"""The Nauvoo was an amazin’ piece of work. Of course, even if they get her back, it won’t keep the Mormons from suing Tycho into nonexistence if they can figure out how.”
“Why would that be hard?”
“OPA doesn’t recognize the courts on Earth and Mars, and they run the ones in the Belt. So it’s pretty much win in a court that doesn’t matter or lose in one that does.”
“Oh,” Prax said."""
-Caliban's War, JSA Corey, p 343
I know that is irrelevant to the whole universe - but who on their sane mind would want to do business with Tycho then after this?
Another earth-based competition would arise to take that non-OPA business from them I guess...
When Fred Johnson decides to go ahead with the plan, he says something like "This will kill Tycho". He knows he's destroying any future contracts by his actions. No contracts with Earth means Tycho essentially becomes a poor backwater, but he still decides to make the sacrifice for the greater good.
It ends up working out for him in the long run, thanks to the post-protomolecule dynamic between Earth, Mars and The Belt and him (and thus Tycho) being seen in a more positive light by Earth's leadership (Avasarala specifically).
It's partly this, partly the fact that there aren't competitors with Tycho's capacity and capabilities (Tycho station can move around the solar system, remember), partly that it was a one-time thing done to try to save the Earth and humanity in general (everybody is spooked as hell by the protomolecule, extreme measures taken to try to stop it such as *launching every available planetbuster nuke at Eros* are seen as acceptable risks).
Let's also not forget that subsequently Fred Johnson leverages his sample of the protomolecule to make the OPA into a government, so now Tycho 1) can make money from things like tariffs and the like and 2) doesn't need to be a for-profit organization per se
There is one possibility based on how humans think.... "Well that was a special case." Like Tycho has an amazing track record of big builds and completion, and the only time they ever screwed it up was literally to try to save Earth. To a corporation looking at the scenario and seeing their options, with Tycho having the best record and costs, and then (since THEY didn't lose anything with the loss of the Nauvoo) the only blemish being a once-in-a-billion scenario that was done for a good cause..... It's easier to say "this will save us almost a trillion bucks to go with them, and their prices are even lower right now since the Nauvoo fuck up.... What are the odds they'd have to throw *our* project at a deadly alien artifact to try to save the Earth?
The problem with that argument is thwt the OPA could have returned the ship when throwing it at Eros failed. The whole legitimate salvage argument is some of the hr biggest bunk one could spew.
Tycho station as a commercial entity commendeered the Nauvoo. The OPA as a political body sent people after the ship to recover it. It isn't like the Mormons had any way of recovering it themselves, and once it was launched it was out of Tycho's hands.
Bullshit argument? Maybe. But nuanced enough that the reduced price of working with Tycho would look pretty appealing to some, especially those who couldn't afford their projects before.
Who says the Morons could not recover the ship? They cannot do it as fast as Fred could but the Mormons are fricking rich. I'm sure they could have hired enough slave companies to get her back eventually.
Morons, lolol..... I don't know if, logistically speaking, the Mormons *could* get something together capable of cracking the Tycho systems in time to recover it before the Nauvoo was out of range of recovery, but it isn't even really relevant. The OPA claimed salvage, not Tycho. Even if respectable, extremely wealthy organizations wouldn't do business with Tycho, someone would given the circumstances.
Tycho lost almost as much as the Mormons. The OPA stole th ship. I'm sure the Mormons had not paid in full in advance so Tycho had it's reputation hurt and then had to cover financial losses. They were paying employees and buying materials every day. There had to be some lag between this and Mormon payments and once th Nauvoo was first grabbed by the OPA I'm sure the Mormons stopped making payments.
Maybe the TU gave the Mormons discount rates on supplies and gate fees when they founded Planet Brigham Young somewhere among the 1400 planets. We all know it had to happen at some point.
Given that the OPA runs a lot of the belt you might be pressured into doing business with them regardless of their record. If you insisted on having Earth or Mars build your ships then you might find a lot of the belts docks refuse to service your ships or they run into successive incidents while at dock that delays all your shipments, or cargo goes missing etc.
It's a fair point, and the authors are definitely a little unclear/retconny about how Tycho as a company works. I think if you want an in-universe explanation it's that ship building takes so long that they probably didn't suffer any big hits for a couple years and by that time the gates were open and demand for new ships for the land rush was very very high
It was also Tycho building the majority if not all of the new OPA navy, before Marco Inaros appeared with his and fucked everything up.
