Hey Everyone,
An Ownsmann’s work is never done, eh? There’s something about the ‘Militant Corporate’ look that’s always appealed to me.
As a quick heads-up/shout out, my buddy Dan Condaxis is a freelance User Interface Designer. Over the last few month’s he’s been doing a redesign of the UI from Mass Effect 1. If any of you are interested in the nitty gritty of how to make a proper game HUD then check out one of the links below.
If you’re working on a project that might need his skills then shoot him an email, he’s open for commissions.
Thanks for reading,
- Luther out
Well, historically, war has been very bad for business overall (if perhaps lucrative for military equipment manufacturers), given its tendency to destroy value. Our friend here may just be looking at how destructive war can be.
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
Indeed, that rather supports my point. But you’ll note that our contractors here are to large extent paying the bills themselves, rather than taking them out of a whole nation. Which I think would help reinforce my point that in their situation, it is going to be very difficult to make war pay- since they largely have to pay for it themselves.
True, yet Mega Fun Foods chose to pay to keep them in it. So where’s the pay out for them? The land isn’t worth it, so it’s reasonable to assume there’s an external benefactor; Either another nation funding this little spat to weaken Dhuvallia or someone within Dhuvallia instigated it for their own political or monetary purposes.
Hell, if who ever makes those pretty blue Limbs gets paid well enough, then paying to keep a weak dog at the throat of the Dhuvallian government could well be within their interests.
I’m sure Mega Fun Foods is own by a even larger company operating behind the scenes
To give an idea of scale, Mega Fun Foods is huge. They’re a bout on the scale of Coca-Cola or Nestle in our world ($46.8 Billion and $92.1 Billion in annual operating revenue respectively). It doesn’t get much bigger than them. Explaining this during the course of the comic without going on a Tolkien-esque tangent however is another story…
However, you folks are correct. Paying for all of these security units in a sustained engagement would be incredibly expensive, even for a mega-corporation. There’d have to be a damn good reason to pony up all that cash… right?
One would certainly think so. Running a war against a nation-state, which is more or less a structure specifically evolved for war, would require a very compelling reason here…
I think it’s been covered in comic. The land their fighting over has a agricultural crop of some value to MFF. After whoever in Dhvalia ‘sold’ the land did it MFF and who knows how many other corporations probably invested in the land in question to get said crop.
It may actually have less of a “tangible” (numarable?) benefit, because losing that land would reduce the amount of land they have access to overall, since Dhuvalia certainly isn’t going to sell/pawn it back to them. Hence, the expected future security/income may outweigh the currently incurred expenses, especially since there are some other factors at play:
That frantic bidding that accompanies many battles, as we’ve seen, would create income, since “betting” always results in the bank winning more than the players, and money paid for corporate shares goes to the company, increasing their “backing”, which would at least mitigate any losses from combat, since they are to a large extent covered by either combatant risk or income due to shares bought (part goes to the combatants, part stays with the company, from what I recall of that scene).
Also, even if that land takes some damage, it’s essentially still arable unless the war materiel is a pollutant, though judging from that reaction to MFF’s food, that would not be seen as a deterrent. If they just dissolve the crops into base chemicals and slap them into some edible goo, filtering out pollutants like that is likely possible. So, the land having no value on its own means the only loss is in war materiel (and lives, but lives lost don’t necessarily incur monetary costs depending on laws, making that potentially irrelevant) and materiel lost, especially if it is not funded by debt, does keep the production of the armament industry going. The largest “cost” of war is in collateral damage to infrastructure and population, or resource opportunities, and of course trade opportunities with your enemies (only if they existed beforehand), if all those factors a minimized (arguably the case here) the loss is in high-maintenance limited-purpose capital (war machines, guns, ammunition…), and restocking those losses only redistributes money, but doesn’t destroy much value (since the value of armaments is in deterrence and dispensation of force/resistance to force, meaning they are essentially worthless if nobody is intimidated or killed by them). Since I recall forcing people into agreements if forbidden in the free market, the value of weapons would lie near-exclusively in international warfare.
These factors only justify the situation as seen, though, since some undisclused highly valuable resource or other objective to be accomplished on behalf of an undisclosed party may still play into this. Wars in Welles’ 1984 were fought (spoiler) to justify domestic repression and provide a colorful evenening news, essentially, and the main driver of warfare in Code Geass was a shiny pink mineral that allowed for essentially magical abilities in small-scale combatants (Not a spoiler since they outright say that in the first episode). Without more worldbuilding, we wouldn’t know which of the reasons it is.
(For the record, I don’t mind Tolkienesque tangents, but keep my own background material under wraps and occasionally considered opening a seperate web presence to publish it as a “side dish” for my story blog. Maybe a wiki.)
Is there a possibility that for a small donation, an individual could receive a shirt-sized file of the 1st Investment Recovery Battalion logo? Seeing the logo drawn on the corporate representative really looks cools.
We’re almost done with our T-shirt design (I mean it this time) and I can’t wait to have a link up for the store soon. As for the 1st IRB logo, we can look into that soon.