> On Feb 1, 2016, at 10:18 AM, xxxxxx@mail.de wrote:
>
> In Traveller Terms, however, how is it different from offering favorable conditions for a world to join the 3I? I imagine that in Milieu Zero there would be a lot of that, offering special deals to key worlds, e.g. in the intersection of trade routes. Specially in low population, democratic worlds, offering direct citizen payments in the new currency would be rather cost-effective (and lead to high local inflation later on...). I can easily imagine a couple of scenarios around the in-situ negotiations.

The Zhunastu School would probably make  use of this tactic in some cases, it’s close enough to their ‘make friends with the appropriate tyrants and sell them arms’ normal tactic.

Going to Traveller’s antecedents, it’s akin to some of the plot in ‘Space Viking’, where Lucas Trask offers an alliance and shipbuilding assistance to Amaterasu. Of course it’s was kind of at the point of a Happy Fun Ball, since he’d raided the planet only a few years earlier.

I expect the growth of the 3I to be similarly messy, although the long history of most of it as part of the FIRST Imperium would still carry cultural weight, as well as (in most cases) far less of a TL difference between the natives and outsiders.

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs