Warclone Blanks, Save Our Clones

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
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M’mkay. Saisa Summit, pleasure to step into the light and make all of yours acquaintances at this time.

I represent the financial and logistical interests of the Bosena Accords, a name some of you may be familiar with. In essence, I both provide personal funding and secure new revenue and credit streams to support the administration of the largest warclone trade union in New Eden. Recently, I’ve uncovered a bit of a marketing anomaly that I think it best I address publically and very vocally for a few reasons.

During the war of planetary conquest standard warclone copies were traditionally valued by Genolution for around 100k ISK /clone. Costs varied based on production and demand, sometimes as high as 500-600k ISK per clone at the height of the warlord era from Molden Heath. The end of the war of planetary conquest in Molden Heath however, along with rising costs of biomass, greatly destabilized the warclone market. The cost of additional clones became prohibitively expensive and many independent warclone clans were forced to close their businesses in favor of joining larger empire affiliated private military contractors. Since then, the rise of alpha clone technology and low-cost cloning services provided to independent warclone clans has helped to stabilize that market albeit in a very fragile ecosystem.

A very fragile ecosystem.

Earlier today with the Blood Raider Covenants Crimson Harvest campaign it was announced that they would provide one million ISK for warclone bodies recovered from Sacred Flame mercenary company sites. I won’t dodder over warclone blanks being traded like livestock for ritualistic purposes. The Sacred Flame, while warclones, are an ideologically driven monastic order with no ties to the Bosena Accords and there’s no moral qualms about the Blood Raiders utilizing soulless empty vessels for their religious ceremonies. As someone that’s studied Sani Sabik doctrine myself I can at the very least have an appreciation for their use of our bodies as painless blood-bags rather than preying on baseliners.

No, the issue I have is the speculative market. See, with Sacred Flame sites being cracked left and right by enterprising capsuleers we saw a whole new market build up from people with no concept of their value attempting to dictate costs. Initially this worked out very well for us. The floor price of warclone blanks was lower than could be produced at cost, which drove me and our associates to buy out the local market in the Forge. From there, the market saw a clear demand and prices began to wind up over the course of the day.

Effectively, we created our own speculative market rush that caused market prices to continuously surge upwards based on nothing more than the stellar upward market trend. Before the end of the day, we began seeing clone banks selling for more than the Blood Raider’s buy-back cost of 1 million ISK. This was made worse by the recent announcements of the RSS and FIO announcing the creation of their own dedicated anti-warclone units modeled after SARO Red Troop creating a tide of panic buying that has depleted the market.

I would like to take this time to remind the capsuleer community that these are effectively to every capsuleer not involved in warclone operations just one million ISK vouchers that can be redeemed at Blood Raiders facilities in a difficult to access region of nullsec for a limited time. Selling higher than their face value. You see the problem here. Our operations have been disrupted as what is essentially a marketing glitch, and I intend to knock the market back to manageable levels.

tl;dr

You lot are making my job infinitely harder, and the warclone industry is hurting as a result. For my own sanity and your own convenience I pray that the invisible hand of the free market correct itself promptly before it causes further issues. In the meantime, the Bosena Accords and our constituent clans will continue to offer fair value for these blanks well past the Crimson Harvest into the future for any intrepid collectors willing to help the cause.

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I rarely comment on this forum but feel obliged to respond to this post.

My corporation was founded, at least in part, to provide auxiliary services to Chatelain Rapid Response. I expect Mlle Eskola-Fae would consider our shareholder one of the “larger empire affiliated private military contractors” that she describes formerly independent clone soldiers as having been ‘forced’ to join. Among other services, we supply CHTRR with clone-grade biomass harvested from an oceanic planet in Syndicate as well as cloning and other medical infrastructure manufactured in orbit of the same planet.

I would like to strongly urge users to sell ‘Warclone Blanks’ recovered in the course of SHFLA’s current deployment to CHTRR (or any other similar organisation properly regulated and inspected by SARO) rather than the renegade warclone gangs which persist in trying to prolong the unregulated chaos of the early period of clone soldier technology. CHTAR will be happy to broker any such sales privately and has already taken up buyside positions in the SCC market to support this.

Furthermore, as someone who spends a considerable amount of time hunting renegade clone soldier recruiters and transporters in the more deprived systems of Placid, I would like to emphasise CHTAR’s support for the joint announcement by the FIO and the RSS of their plans to form units dedicated to hunting unregulated clone soldiers in the model of SARO’s Red Troop.