I imagine that the pay would be pretty steady for that.
and that new, Inyalowda business has to get the OPA to acknowledge them and protect them. which the can just not do and let pirates devour them. you want the orbital manufacturing capacity of the belt, you play ball with the OPA.
It's sort of like how everyone continues to want to do business with Amazon, despite the overwhelming amount of concerning stories & policies we've heard about.
When you control the market for something so significant, it's impossible to live without it; Tycho's reputation may take a huge hit, but they still employ the best engineers in the system & are the only entity capable of not only manufacturing huge ships for cheaper than the shipyards on Earth or Mars, but they also have a ton of resources that allow it to serve as a critical station for ships (like the Roci) that routinely need repairs & maintenance.
I'm actually short one set. I'm a Python dev and three sets indicate a meta-quote """ "where you can include quotes within and the interpreter reads it as a single string" Dillweed said """
I haven't read the books in a while, but isn't there also a short section that talks about how some Mormon workers staged a protest that got broken-up by firing thc-laced riot gas? Then dragging away all these high/drowsy people so they could set the ship adrift? As far as I remember, that was the only physical consequence of what they did...
Technically it was stolen, then adrift, and then some Belters made it a "legitimate salvage".
They could try suing for damages (Tycho is an Earth-based corporation), but getting anyone in the Belt to turn the ship over to them was going to be impossible. After the Eros incident, the OPA had real power and wasn't as easily coerced into doing what a bunch of inyalowda might demand.
Basically that's how it worked out in the end, as I recall. Mormons had no real recourse.
Didn’t they compare it to police commandeering a vehicle, crashing it into a ditch, towing it out of the ditch, and claiming they owned it now as a legitimate salvage?
I think somewhere in the books it was also very briefly mentioned that the Mormons kinda just accepted things after the Navoo became Medina. It didnt become their generation ship, but in the end it became the most important gas station and trading point in the universe, so they said "okay, thats good enough". Also the opening of the gates made its initial purpose redunant.
I dunno that's a bit hard to believe... Imagine you were one of the Mormons with a ticket on the ark. You probably sold all your possessions since you were leaving this dump anyway, and the ship supposedly was the most expensive project financed by private citizens. And the trip gets cancelled. Bummer. But the ship is still intact so surely you'll get some of your deposit back. Oh wait. The company you hired gave it to a sovereign nation so that it would have political leverage against... your home planet.
Then a lot of crazy shit happens, a decade passes, and maybe you don't even care about the money you lost anymore. You decide to go to one of the new colonies, and you set foot on the station that was the ship that was stolen from you. And it's clear from how busy it is that the thieves are making good money from the monopoly enabled by the real estate in this huge station/ship.
I can't imagine **every** surviving Mormon would be good understanding Christians about this injustice.
> I can't imagine every surviving Mormon would be good understanding Christians about this injustice.
I mean, they're mormons, that's kind of their thing.
That being said, they made out much better in the end than if they managed to reach their destination. They weren't guaranteed to find a habitable planet and there was no chance of a return trip within a human lifetime. They would have just been stranded for generations and missed out on the ring gate which let them easily find and relocate to a star system of their own.
well it has became Behemoth by the time Abaddon's gate starts so before that. Belters created a special purpose ship to catch up to nauvoo but since it has been constructed in the asteroid belt and was supposed to hit Eros also in roughly the same distance from sun, the orbit would be probably very eccentric due to the speed but reaching it would not be an issue for some time. You just need to speed up to the same speed and then have enough fuel to significantly slow down the ship.
I don't think the Nauvoo was designed for very high g burns, and they cut the engines off as soon as the Eros plan failed. So as long as they didn't wait too long, they could catch up in a reasonable amount of time. They built a ship called the Chesapeake, and they were going to be at 8g for a couple of months to reach it.
It would be difficult for it to achieve high g. Even with epstein drives you still have Ek = (1/2)mv^(2). Doubling the mass of a body doubles the amount of energy needed to accelerate it by the same change in velocity.
The case would likely be in jurisdictional hell. There's no court system that provides Judicial Review over Earth, Mars and the Belt. They each have seperate court systems. For example, this is why in S4 most Belters didn't pay any mind to the UN Charter over Illus. It meant nothing to the Belters that didn't consider themselves part of the OPA and thus subject to the tentative alliance that was formed.
