<cast_spell_of_lesser_thread_necromancy />
Natural 1 again. Dammit.
Geez - has it only been three months? Seems longer than that. Anyway, I've finished setting the force dispositions for the various factions in Epsilon, and I'm finally ready to resume work on the encounter tables. I finalized my encounter table mechanism yesterday and I've pretty well dropped the notion of working with any year in Epsilon other than 2680 for the Elegy campaign, though I don't discount the notion of working with the map again in the future.
So, the work I'm focused on right now involves establishing trade routes throughout the Sector, the idea being that encounters would be more likely along them. I'm finding it difficult to establish a criteria upon which the trade routes will be based. What I've done so far is to determine the number of nav points in each system (including the number of out-sector jumps if possible), the total population of each system based on the work I did with bases a while ago, and the types of bases in each system. I'm also going to consider what factions have representation in each system - for governments, corporations and guilds, this will be easy. For paramilitary groups (militias, pirates, retros, etc.), this is going to be more difficult to establish. I also have the Landreich to consider; they hold no territory in Epsilon but I imagine they might do a fair amount of trade in the Sector.
So far I'm thinking that there will be trade routes going in and out of Firekka. Yes, I know that Firekka was "well off the trade routes" in 2654, before they joined the Confederation. But I imagined that changed shortly after Operation Crusade, with them gaining Confederation membership and having an established specialty trade good (namely Firekka's finest). I've been analyzing routes between the homeworlds (using Epsilon Prime as the capital of the UBW, something I establish in the campaign). The route between Firekka and Landreich appears to be particularly convoluted.
Speaking of which - maybe one of y'all knows this: how stringent are the quarantines on the Telemon and Trafalgar systems, respectively? Is it that no one is allowed into the system at all, or that they are just not allowed to land on the planets? I can see a big point of contention economically if the quarantines are absolute - namely in terms of trade between Firekka and Landreich as well isolating the "lower" Union of Border Worlds (the members of Enigma Sector and Antares Quadrant, including the capital) from the "upper" part (Deneb and Sa'Khan Quadrant, as well as Vega Sector).
Do y'all have any thoughts on the topic? Where would y'all establish trade routes within the Sector?