Like it or not, clone technology has an inevitable place on the modern battlefield. Accepting that, it is essential for the security of the communities in which clone soldiers operate and from which they recruit that the industry is strictly regulated and those who seek to circumvent those regulations face robust enforcement action. Not only are SARO regulated contractors more likely to operate effective corporate social responsibility policies, they are infinitely less likely to betray their obligations to contracted clients in favour of pursuing vainglorious personal agendas…

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I would like to, in the spirit of the current discussion point out that ‘SARO’ for being the ‘proper authority’ have a surprisingly limited amount of oversight or control in any true regard Ms. Menkalinan. As a regulating body they are woefully inadequate even with ‘Red Troop.’ As for the FIO and RSS styleD emulations therein, and the ‘SARO regulated empire mercenary outfits,’ well. Good luck to them.

And good luck to CHTAR in gathering clone blanks. It seems that, for once, we’re on opposite ends of the system as it were.

The United Neopian Federation, as it were being a non-signatory entity to the Yulai Conventions, is not going to suddenly submit to supporting SARO mandates against friends and allies.

As for your statement about abandoning contracts for vain glorious personal gains, isn’t that an accurate description of the vast majority of capsuleers dear? Even Many of the navy ones make quite the habit of sprinting off after their own habitual fix of adrenalin and murder. I have yet to have warclones hired through the Accords abandon their posts or the contract they’ve signed on for. Even in the face of being purged by the likes of Red Troop. Of course, that isn’t to say it doesn’t happen, but they’ve been far more committed to doing their due than any empire loyal contracting unit I’ve worked with, and more conscious of the human cost and long term ramifications, where as empire contracor warclones often have been little more than leashed attack dogs on a hair trigger with how forcibly contained they are.

UNF will be selling a full 50% of recovered clone blanks to the accords herein to support them further, in similar fashion as we have provided their contractors high quality biomass blanks in the past.

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SARO may be inadequate but there is no credible alternative. Your other comments are tangential.

I won’t dignify your assertion that the Accords are concerned with the “human cost and long term ramifications” of their operations with a response. The forcible containment policies of responsible clone soldier employers that you refer to are precisely what avoids these situations.

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Please.
There’s always collateral damage in war. Being unaligned myself, I’d sooner wager on an unaligned soldier to actively want to avoid collateral, as opposed to a loyalist soldier who has the leadership of the Empires for a role model, seeing as all four have established precedent of prioritizing their own agendas over preserving human life.

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I am not talking about loyalists. I am talking about the need to regulate clone soldier mercenaries. I tend to agree that trouble often starts when such troops become concerned with anything other than performing their contractual obligations.

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For not dignifying response, you seem to already have done so dear. So, lets move away from the tangentials and more to the specifics. Lets start with ‘No Credible Alternative to SARO,’ yes and no. The Bosena Accords originally was formed to be both a regulatory body and trade union for disenfranchised warclones at the ‘end of the warlord era,’ which is what they were and have been, even into the current period. They are not perfect, but I’ve seen them do a better job regulating the warclone community, and criminal elements therein and around, than SARO has with their ‘iron first’ approach, that has already notably failed due to its inflexibility and ‘purge first, figure out consequences later’ that Red Troop especially seems keen to employ in its minimal operations, at expense of all other considerations, including baseline life. If you are happy to submit to the FIO and RSS setting up units with similar lack of ethos, then I am quite concerned about what has changed with you of late.

What occurred in Skarkon, which you might not be aware of, is that actions started as, and in some cases, remained sanctioned prosecution of mandate and invitation, until of course, the very end after the system fell to Svarog Clade. Even after the RSS ‘legitimized’ Krullefor and Seykal as contractors, they still were opposed near in full by the local populace, and later the RJD. Seykal Headhunters specifically were notably difficult and ruthless in their prosecution of their ‘legitimate claim to power’ under Efrit’s regime, with about the same amount of regard for human life as Svarog Clade currently displays until they were paid to care and assist evacuations, where as Bosena Accords, though having officially stepped from their initial intents on Skarkon(after several attempts at cease fire and cooperation, all of which were, notably denied,) actively assisted in defending human life, and still is actively trying to help safeguard remaining civilians therein until they can be evacuated. All without being compensated to do so.

I have my issues with the direction Galm has taken the Accords, but if you are going to be this committed to ‘proper authority’ Callisto, then at least know the facts of the situation and where it started and progressed to, and why. I will not throw my lot in behind SARO, the FIO, or RSS and their ‘legitimate subdivisions for executing, capturing, and reprogramming warclones’.

And lets move to ‘responsible clone soldier employers’ shall we? Most of the empire based ‘responsible groups’ tend to treat those that work for them as little more than slave guns, just by another name, providing them minimal accommodation, poor relative pay to the cost of their profession, strict limits on their biomass access, and a policy of repression which further causes psychologically problematic responses when they are allowed out of their barracks into combat zones or on contract deployments.

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Whew, take a breath girl!

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Hah, I do suppose I did fall into an exceptional run on there.

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The only credibility a mercenary has is sticking to their client’s mandate. Once they decide to breach that, which seems to have happened at the very start of this debacle not the end, they become actors rather than contractors. It is not a mercenary’s role to make value judgments about who the ‘right’ side in a conflict is. I have never been convinced of the Accords claims to regulatory authority but recent events have clearly disqualified them.

As for the methods used to control clone soldiers, there is precious little place for squeamishness when dealing with such powerful technology.

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I wont fault you for not knowing this, but Coen, a Warclone under my employ through the Bosena Accords is a part of Chetelain Rapid Response, in official documentation. He Has been a signatory of the Bosena Accords since its inception. He wants me to relay that Chetalain Rapid Response has done nothing for Warclones since the purge. The Accords has protected, spoken for, and given purpose to Warclones since SARO Red troop began their purge. Many of the Warclones arent even serving in combat roles anymore, many of them have been retrained for high risk civilian jobs. Also, by calling them mercenaries, you misrepresent what most of Bosena Accords Warclones are now. They havent been mercenaries since the purge

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I couldn’t agree more.

“War Criminals”, “Triglavian Sympathisers” and “Enemies of the Republic” are much more fitting to what they are now.

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About as much of war criminals as any given capsuleer on any given day, less so actually, as they aren’t often tearing apart stations for amusement about how the reactors will fragment.

And I don’t see anywhere that Bosena Accords has been officially declared enemies of the republic… just the RSS, Krullefor, Seykal, and Kril Efrit. But apparently that’s all that matters to certain people. Members of the Accords are still able to, quite easily, fly under their banner within republic borders, even the warclones separate from capsuleer transporters. Not something ‘enemies of the republic’ would really be capable of.

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If this person is an employee of yours then I doubt that they are also an employee of CHTRR.

In any case, you should remind your employee that CHTRR is in the business of ‘doing things’ for its clients not for the clone soldier community. It doesn’t pretend to be a trade union.

The ambiguity that you highlight about what exactly BosAc clone soldiers are now is one of my main concerns about the organisation. It appears to have aspirations to create some kind of polity and perhaps even claim sovereign status, which is an alarming thought to put it mildly.

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About as alarming as… a sovereign entity being propped up be capsuleers and allowing them to be its primary representatives in cluster politics?

Or… better yet, the ambiguity of capsuleer entities, and such claiming sovereign polity rights in outer regions?

I find myself disappointed in your poor logic there, Callisto. I thought you were a smart girl, and that is not much on display here.

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I am not aware of either scenario actually happening.

A sovereign entity propped up and represented by capsuleers?

Capsuleer terminology regarding the Outer Regions lacks legal foundation. What people mean is ownership, which can and often does change hands, or title to property. Ownership is not at all the same as sovereignty, which is an inalienable right to political self-determination. This is why none of the cluster’s sovereign entities recognises the big null blocs in multilateral institutions. They may own territory but they don’t, legally, have sovereignty over it.

Similarly, BosAc may have been given ownership rights over territory in Molden Heath but sovereignty still rests with the Republic despite their obvious delusions of grandeur.

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Congratulations, its… almost like you’ve been friends with the lead diplomat of such an entity for the past four years dear! I will be sure to remember what you think therein that my people have no sovereign rights to our homeworld, and that our choices to allow capsuleers as our main representing force is impossible!

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I assumed it was obvious that I was referring to entities in New Eden.

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Implication and ‘the obvious’ should never be assumed as apparent in a text based formatting, Menkalinan. We will speak later.

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Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Republic Security Services is an arm of the government of the Tribal Republic. So, if someone’s been declared an ‘enemy’ of the RSS… yeah, that’s ‘Enemy of the Republic’ status, more or less. Just because individuals still have decent standings due to CONCORD’s regulations, that doesn’t mean the Republic wouldn’t love to put all of you on ice, forever.

There’s no ambiguity in capsuleer sovereign rights in nullsec. CONCORD makes those determinations based on infrastructure maintenance costs we pay to them every month. And they keep pretty clear track of who’s on the hook for which infrastructure. It’s pretty clear cut, in fact.

Except, you know, for that being exactly the terminology CONCORD uses in the upkeep agreements, and echoed in their ratings like the ‘Sovereignty Index’.