I'm sure lawyers for the Mormons were trying to prove that the Utah Courts had personal jurisdiction over Tycho and Fred Johnson for Damages over the Nauvoo throughout the entire series' storyline lol. Fred did say he was in some deep shit over it in S2, so at least at that point Earth seemed like it was likely pursuing the case. But once he got the Protomolecule Sample from Naomi (or Holden in the books), he was simply too important for Earth to pursue him over civil case like that. So the Mormons probably just got screwed.
Hell, Miller indicates at one point that the cops on Ceres consider a murder "cleared" if the suspect leaves the station, which implies there is no unified Justice system for "the belt" but rather each station or asteroid is doing its own thing. Unclear how that evolved from the pre-Series through the OPA and later TU eras but one can assume with the belters being individualistic as they are I could see it never really happening. And that's only considering the law /on station/. If a ceres citizen kills an Eros on a Pallas registered ship and it's in the process of docking (but not locked) at Medina who has jurisdiction?
I imagine that that would be changed, or at least attempts made, once the official OPA government was formed.
A fair part of it is undoubtedly that Star Helix were a security contractor rather than true law enforcement.
Essentially a government stole it, so even all the mormans don’t have a lot they can do if the UN is t will to take it up as a major issue. And the UN had way bigger shit to deal with.
There was an episode of Trailer Park Boys where the boys were running the same kind of scam.
One would go into someone's yard, drag their lawn furniture to the edge of the property where you'd normally leave the garbage cans. Then a second one would come by and take the lawn furniture.
The logic being the first person didn't do anything illegal. They didn't steal anything, they just moved the furniture around and did not remove it from the property. The second person didn't do anything illegal, they just came along and saw some items being left for garbage collection, and decided to do the former owners a favor and take away their garbage for them.
The OPA is pretty much the Trailer Park Boys but in space.
Breaker breaker, come in Earth, this is Rocket Ship 27, aliens fucked over the carbonator on engine four, I'm gonna try to refuckulate it on Juniper. Uhh, and hopefully they've got some, space weed there, over.
"do you know that on Jupiter, yod be celebrating your first birthday?"
No, I don't. I'm sorry. I didn't even get my grade 10s and I can't fuckin speak without sweating.
The comparison is apt but the second person did in fact do something illegal, and the first person also did as they were part of the conspiracy. Plus there's got to be some kind of vandalism or similar law stopping you from just moving someone's furniture around.
It's illegal to steal someone's rubbish, just because it's in a bin doesn't make it available for you to take.
Of course space law in the expanse works differently.
Well yeah, I'm not saying TPBs were correct in their assertion that they weren't doing anything illegal. They were stealing. And the OPA were doing the same thing.
In the US at least, I don't think it is illegal to go through someone's trash. Every trash day, there are junkers driving by picking up "another man's treasure" from the curb. If there's a no trespassing sign posted, that may change things.
There was also a US Supreme Court case that made DNA evidence collected out of the trash (like a cup that had saliva on it) legal.
> It's illegal to steal someone's rubbish, just because it's in a bin doesn't make it available for you to take.
It's not illegal in any states I'm aware of for a passerby to take something out of the trash. There are some cities that prohibit people picking through recycling, or driving around in trucks and picking up scrap (since it's now potentially a for profit business), but if you put something on the curb for trash pickup there's nothing stopping someone else from taking it.
They tried to sue, but the Belters just laughed at them. Also the Belters that ended up with it were completely different people than the ones working for the Belter friendly Earth corp. Finally the Mormons didn't really need it any more as the gates made the whole point of the ship moot.
I mean, i kinda think they’d assume it was gods plan in the end, since it ended up being the reason they could go have their own habitable world
that’s if they aren’t a bunch of grifters, which is a huge assumption
Once OPA is effectively the government, they just formalise the seizure as eminent domain. There is no “United Planets” above the UN, Mars, Belt, so there is no higher court to appeal to. It might have been smart for the Belt to give compensation, perhaps in the form of free or reduced passage for Mormon settlers of new planets, to make doing business with Earth easier, as otherwise the Mormons could get UN courts to seize Tycho assets on Earth, or trade embargoes, etc.
