Psi-Wars Corporate Briefs: Orion Arms

 

Some eagle-eyed fans have noticed the slow additions of Orion Arms gear to the wiki. I wanted to stop and take a moment to talk about them.  While I don't have "corporations as organizations" worked out yet, I think it might be something I focus on later, because a lot of it has been coming into view.

Every arms manufacturer in Psi-Wars has a theme: Syntech has the coolest, cutting edge-gadgets; Wyrmwerks goes beyond cutting edge and into prototype tech, with all the attendant issues; ARC is the High Street of arms manufacturers (it wouldn't surprise me if they had literal butlers taking your measurements before manufacturing your armor to spec), etc.  The original intent of Orion Arms was to be where I parked the arms manufacture of the Umbral Rim, the Slaver aliens and their associated races and the technology they produce to wage their wars.  I intended to base them on the military industries of "the third world," any place that produces military equipment that wasn't cutting edge, and part of the less stable, more chaotic parts of the world, as that's what I wanted to emulate with the Umbral Rim.  So I dived into my research, and didn't find what I expected.

What sorts of arms industry does the third world have? The short answer is "None." The long answer is: they have some arms industry, but it mostly exists to either convert/update the military materiel they get from other countries, to maintain that materiel, to create ammunition or, in advanced cases, to make one or two simpler forms of materiel (think tanks and guns rather than fighter craft or carriers).  In practice, the third world gets its arms from the first (and if we're being technical, the second) world.

If you dig into African militaries, or the military forces of the Middle East or South America or anywhere else that you wouldn't be remotely tempted to assign the label "super-power" to, you'll find that most of their military gear comes from America or Russia.  China is making some headway, though most of its materiel is just Russian or American gear with the serial numbers (sometimes literally) filed off, though they're starting to actually make things that you might call "uniquely Chinese." Israel, Korea and Europe have some genuine native arms manufacture, and I think you can definitely make the case for Turkey, but pretty much everywhere else I looked had marginal arms manufacture, and a lot of the "big" arms manufacturers that weren't America, Russia or China weren't making them for domestic consumption: daewoo is not manufacturing the USAS-12 for the Korean military; they're making it for you. While this was a little disappointing, it also intrigued me and began to change the character of Orion Arms.  I always knew they were going to be the subpar arms manufacturer, but I began to have a better understanding of why and what they were trying to do.

A lot of Psi-Wars' technological design is inspired by games like Star Trek, Starcraft or 40k where we think about human technology vs eldar technology vs the technology of that race over there.  Each race, each faction, sits in a self-contained little technological boxes. This isn't a bad design; it's actually good design, because it lets you easily differentiate, say, humanity from the Eldar from the Tyranid.  When you have factions that mix and mingle Federation, Klingon and Romulan tech, that creates an interesting tension.  But it's not really realistic: gun nuts like to talk about the differences between American and Russian gear, but in the end, they're not really that different, not to the scale of Imperium-vs-Eldar, because a tank is a tank, and a gun is a gun, and tactics are tactics.  If some country got rich and wanted a lot of military power quickly (cough Saudi Arabia cough), what would pop out wouldn't be a novel way of fighting; instead, they'd just purchase the firepower of other countries.  They would start to look American or Russian or both in how their forces were equipped; there are real differences, but they tend to involve fine details rather than coarse grain concerns, or they're visible on very large scales (like navy composition).

So, if you're a powerful, rich Slaver who just hit it rich thanks to hyperium deposits and a particularly lucrative raiding year, and you have money to burn and rivals to impress and/or conquer.  What do you do? Well, you probably don't invest in a massive military complex on your own planet.  You might, but that requires the sort of political stability your region of the Galaxy just doesn't have: the planet that you pick might not be your planet tomorrow and worse, having a massive industrial complex there makes it a tempting target.  You'd want to buy your military equipment, and you'd want to buy the most impressive tech you could.  Ideally, you'd want imperial equipment, because nothing quite says "power!" like wielding the same technology as the ruler of the Galaxy.  But the Empire's never going to sell to you, alien scum.  So who do you buy from?

• ARC has some nice gear, but it's extremely expensive, and from very far away.  It'll never get to you. It's also deeply culturally bound to a faction of humanity that look like the losers of this war. Not a force that inspires confidence. Plus they're mostly a domestic military producer.  They build arms for the Alliance, and you're not part of the Alliance.
• Syntech produces really sweet weapons, and with an eye towards selling them to others too!  You'd do well to buy Syntech, but it's very far away, and it's the sort of gear that has everyone's attention: their intended target audience is the Alliance and/or Empire, not a warlord in the Umbral Rim, plus you lack the technological base to maintain the tech (or, to be honest, the money to buy a lot of it).
• Stellar Dynamics is an option, but they aim most of their materiel at the civilian and police market.
• Startrodder is also primarily an arms dealer, but it's already out of date. Sure, you can buy their stuff, but their tanks are already obsolete.
• Redjack is good, it can get around most blockades to get their materiel to you, and it's great stuff for pirates, but it seeks to solve the problems of belters living on the edge of space, not conquerors who seek to rule a section of the galaxy and impress others with their sweet gear.

So we have a niche: someone who produces military-grade equipment that looks like, that screams, military equipment.  We need someone who makes knock-off imperial equipment, stuff that's not so good that they'd have to charge an arm and a leg or would catch the eye of the Empire and shut down your operation.  We need a cut-rate, tacticool producer.  I know tacticool is a joke about redneck gun-nuts, but there's very real value to it for minor powers: fielding soldiers decked out in nightvision gear, advanced-looking rifles covered in accessories and sweet armor that evokes the image of more powerful factions has the same effect as prey animals that adopt the coloration and behavior of a dangerous predator: it confuses your foe and makes them hesitant to attack you.

So ultimately what we need is a corporation that focuses on arms dealing to mob bosses and minor warlords.  They might not be exclusive to the Umbral Rim, but the Umbral Rim would be one of their major customers: the Empire, the Cybernetic Union and the Alliance (for the most part) have access to better gear, and the Sylvan Spiral isn't advanced enough to really know what to do with it (except for Xen and Ys, who prefer Syntech gear).  So the Umbral Rim becomes their primary target, though low-scale mob-bosses and pirates in all parts of the galaxy might also like their materiel.

Why does the Empire tolerate a corporation like this smuggling military-grade equipment and freaking battleships around? That's a good question.  I imagine a lot of their arms manufacture isn't in the Empire and their supply lines don't cross it.  But I also imagine the Empire negotiates with Orion Arms: they look the other way sometimes, provided Orion Arms worked with them. By supplying arms to the Umbral Rim, the Rim lacks the incentive to develop its own arms industry. By picking "winners and losers" Orion can keep various factions from gaining too much power: if one guy starts to build up his own military industry, he'll stop buying from Orion, or Orion can stop selling to them and start offering discounts to other factions.  It doesn't even need to be part of a vast conspiracy to do this: one faction gaining too much power and bringing peace and stability to the Umbral Rim is bad for business.  That's why the Empire doesn't really care, just as long as nothing Orion puts out can seriously rival the gear the Empire has.

This suggests a human-run corporation with some very seedy morals and some insidious goals, that is slowly entangling the Umbral Rim in its dangerous business practices.  It's a corporation that would work closely with smugglers that might leave them feeling conflicted after. It has representatives that would rub shoulders with alien warlords and gangsters one day, and then Imperial senators the next.  I found the idea compelling, and it's what I went with.  So far it's only guns and armor, though some weapon accessories will come out soon, and they'll get vehicles, those are just lower priority at the moment.

I don't think they're the only gear available in the Umbral Rim.  There's still some ancient "Tyrannic Tech" kicking around, and I still think there's room for native military industry in the Umbral Rim, because Slavers and some of the other aliens have sufficiently unique physiologies that they could design technologies to exploit their alienness for a military advantage, and Orion would be hard-pressed to match it.  But they're one part of the puzzle of the military industrial complex of the Umbral Rim.