[Economy] Traffic at Pelion subject to boarding inspections

[Economy] Traffic at Pelion subject to boarding inspections

Pelion system/Nimbus – As civilian traffic is picking up in volume to and from Nimbus Cluster, the patrol fleet at the Pelion Relay has issued new procedures for outbound cargo vessels.

“All civilian operated cargo vessels which want to enter the Pelion relay will be subject to be inspected by a boarding party for the time being. This will not be a 100% measure at this point but the responsible traffic controller at the relay protection flotilla will decide on a case to case basis,” says Matriarch Lameta, commander-in-chief of the Nimbus patrol fleets.

“We will try and keep disturbance and delays to a minimum but at this point the measure is necessary unfortunately.”

Until now, civilian traffic had only to register and clear with the flotilla in the Pelion system on an intercom and scan basis.

The republican forces are fighting smugglers and pirates in the cluster. After reports of trade-restricted rare goods from Nimbus sources surfacing on the free market outside the cluster, calls have been raised for tighter controls at the relay.

However there are critical voices.
“Free relay travel is a basic sapient right. Every measure that’s hindering or even blockading relays is not a good development! The asari should stop that and remove their fleet from the vicinity of the relay!” says sapient rights activist Perola Gern on the Citadel.

Council speaker Curt Langvalley dismissed critics.
“Free travel is absolutely ensured. This is no infraction of Council laws, this is merly a police action.”

If and how this will affect the trade of the Nimbus systems remains to be seen.

Please. We all know why they're REALLY doing these boarding inspections.

It's the Volanti, isn't it Job? Trying to keep us honest working people down while they flash priority passes and skip in the line!

Right culprit, wrong reason. They're LOOKING for something. The Volanti clearly want something on Pelion, and are using their connections in local law enforcement to look for it - quietly, of course. But, as you can see, not quietly enough.

They cannot be serious. I

oh my head.

Right, alright; you know how big, exactly, most ships are? How many hiding places there are on even frigates much less the freighters or container ships (which is probably where the bulk of the contraband is probably going, transported under a completely licit heading for legitimate purposes)? Any actually competent person will have the goods concealed, broken down and rendered to base components, not even on the ship with them, or simply bribe or otherwise misdirect the no doubt severely underpaid customs officials. Even with drone assistance searching anything frigate tonnage or above is time consuming and far from foolproof. All you're really doing is dramatically slowing down the flow of goods between the Nimbus and the rest of the galaxy and that ultimately hurts you more than the pirates and smugglers given that the resources they hold are even more valuable.

Unless they're not going to be searching aid, relief, and military vessels in which case that's almost certainly where most of the goods are going to be.

This is of course overlooking the fact that relay transit is already controlled and administrated and if the individuals have the means to bypass the cartel they're good enough to not be caught by the asari fleet.
Did they deliberately seek out the most ineffectual critic they could find or was she engineered in a lab to be the ultimate nonconvincing life form.

I mean seriously, there are some legitimate problems with this policy. You can and should be addressing those instead of demanding that the Republics strip every single defensive line from a relay connecting to what is basically a contested cluster. As well as completely ignoring the several ton elephant in the room that is the Relay Transit Administration.

And a piss poor one at that.

No, no as I said the effects upon trade to and from the Nimbus are rather obvious and there's only so many ways you can say "utterly catastrophic" before it begins to get repetitive.

Maybe advanced scanners are used to count life forms on board and find suspicious components and contraband materials.
The freedom argument is silly, but I wonder what kind of manpower is required to perform the inspections, and how much it slows down relay use.

Right, that's exactly how the possible attack on the Citadel by Cerberus was prevented by C-Sec.

ohhhh wait


A lot.

A fatal snarkurism.



Firstly, the intended effect is to stymie the export of illegally obtained goods out of the Nimbus system. Not to impede incoming aid. The Republics can endure the economic impact better than the pirate forces can while on the run and ultimately anything caught pre-emptively is a net gain for the Republics in the long run.



We should be so lucky, I doubt the pirates survived that long in Nimbus as is by being so predictable.



I know! It makes so much less sense than your ingenious 'let them go because it's too much effort' plan.

The attack on the Citadel was only possible thanks to a great deal of inside work. Step 1 certainly was deactivating any means to detect incoming attackers.

I can't see how this is not supposed to be of some effect.
We work with scan drones at the spaceport ourselves. A team of specialists and a handful of drones find you a needle in the airducts. If they know what material they look for, they'll most likely find it.