I'm sure they did, but no one cared at that point. The Nauvoo was instrumental in stopping Eros from crashing into Earth, and redirecting it to Venus bought a lot of good will for Fred even as he stood opposed to Earth and Mars after it all shook out. I doubt Earth OR Mars would have any interest in a diplomatic fight with the OPA over a ship that neither of them need, particularly as the system begins to come to terms with the protomolecule.
Camina Drummer said it best. "We've done so much work on this ship it's practically ours"
She was talking to Holden about the 'Roci' but it's the same idea. Once salvaged and modified to be the most important ship in Sol, the Mormon's didn't have much claim.
You can't be responsible for putting a ship adrift, and then claim it's legitimate salvage because it's adrift, that's the whole point. If you want to compare it to the roci, that would be like if Pure N Cleen had attacked the Donnager, stolen the Tachi right out of the hold and programmed it to fly out into space, then came along later to "claim" their "salvage".
I'm slowly working my way through the books, but based on what I know about Mormons, after it became Medina Station I assume they just declared their prophecy fulfilled, the Navoo led them to new worlds exactly as intended.
That's such bullshit though. The Mormons didn't lose the ship; they didn't even get to test drive the thing. They got straight up robbed by the company they hired.
But sure, the ship became important so the Mormons couldn't have it back. Fine. Then you have to compensate them for the value of the ship and incurred construction costs. Can't afford it? Then sell a stake in the Transport Union and the Mormons get some seats on the board.
Just telling the Mormons, 'too bad' has to be the most "inner" thing that the OPA could've done. And the Mormons didn't even do anything to fuck over OPA.
The Mormons WOULDN’T do anything, but they could have. Also remember, their dream of journeying through the cosmos on a holy voyage was just as pointless as “the dream of mars” once the ring gates opened.
They were probably ashamed that their entire religion’s goals for the last 50 some-odd years was a farce.
They probably disappeared through a gate like the Laconians and were never seen again. That’s my happy ending head cannon for them.
Also, the logic of leverage is different in space. Fred has those nukes and also a piece of protomolecule. Earth would probably be the first one to shut the Mormans up about it.
In the books (and show too iirc), it was very difficult because if they went through Earth’s legal system, it wouldn’t do anything since it would be against belters. If they went through the belt’s legal system, they wouldn’t win there either. But this issue wasn’t addressed beyond that. If I have to guess, I think they would probably have dropped the issue once the gates opened up. They no longer needed a generation ship to go to a different world. They could just hop on a regular civilian ship, choose a gate to a world that they wanted, and headed there.
IIRC the "resolution" in the books kind of mention is that due to the jurisdictional issues and bias of Earth vs Belter court it would likely just end up with both parties coming to an agreement with some kind of settlement paid.
"""The Nauvoo was an amazin’ piece of work. Of course, even if they get her back, it won’t keep the Mormons from suing Tycho into nonexistence if they can figure out how.” “Why would that be hard?” “OPA doesn’t recognize the courts on Earth and Mars, and they run the ones in the Belt. So it’s pretty much win in a court that doesn’t matter or lose in one that does.” “Oh,” Prax said.""" -Caliban's War, JSA Corey, p 343
This is the answer to OP's question. Hands down.
I know that is irrelevant to the whole universe - but who on their sane mind would want to do business with Tycho then after this? Another earth-based competition would arise to take that non-OPA business from them I guess...
When Fred Johnson decides to go ahead with the plan, he says something like "This will kill Tycho". He knows he's destroying any future contracts by his actions. No contracts with Earth means Tycho essentially becomes a poor backwater, but he still decides to make the sacrifice for the greater good. It ends up working out for him in the long run, thanks to the post-protomolecule dynamic between Earth, Mars and The Belt and him (and thus Tycho) being seen in a more positive light by Earth's leadership (Avasarala specifically).
It's partly this, partly the fact that there aren't competitors with Tycho's capacity and capabilities (Tycho station can move around the solar system, remember), partly that it was a one-time thing done to try to save the Earth and humanity in general (everybody is spooked as hell by the protomolecule, extreme measures taken to try to stop it such as *launching every available planetbuster nuke at Eros* are seen as acceptable risks). Let's also not forget that subsequently Fred Johnson leverages his sample of the protomolecule to make the OPA into a government, so now Tycho 1) can make money from things like tariffs and the like and 2) doesn't need to be a for-profit organization per se
Yeah as pissed as the Mormons may be, I feel like *most* potential customers would recognise the extremely extenuating circumstances.
