Probably a very bad idea, but

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
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… has anybody given any thought to playing the slave trade at its own game and buying the enslaved Minmatar free?

I realise that most people will reject this out of hand, and believe me, I’d rather fly my ship into a supernova than give money to the Amarr, but at least if we consider it, we can’t say that we’ve left any avenue unexplored in our quest for freedom.

The basic plan goes something like this:

  • ISK are worthy millions in planetary currency - 1 ISK is enough to get set up comfortably for life planet-side
  • Slaves aren’t exactly expensive; for 1 ISK, you could probably buy hundreds, if not thousands, of slaves
  • Planetary population of 10 billion, assume half of those are slaves - 5 billion slaves per planet, 100 head per ISK, you could buy an entire planet of slaves for 50 million ISK
  • I don’t know the exact cost of a Titan, but as far as I was aware it was upwards of 250 billion ISK. Given the number of systems, number of inhabited planets in each one, you could buy and set free every slave in every system in all of New Eden for the cost of two or three Titans.

Of course, carrot and stick works a lot better than just a carrot, so here’s Plan B if the Amarr refuse to play ball:

  • A habitable planet has a radius somewhere in the area of 6000km - 7000km
  • A smartbomb has a blast radius of 10km
  • Smartbombs have a cycle time of 10 seconds, and one ship can fit a maximum of 8 smartbombs
  • 1,000,000 smartbombs is enough to glass an entire planet
  • A fleet of 200 ships, each with 8 smartbombs and cycling them once every 10 seconds, can destroy the surface of an entire planet in a couple of hours
  • Systems don’t have any defences, so it’s possible to waltz a fleet of 200 ships directly up to the Amarr homeworld and wipe out their entire government, church and aristocracy before anybody can stop you

Most people are probably going to want to go with Plan B straight away, but then you get people whining about friendly fire and collateral damage.

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As far as plan A goes:

ISK is a lot compared to most planetary currencies for sure, but very few places can one ISK set up even humble families for their lives.

That being said, I fully understand the desire to want to buy people their way to freedom. The problem is however with how the Amarr system works. Only a certain number of slaves will be for sale at any given time and buying them just encourages the Holders to make more. The especially sick and twisted Holders are the ones who do the most business on open markets and so what ends up happening is encouraging more of the breeding facilities that the Amarr use. They will not sell you all of the people they’re holding captive, as they can make more money by keeping some. All this while the types of Holders who are delusional enough to think they’re doing good for their captives are unlikely to sell you any of their slaves at all.

As far as plan B goes:

You are far from the first person in the cluster who has wanted to glass Amarr Prime. If it were so easy, it would have already been done. Between CONCORD’s rapid response protocol and lockouts on your own ships, some of the strongest planetary defenses in the cluster, and the Imperial navy you wouldn’t manage to damage a thing, unfortunately.

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Many people before you and likely after you. It won’t work for numerous reasons, one of which is that the Amarr aren’t enslaving people only for money, so “everyone has a price” doesn’t apply. Which apparently was explained far better above.

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Creating a greater market for slaves while financially supporting the slavers is not exactly the brightest idea one can have, but somehow people still keep having it. There is no way to deal with the problem other than through absolute no-tolerance, no negotiation, no mercy. You negotiate with the hostage takers, you’ll have to negotiate with all of the hostage takers. No. When they take hostages, you burn the house with them and the hostages inside, then you point at the ashen rubble when the next group tries, as an example of what happens if total surrender isn’t done. Then you keep that up until no more hostages or slaves are taken. It is, unfortunately, the lesser evil leading to least suffering.

As for Plan B, if I could divebomb every major Amarr population center with a Hel, I damn well would. It’s just not in our toolkit, nor would it achieve much unless we did every single one of them at once.

The sad unfortunate truth is that the only true solution to the problem is total war, and total war will cost us almost everything and even then is far from a sure thing.

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I think you’ll find you’re mistaken on this one.

See Girani-Fa for recent details. or Kahah or Tanoo or Tierijev.