From how I read it, they are sampling from outgoing cargo traffic (based on whatever criteria. I can understand they don't give that away!) so nobody else is affected in travel times.

This makes no sense. Aid is only going in and the only military traffic is the asari fleets. Well, if a war ship shows up that's not supposed to be there and wants to leave, I'd not only scan but confiscate it.

Just going to leave that there.

No, no they won't. Given that the Republic's infrastructure is already in extremely poor repair from the the Reaper incursion, several years without external resources to repair, and enough pirates operating more or less uncontested that you can reasonably call the region the "Near Terminus" and said pirates are apparently thriving in the local environment and currently stand as a legitimate threat to Republic's authority in the cluster they most emphatically won't.

The best way to reverse the damage is to provide legitimate and effective alternatives to the goods and services that the hostile third parties are offering. Pray tell, how does impeding the flow of aid help that cause?

Odd reaction to take to a person implying that your military and national relief organizations are incredibly corruptible.

I don't actually have a reply to this, I just wanted to memorialize the spot where your last bit of wit died ignominiously.

For someone apparently so adept at their job you don't seem to have a great deal of appreciation for scale do you?

Allow me to educate you.

This is a planetary cargo barge, used to ferry goods out from major space ports over terrestrial waters to secondary distribution points.



It is approximately four hundred meters long, has a beam of fifty nine meters, and a depth of around thirty meters. The last two being rough equivalents to width and height respectively.

An interplanetary container ship can be anywhere for half again to twice as long, several times wider, and a couple dozen meters higher.

Look at that picture.

Look at what you just said.

Now look at what I said


Do you understand now?

Then it's merely utterly ineffective at curbing the illegal trade rather than actively impeding the reconstruction process.

Congratulations.

Those aid ships also have to leave to go get more supplies you understand yes? And you do know that when they do they have also to pass through the relay?

And I'm not saying that the smugglers are going to hijack an asari warvessel or whatever fresh inanity it is that you're implying, I'm merely stating that they would bribe or otherwise coerce members of the vessels crew to ferry their contraband for them thus neatly avoiding customs checks.

I'm inclined to agree with Job on this.

Not about the Volanti. I'm not even sure what he's going on about there. But having a check point in front of a relay and having the 'responsible traffic controller' decide on a case by case basis who gets searched?

That is a position that is now posed eminently for bribing. If they aren't already involved with smuggling. What will they be basing their decisions on which ship to be searched on? Perfect grammar when speaking to the traffic controller? Who said something bad about asari on a terrorist-affiliated extranet site in the last 24 hours?

I work at spaceports, man. No, don't.
I have worked with drones before. Inventorizing an incoming freighter for customs is no fun but also nothing out of the ordinary. I guess the asari have no shortage of drones they can send around the ship. The more, the faster, pretty simple, I have no idea what your problem is.

What I would be more interested in is what they are looking for. There's material that's pretty easy to detect by scanners in quantities, some that isn't. Most of the things they are looking for must be stuff that was robbed in pirating attacks so it must be known how much of what is on the market for illegal export. That makes serching for it easier.
I think a hidden box of Trategos Ice Brandy is why this is set up.

By the scrolls, this is too much for me to handle.

I am having trouble keeping in my chair from how excited I am, because of the amount of ignorance coming out of this. It's like all my prayers have been answered. The average republics citizen is so ignorant about how piracy works, it's like taking credits from a brain dead vorcha (And I vote that this phrase be replaced with "Like robbing an asari").

Okay, I'll try to explain this, because I have enough of a conscience to feel sorry for you.

Pirates are usually not "On the run". The reason for this can be derived from the Migrant Fleet. The sheer logistics required and complications that crop up to keep a fleet that has no planetary contact both operational and effective is by an order of magnitude higher then normal.

Most pirate fleets' first action in a new zone of operations is establishing a base on a planet that's empty of other settlers. A supply base, FOB, headquarters, whatever. It's a place where the fleet can rotate out crew, produce food and other materials, perform training, replenish supplies of water and other elements, and allow exposure to a natural climate again to prevent immune deficiency. Good?

Good.

Now, because of this base, the pirates should already have enough supplies of everything they need to last months. If there was a total embargo in that sector of space, they could even manage self sufficiency depending on how well led the crew is.

Now the colonies in the Nimbus Cluster are a different story. Because they are a consumerist society that is currently in the need of logistical aid, a constant supply of ships is needed to sustain themselves. This is where the pirate situation can get even worse if you're not prepared to send aid properly escorted, because then the pirates can take their wares for their own purposes.

So it seems rather stupid to put your fleet at the relay for contraband searching instead of actually escorting the things, which would actually add a challenge to my job.

The pirate is right.

Parking your ships in space and hoping you find what you're looking for is poor strategy at best.

"A hastily made dam leads to more flooding than the river."

Even if there was the manpower and the will to stop and search every ship; Of which you have neither, contraband will still get through. You will still have pirates. As it is, you're propping your fleet up as an illusion. A distraction. A show of control for the masses when you really have none. Goods will keep getting out, and pirates will continue coming and going as they please.

A proper military might help that.

How many dreadnoughts do you need to set up a guard at a relay? To assume that this task is keeping a large amount of ships bound is strange. I assume that a large part of the Republics expedition fleet is just doing that, bolstering escorts and looking for bases.

Not hearing about any finds can as well be news embargo.

Considering that to even have a remotely thorough search of a frieghter you need to have a ship just as big individually break off formation and search it with all it's scanners, yes, this tactic keeps a huge amount of the patrol fleet bound to incoming traffic.

I'm telling you right now, all civilian aid ships are advised to rely on their own defenses upon entering the cluster. That's why mercenary companies like Mr. Aleksanders are making it big almost as much as we are. The republics have chosen a doctrine that has slowed aid to the colonies, that will not even affect the pirates in any significant manner, and adds a middle man to the martial deterrence of pirates in the system. So while the colonies are suffering, there's a constantly reoccurring cycle of credit distribution where aid corporations lose money from the pirates, then pay more money to the mercenaries.

In essence, the Republics intervention has only made the situation worse. I'm just waiting until they realize how much they've fucked up and send in the Turians.

Uh. No.
The traffic controller tells the freighter in question to stop, a shuttle brings the boarding party, the run their drones through the ship and the drones can begin their work. This can be done with a minimum of military vessels stationed at the relay. But belief what you want, you're a pirate so I can understand you keep your hopes up.

The asari have one of the largest fleets and know how to use it.It may have been aproblem to protect all convoys while the relay was closed, but now, with a enough ships in the cluster, I think only the reckless or very fast travel alone and not in fleet protected convoys.

Taleeze, sweetie, while I know you're not the greatest of debaters, you could have at least made a point that wasn't rebutted on literally the same page, and then resort to personal attacks based on my occupation. You're better then that, but I'll try to answer it anyway.


Now, you see? And that's not even taking in account bribery and corruption of customs officials. And don't try to say they're untouchable. They're, for the most part, asari maidens. They have a cultural obligation to do anything for a quick buck.


You've already pointed out that there's an information embargo out of the cluster, which means that you're assuming that they're doing that. I, as someone who's involved, am telling you, that it is not the case.

Oh but apparently I do Mr. Hall. A large part of why that is even possible is because of manifests and, as ridiculous as it no doubt sounds, proper labeling. It also depends on materials being readily accessible and not, say, in sealed packages, casks, or airtight spaces. There is, in short, simply too much information to process that to declare contraband or illicitly procured goods cannot be hiding in the error margins is patently ridiculous.

Of course.

Assuming, of course, that none of those goods are exchanged in cluster for more or less legally procured materials (such as a literal colonization group's worth of undocumented salvage), broken down, or otherwise modified.
Luxuries generally aren't worth the expense and risk unless they can be transported in bulk. Which, sadly, I'm not aware that Trategos Ice Brandy can. Essentials take priority for all involved, procurer, middlemen, and consumer.

Which would indicate things are going poorly, if they are in fact "going" at all, considering that it is generally customary for the Republics to boast about their accomplishments both loudly and repeatedly.

You have a large fleet, to imply that you know how to use it when your own government proudly proclaims the fact that it emphasizes small unit tactics at the expense of defensive warfare or heavy support is laughable.

Particularly when taking in the context of escorting ships.

Which is why, I imagine, myself and a large number of my colleagues are decidedly unperturbed about the asari government's current state of affairs.

I would like the asari in this thread to appreciate the irony of a situation in which the people on the opposite sides of the playing field understand quite well how things work while the group ostensibly in control of the situation has virtually no idea what's going on.

And it's because of what could be charitably described as willful ignorance on behalf of said group this situation persists and continues to decay.