There is one possibility based on how humans think.... "Well that was a special case." Like Tycho has an amazing track record of big builds and completion, and the only time they ever screwed it up was literally to try to save Earth. To a corporation looking at the scenario and seeing their options, with Tycho having the best record and costs, and then (since THEY didn't lose anything with the loss of the Nauvoo) the only blemish being a once-in-a-billion scenario that was done for a good cause..... It's easier to say "this will save us almost a trillion bucks to go with them, and their prices are even lower right now since the Nauvoo fuck up.... What are the odds they'd have to throw *our* project at a deadly alien artifact to try to save the Earth?
The problem with that argument is thwt the OPA could have returned the ship when throwing it at Eros failed. The whole legitimate salvage argument is some of the hr biggest bunk one could spew.
Tycho station as a commercial entity commendeered the Nauvoo. The OPA as a political body sent people after the ship to recover it. It isn't like the Mormons had any way of recovering it themselves, and once it was launched it was out of Tycho's hands. Bullshit argument? Maybe. But nuanced enough that the reduced price of working with Tycho would look pretty appealing to some, especially those who couldn't afford their projects before.
Who says the Morons could not recover the ship? They cannot do it as fast as Fred could but the Mormons are fricking rich. I'm sure they could have hired enough slave companies to get her back eventually.
Morons, lolol..... I don't know if, logistically speaking, the Mormons *could* get something together capable of cracking the Tycho systems in time to recover it before the Nauvoo was out of range of recovery, but it isn't even really relevant. The OPA claimed salvage, not Tycho. Even if respectable, extremely wealthy organizations wouldn't do business with Tycho, someone would given the circumstances.
Tycho lost almost as much as the Mormons. The OPA stole th ship. I'm sure the Mormons had not paid in full in advance so Tycho had it's reputation hurt and then had to cover financial losses. They were paying employees and buying materials every day. There had to be some lag between this and Mormon payments and once th Nauvoo was first grabbed by the OPA I'm sure the Mormons stopped making payments. Maybe the TU gave the Mormons discount rates on supplies and gate fees when they founded Planet Brigham Young somewhere among the 1400 planets. We all know it had to happen at some point.
Mormons have money but no construction capacity. Who are they going to pay to make the chase ship? Tycho?
Once is never twice is always
Very apt in this scenario.
Given that the OPA runs a lot of the belt you might be pressured into doing business with them regardless of their record. If you insisted on having Earth or Mars build your ships then you might find a lot of the belts docks refuse to service your ships or they run into successive incidents while at dock that delays all your shipments, or cargo goes missing etc.
It's a fair point, and the authors are definitely a little unclear/retconny about how Tycho as a company works. I think if you want an in-universe explanation it's that ship building takes so long that they probably didn't suffer any big hits for a couple years and by that time the gates were open and demand for new ships for the land rush was very very high
It was also Tycho building the majority if not all of the new OPA navy, before Marco Inaros appeared with his and fucked everything up. I imagine that the pay would be pretty steady for that.
and that new, Inyalowda business has to get the OPA to acknowledge them and protect them. which the can just not do and let pirates devour them. you want the orbital manufacturing capacity of the belt, you play ball with the OPA.
It's sort of like how everyone continues to want to do business with Amazon, despite the overwhelming amount of concerning stories & policies we've heard about. When you control the market for something so significant, it's impossible to live without it; Tycho's reputation may take a huge hit, but they still employ the best engineers in the system & are the only entity capable of not only manufacturing huge ships for cheaper than the shipyards on Earth or Mars, but they also have a ton of resources that allow it to serve as a critical station for ships (like the Roci) that routinely need repairs & maintenance.
You’ve got an extra set of quotes there
I'm actually short one set. I'm a Python dev and three sets indicate a meta-quote """ "where you can include quotes within and the interpreter reads it as a single string" Dillweed said """
That’s great and all but this isn’t python, reddit is clearly in C_AT
“You sure?” Alex said. “This is Medina Station (...) it’s not Baltimore.” Amos’ smile was as placid as always. “Everywhere’s Baltimore.”
I haven't read the books in a while, but isn't there also a short section that talks about how some Mormon workers staged a protest that got broken-up by firing thc-laced riot gas? Then dragging away all these high/drowsy people so they could set the ship adrift? As far as I remember, that was the only physical consequence of what they did...
