A long time ago, the Galactic United Nations incentivised the creation of robotic mining colonies in far away galaxies. The military purpose of these colonies is to provide a shell of productive galaxies around the civilised galaxy or galaxies; in the long term this productive shell of colonies is hoped to lead to the development of an even farther shell of emplacements intended as an outer shell of defense, protecting not just the civilised galaxies but also the shell of productive galaxies which hopefully will be useable to launch the farther-away defensive shell. Beyond that, who knows? Possibly eventually more and more shells of defensive and productive robotic colonies.
A major part of the incentive programme involved a secured loans programme allowing capable persons or groups to launch a colony "on credit".
That turned out to possibly be a mistake; it led to a lot of idle colonies that made no attempt to actually be productive, let alone to make any payments toward their startup loans.
Thus were the Galactic Repo Corps born; a series of Corps, one per abandoned colony, taking the reins of such colonies to put them on the path to productivity and eventual repayment of their debts.
Nowadays there are many Repo Corps, some of which have already paid off the startup loans and are well into profit. Some, however, despair of ever being able to service their debt using only the raw materials the planets they control can produce. Others are in a midrange zone where it is uncertain whether or not their raw materials production can dig them out of debt, or even if it can, it will take a long long long time to do so.
(They have been running since 2012 or so; by a long long long time we mean decades, maybe a lot of decades.)
Thus we are now in an era in which intergalactic mining Corps and other high-income endeavours are looking at the Galactic Repo Corps that have yet to pay off their debts and wondering whether, and if so when, their own treasuries might reach a scale at which it will become feasible to try to buy up those Corps and pay off their debts for them so as to have control of more free-and-clear intergalactic mining Corps.
Basically it has become a question of how many fully paid-for intergalactic mining Corps it would take to pay off the debts of some of those that are still deeply in debt.
The Galactic United Nations of course likes this kind of thinking a lot, because after all it guaranteed those loans and thus is "on the hook" if the attempt to get all the colonies paid for somehow fails.
All the intergalactic mining Corps control at least seven entire planets; most of their planets are spread across several galaxies. There are no plans to send out any new colony ships from the Civilised Galaxies, it is up to the Corps already active out there to continue exploitation of those "galaxies far far away".
Thus the possibility of taking control of such a Corp is kind of a last chance at getting into the lucrative field of intergalactic mining at that scale, plus of course centuries down the line it might well be feasible to start turning mined-out planets into civilised worlds; that remains to be seen and depends partly on the quality of terraforming the robotic colonies eventually prove capable of.
This is possibly the kind of opportunity that should appeal to "gamer guilds" and the like: organisations of many players, controlling large amounts of in-game capital.
Possibly it might also be of interest to venture capitalists, as a way to maximise income from large holdings of in-game capital they might purchase on the various markets using out-of-game capital.
Taking advantage of such opportunities might also be becoming harder, since for example we have launched a Crossfire-RPG "Play-to-Earn server" and thus now might no longer need to allow random internet passers-by to directly join the Crossfire-RPG server that implements the Galactic Diplomacy Planet to which one would most likely need to send delegates in order to negotiate this and other opportunities in which galactic diplomacy is involved.
That is to say, now that we have another server available for play-to-earn using the Crossfire-RPG platform it seems very feasible that we could filter who gets into the Galactic Diplomacy Planet server by having initial creation of Crossfire-RPG characters take place on the Play-to-Earn server, having characters take passage from there to get to the Galactic Diplomacy Planet.
Doing that would also make already having a character or characters on the Galactic Diplomacy Planet's server a nice little bonus for being an "early adopter". Possibly it could even create a market for such characters, so that such players could, if no longer interested in galactic and intergalactic diplomacy, sell characters on that server to newcomers who wish to avoid the possibly long and tedious process of first having to establish themselves on the new Play-to-Earn server before being able to take passage to the Galactic Diplomacy Planet's server.
I will not bother trying to detail here various characteristics of the potentially available intergalactic mining Corps, because of course being a venue where such information might be unearthed is part of the function and purpose of the Galactic Diplomacy Planet. :)
-MarkM-
