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118

Note..: chapter highly influenced by the excellent works of Cannonshop in his excellent Ngoverse.

One of Jean-Luc's long-term investments from the beginning had been to try to attract as many spacers / belters / rockajackers as possible to New Vandenberg first, and then to Coromodir.

By 3068, this effort had resulted in a spacer population of about 250 million in the Coromodir system, which was the third system with the most spacers in the Inner Sphere/Periphery, being only surpassed by the Sol and Kowloon systems.

Arriving in small groups, they had come from large concentrations such as Sol, Cambiano and even Kowloon, and also from small communities that existed in all nations, with some even coming from the Kuritan space.

The end result was the availability of a huge population trained to work in space and with the investments made at Snowden and Snowden-L in equipment to both explore the asteroid belts and the Oort cloud, the shipyards at Coromodir were not short of either trained personnel nor of resources that in other systems would be rare and expensive.

Adjusting the legislation to support the specific needs of these communities had contributed a lot to the attractiveness of the whole system.

Another factors that helped attract several of these groups was the excellent repair and maintenance conditions offered at the dockyards and shipyards, as well as excellent credit conditions for the purchase of JumpShips for spacers, as long as they worked a large part of the time within Concordat. / Aurigan Province. Or the building of a complete teaching/healthcare system in selected asteroids. Since their needs were usually not taken care of and the spacers viewed all governments with suspicion, it took a lot of discussion and negotiations to put everything on tracks..

Another area of interest for spacers was skinsuits. A modern factory had been built in Coromodir to produce the best possible design. To this end, a competition had been instituted in which each improvement, each bug fix, was rewarded, leading to several spacers communicating their personal improvements.

The end result was a model superior in quality, autonomy and comfort to any other in existence. They were sold at a low profit to the local community, which was so large (in the millions), that the factory still made a small gain, but the reason was mostly politic, leading the managers to be overruled by the ruling family when they wanted to increase the price. Obviously, the price of the ones sold outside the Coromodir system was more in line with the desires of the company.

A side effect of these measures was that even JàrnFòlk's JumpShips began to appear in Coromodir with the first contact being made in 3065.

Reaching such results had been neither easy nor short journey, on the contrary. In the beginning, and in the first few decades, this policy had to face the many suspicions and distrusts of the belters and rockajackers, more than triple burned and deceived by successive governments in the Inner Sphere.

But, thanks to the same focused politics being pursued overtime accompanied by constant consultations with the interested parties, results were reached until we gathered in 3068 what was the third-largest concentration of spacers ever created.

From Kowloon, the biggest enclave outside Sol, spacers only started to arrive in numbers after the Clan invasions, any attempts before that only got very small results.

One thing interlinked with spacers is their JumpShips. You couldn't have ones without the others.

While the Concordat has five full shipyards – Bolthole, Taurus, New Vandenberg, Coromodir and Mechdur – all capable to deliver WarShips and JumpShips, they also had two more – Detroit and Pinard – that could only build Invaders. What they had in greater numbers were dockyards, that couldn't make new ships but were vital for the maintenance and small repairs of the growing fleet.

For example, in 3068, Coromodir had one full shipyard over Coromodir V, a dockyard on the asteroid belt that mostly served the spacer community, and was busy building another dockyard (that was planned to be latter transformed into a full shipyard) in the Oort cloud.

That network of dockyards was part of the reasons the spacers were eager to move to the Coromodir system as they knew their fleets could be maintained at a rhythm and price not possible in other nations, thanks in no small part to the accords with the Arano-Bassot. Outside Coromodir, they had, like in other states, to 'fight' to obtain access to said dockyards and shipyards, even if the Concordat treated them better than the other nations.

Another really important factor was that the space lanes inside the Concordat were much safer than in any other nation, a thing much appreciated by the spacer communities. Much of this came from the Pinto Class WarShips.

The growing fleet of Pintos Block 2 (with the 80 MG replaced by 24 AMS and the 800 SHS by 600 DHS – see chapter 68) was mostly used for 'Coastal Guard' missions, aka, patrolling against piracy / contraband and helping ships in distress. Even with some sold to the Magistracy, the Draconis Combine and even to the Outworlds Alliance, the remaining fleet was big enough to be the reason that any pirate would consider the Concordat space Death Ground and departed to less dangerous territories.

Apart from the increased number of people to work in space oriented jobs inside the Coromodir system – one of the reasons said system is economically growing faster than any other – the presence of the spacers JumpShips also accounted in no small part for the increase in trade inside the Aurigan Province and the rest of the Concordat. Inside the Province they represented about 20% of all commercial Jumpships, while in the Concordat they are about 10%. And more ships meant more trade.

By 3068, the Taurian Commercial Navy – and private companies- were doing business with all the Concordat territory as well as all the systems up to the Magistracy of Canopus, the old Lothian League and Illyrian Palatinate (these two now Taurian territory or Taurian vassals in all but name), the Circinus Federation, the Federated Commonwealth, the Draconis Combine, the Outworlds Alliance and the news states in the ex-FWL, and Earth.

Basically, they only didn't do business with the Capellan Confederation and the Clans. The Concordat was also selling WarShips to the Magistracy, the Outworld Alliance, the Combine and after the disaster in the Rasalhague space (and in urgent negotiations) with Earth, and was the only nation to do so.