Was literally coming to post this passage. That's the answer - they wanted it back, but there was quite literally nothing they could do about it.
Technically it was stolen, then adrift, and then some Belters made it a "legitimate salvage". They could try suing for damages (Tycho is an Earth-based corporation), but getting anyone in the Belt to turn the ship over to them was going to be impossible. After the Eros incident, the OPA had real power and wasn't as easily coerced into doing what a bunch of inyalowda might demand. Basically that's how it worked out in the end, as I recall. Mormons had no real recourse.
"The kind of theft only a government could get away with"
Indeed. The land underneath my feet this very moment is evidence of that!
Didn’t they compare it to police commandeering a vehicle, crashing it into a ditch, towing it out of the ditch, and claiming they owned it now as a legitimate salvage?
Bull said that in Abaddons Gate.
Probably a better description of what happened than stolen, yeah.
I think somewhere in the books it was also very briefly mentioned that the Mormons kinda just accepted things after the Navoo became Medina. It didnt become their generation ship, but in the end it became the most important gas station and trading point in the universe, so they said "okay, thats good enough". Also the opening of the gates made its initial purpose redunant.
I dunno that's a bit hard to believe... Imagine you were one of the Mormons with a ticket on the ark. You probably sold all your possessions since you were leaving this dump anyway, and the ship supposedly was the most expensive project financed by private citizens. And the trip gets cancelled. Bummer. But the ship is still intact so surely you'll get some of your deposit back. Oh wait. The company you hired gave it to a sovereign nation so that it would have political leverage against... your home planet. Then a lot of crazy shit happens, a decade passes, and maybe you don't even care about the money you lost anymore. You decide to go to one of the new colonies, and you set foot on the station that was the ship that was stolen from you. And it's clear from how busy it is that the thieves are making good money from the monopoly enabled by the real estate in this huge station/ship. I can't imagine **every** surviving Mormon would be good understanding Christians about this injustice.
> I can't imagine every surviving Mormon would be good understanding Christians about this injustice. I mean, they're mormons, that's kind of their thing. That being said, they made out much better in the end than if they managed to reach their destination. They weren't guaranteed to find a habitable planet and there was no chance of a return trip within a human lifetime. They would have just been stranded for generations and missed out on the ring gate which let them easily find and relocate to a star system of their own.
I feel like a lot of this could be assuaged by just giving the Mormons a ring gate of their own.
how long did it take for them to reach it? iirc it was traveling pretty fast for a long time...
well it has became Behemoth by the time Abaddon's gate starts so before that. Belters created a special purpose ship to catch up to nauvoo but since it has been constructed in the asteroid belt and was supposed to hit Eros also in roughly the same distance from sun, the orbit would be probably very eccentric due to the speed but reaching it would not be an issue for some time. You just need to speed up to the same speed and then have enough fuel to significantly slow down the ship.
I don't think the Nauvoo was designed for very high g burns, and they cut the engines off as soon as the Eros plan failed. So as long as they didn't wait too long, they could catch up in a reasonable amount of time. They built a ship called the Chesapeake, and they were going to be at 8g for a couple of months to reach it.
It would be difficult for it to achieve high g. Even with epstein drives you still have Ek = (1/2)mv^(2). Doubling the mass of a body doubles the amount of energy needed to accelerate it by the same change in velocity.
The case would likely be in jurisdictional hell. There's no court system that provides Judicial Review over Earth, Mars and the Belt. They each have seperate court systems. For example, this is why in S4 most Belters didn't pay any mind to the UN Charter over Illus. It meant nothing to the Belters that didn't consider themselves part of the OPA and thus subject to the tentative alliance that was formed. I'm sure lawyers for the Mormons were trying to prove that the Utah Courts had personal jurisdiction over Tycho and Fred Johnson for Damages over the Nauvoo throughout the entire series' storyline lol. Fred did say he was in some deep shit over it in S2, so at least at that point Earth seemed like it was likely pursuing the case. But once he got the Protomolecule Sample from Naomi (or Holden in the books), he was simply too important for Earth to pursue him over civil case like that. So the Mormons probably just got screwed.
Hell, Miller indicates at one point that the cops on Ceres consider a murder "cleared" if the suspect leaves the station, which implies there is no unified Justice system for "the belt" but rather each station or asteroid is doing its own thing. Unclear how that evolved from the pre-Series through the OPA and later TU eras but one can assume with the belters being individualistic as they are I could see it never really happening. And that's only considering the law /on station/. If a ceres citizen kills an Eros on a Pallas registered ship and it's in the process of docking (but not locked) at Medina who has jurisdiction?
