to Rule the Galaxy. They have been working slowly and carefully in the shadows for hundreds of years. I think that shows they could have been patient and coordinated enough to dominate the markets if they had put their minds to it instead of this insane plan.
