2 Sure, Don, I'll give you that break.
A company could certainly have financed guards from
the profits on the previous discovery that it found.
Now you give me two breaks:
2.1 A new company, with no previous discoveries to get
profits from, would have to pay through the nose in
interest rates for the money to finance guards.
After all, Sharona has no central control of the moneys
earned from Outworlds. Each company arranges its own
financing.
Such central control would require taxes on moneys
earned Outworlds by successful companies,
with the money used to subsidize new companies.
What old company would wamt to be taxed to
subsidize its competitors?
Only the Portal Authority was in a position to collect
such taxes. It would need more legal authority to do
that, and then a larger (resource-consuming) bureaucracy.
Would you advise Sharonans to do that?
2.2 No company financed and controlled by Humans
*ever* has enough money to content the people who
finance and control it. Those people would *always*
have other uses for whatever money they controlled,
no matter how much it was.
Eighty years have nine hundred sixty (960) months.
Do you expect human companies to pay insurance money
for 959 months, with no return, for the sake of a thing
that might happen in the 960th?
How many Humans have ever done that?
Beyond those points, it occurs to me that two or more
companies exploring the same the same world might bump
into each other. If they both had Guard Companies,
they might wage war against each other.
For the past eighty years, any such disputes have been
settled by the SPA, because they have all the soldiers.
With the new system, SPA would need enough soldiers to
overwhelm all of the Guard Companies, or else there
would be Anarchy And Chaos in the Outworlds!
=====================================
I almost forgot your paragraph #1.
I see you as being very, very upset that the Chalgyn
team was overwhelmed and destroyed.
Is it possible that you are reacting too strongly?
As you yourself said, Bad Things do happen.
What if the Chalgyns had had twenty guards, or forty,
and they'd run into two Arcanan platoons, or more?
OTOH, what if Arcana'd had a twelve-man squad?
I deem it Chance that determines which group is stronger.
Howard T. Map-addict
n7axw wrote:reply at bottom
Howard T. Map-addict wrote:Don, my point is that 200 year old plans
are vulnerable to being partly forgotten,
misunderstood, insufficiently rehearsed,
and not quite applicable to a new situation.
The older a plan, the more likely a screw up, I say!
This Arcanan plan does not consider that the Others
might resent the way the situation was controlled in
the first place, or on further consideration might
conclude that it was a harmful plan, worse than no
plan at all.
And what if an attempt to control the situation,
had **failed?**
The blowback from a failed attempt would hurt Arcana.
In this case, had the Arcanan platoon kept the
Sharonans surrounded without moving in,
then in a few hours about twenty Sharonan cavalrymen
would have arrived and changed matters.
If Sharonan explorers had kept soldiers with them,
then they would have spent money on them for seventy-
nine years and eleven months with no benefit.
Now I wonder how Arcana can afford to use whole platoons
and sometimes companies of expensive soldiers to explore.
How can they afford the money and the time to slog
through forests and other conditions?
And why-oh-why would they use foot soldiers,
when they have dragons to search from on high at 100 mph?
{snip - htm}
HTM
1 Yes, there could be resentment. That would be a
bearable price. It was not Arcana's survey crew
that got caught pants down. That's my point.
The universe is not necessarily a benign place.
Arcana's plan was apparently pretty simple
rather than detailed and probably would have
worked fine if properly implemented.
2 As for "how they could afford it," gimme a break.
What Arcana did and what I proposed would have cost
a drop in the bucket compared to the wealth gained from
the new universes they were discovering and exploiting.
Don
_