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Somewhere, the Holy Empress Catiz I is laughing.

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Her Most Sublime and Imperial Majesty would not be alone, resettling twenty trillion people for less than the cost of a titan; magical thinking.

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What?

Where?

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The standard price on the SCC market is 705.00 ISK.

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I know.

I am not partial to slave trading myself, but if the OP has found someone willing to sell thousands for a single isk, well, that sounds like a lucrative investment opportunity.

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Every slave should be entitled to drink Quafe Hyper, one can a day. Only hyped up slaves can perform well.

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A habitable planet has about 60-80km of atmosphere where the air is thick enough to cause orbital deceleration. So first, you need to get your ships—which are not designed for atmospheric flight—down through the atmosphere to get to the surface.

Along the way, you need to get through the orbital defenses that yes, almost all habitable planets in highsec have. You just can’t see them, because CONCORD controls which categories of ID codes your ship’s systems are capable of relaying telemetry about to your pod. Guess what your ship sees, but isn’t telling you about.

Next, you have to get through atmospheric defenses! I hope you’re in something armor-tanked, by the way, because your shields will be having a lot of fun with atmospheric friction (thermic!), compression (kinetic and explosive!), as well as the impacts happening with the smartbombs, buffeting one another at a lot more than 10km (because you’re setting off explosions in an atmosphere, which means shockwaves, ie: more kinetic damage on the shields). And that’s just the air and your own smartbombs! That doesn’t include, you know, aircraft, carrying lasers, since we’re talking about Amarr. And ground-based laser systems. And the orbital systems, still a factor, firing down at you with ridiculously improved telemetry, because now your smartbombs are creating a giant field of ‘SHOOT HERE’ for them to look at.

By the way, that’s a surface area of 4.52389×108, or 452,389,000 square km. So no, 1,000,000 smartbombs, with a max area of 62 sq km each will only get you less than 1/7 of the planet. And it doesn’t matter how many smartbombs you have on each ship, because each of those smartbombs on any given ship is still only hitting the same space.

So, Plan B? Exactly as feasible as Plan A: not at all.

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The easier way to do it would be to take a shuttle, load it’s cargohold with biological weapons then detonate the entire thing in atmosphere. But that would only work if you either somehow manage to nullify the orbital defense system or overwhelm it with sheer numbers.

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The difficulty with buying out a slave market is that it provides an incentive for those providing the slaves to acquire more captives, and gives them the financial means to do so. Shrewd slavers are also never going to sell themselves out of business.

As for bombing a planet to veritable dust, one does not set a house on fire to kill a fly.

As a Gallentean who has occasionally used nefarious–some would say immoral–means to achieve my ends, I have no qualms with defrauding slavers in every way possible. I have no trouble sleeping at the thought of dropping every slaver out of an airlock in mid-warp. Such is occasionally the fodder of my sweetest dreams.

What I cannot abide is the idea of murdering a planet wholesale for the sins of even a majority of its population. Ideally, I would rather see every slaver put themselves out of business due to the evolution of their conscience, or failing that, I’d like to see slavers commit such errors in judgment as to find themselves excessively ventilated under conditions in which those responsible for their exuberant perforation are exonerated.

At the very least, New Eden would be improved by any circumstance in which a slaver finds themselves deprived of the means for their continued business in the subjugation of others, and/or suffers an acute case of fatal laser poisoning for which a cause or cure is never found.

I’d rather the slaver be shot, not paid.

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It seems that many do not know their history. A couple of search terms for the people here: Elder Fleet. Starkmanir.

A little time doing research on the Galnet might help people learn from the past.

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I do not think that’s a particularly compelling case for anti-orbital defences.

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I have bought slaves in the past, and transitioned them to indentures with a very generous contract. Usually I do so at the behest of Minmatar who work under me, if they can present a reasonable argument. But, as others here have explained, doing so to end slavery is not a viable option. Slavery will always exist. One can merely do what they can to help those who’re within their power.

If you truely wished to hit slavers hard, it takes a long time, a lot of resources, and the lives of your agents.

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