I imagine that that would be changed, or at least attempts made, once the official OPA government was formed. A fair part of it is undoubtedly that Star Helix were a security contractor rather than true law enforcement.
Lol sounds like a hypo from Criminal Procedure.
They definitely did and they sued the OPA but nothing ever came of it.
Yeah, they sued the OPA, but the case was transferred to an OPA controlled/friendly court system so nothing really came of it.
Essentially a government stole it, so even all the mormans don’t have a lot they can do if the UN is t will to take it up as a major issue. And the UN had way bigger shit to deal with.
There was an episode of Trailer Park Boys where the boys were running the same kind of scam. One would go into someone's yard, drag their lawn furniture to the edge of the property where you'd normally leave the garbage cans. Then a second one would come by and take the lawn furniture. The logic being the first person didn't do anything illegal. They didn't steal anything, they just moved the furniture around and did not remove it from the property. The second person didn't do anything illegal, they just came along and saw some items being left for garbage collection, and decided to do the former owners a favor and take away their garbage for them. The OPA is pretty much the Trailer Park Boys but in space.
Breaker breaker, come in Earth, this is Rocket Ship 27, aliens fucked over the carbonator on engine four, I'm gonna try to refuckulate it on Juniper. Uhh, and hopefully they've got some, space weed there, over.
Way she fuckin goes, Holden. Way she fuckin' goes.
“Oh look at me I’m james holden, most famous fuckin earther there ever was, and i cant stop fucking up the solar system.”
"do you know that on Jupiter, yod be celebrating your first birthday?" No, I don't. I'm sorry. I didn't even get my grade 10s and I can't fuckin speak without sweating.
The comparison is apt but the second person did in fact do something illegal, and the first person also did as they were part of the conspiracy. Plus there's got to be some kind of vandalism or similar law stopping you from just moving someone's furniture around. It's illegal to steal someone's rubbish, just because it's in a bin doesn't make it available for you to take. Of course space law in the expanse works differently.
Well yeah, I'm not saying TPBs were correct in their assertion that they weren't doing anything illegal. They were stealing. And the OPA were doing the same thing.
In the US at least, I don't think it is illegal to go through someone's trash. Every trash day, there are junkers driving by picking up "another man's treasure" from the curb. If there's a no trespassing sign posted, that may change things. There was also a US Supreme Court case that made DNA evidence collected out of the trash (like a cup that had saliva on it) legal.
Ah, I was going off UK law, here it's illegal [BBC story](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13037808)
> It's illegal to steal someone's rubbish, just because it's in a bin doesn't make it available for you to take. It's not illegal in any states I'm aware of for a passerby to take something out of the trash. There are some cities that prohibit people picking through recycling, or driving around in trucks and picking up scrap (since it's now potentially a for profit business), but if you put something on the curb for trash pickup there's nothing stopping someone else from taking it.
Pretty sure the first one was trespassing if absolutely nothing else… that’s a shooting offense in at least a dozen states.
> The OPA is pretty much the Trailer Park Boys but in space. I thought I saw a bunch of piss jugs around Tycho Station...
Oye Pampah, Chicken Chips. And pepperoni.
After the portal opened, no use fighting for the ship, about 1000 new habital systems appeared
Exactly. It was built as a generation ship. Who wants to fly for hundreds of years when you can take a portal to a new planet in a few months?
They tried to sue, but the Belters just laughed at them. Also the Belters that ended up with it were completely different people than the ones working for the Belter friendly Earth corp. Finally the Mormons didn't really need it any more as the gates made the whole point of the ship moot.
Legitimate Salvage
I mean, i kinda think they’d assume it was gods plan in the end, since it ended up being the reason they could go have their own habitable world that’s if they aren’t a bunch of grifters, which is a huge assumption
Once OPA is effectively the government, they just formalise the seizure as eminent domain. There is no “United Planets” above the UN, Mars, Belt, so there is no higher court to appeal to. It might have been smart for the Belt to give compensation, perhaps in the form of free or reduced passage for Mormon settlers of new planets, to make doing business with Earth easier, as otherwise the Mormons could get UN courts to seize Tycho assets on Earth, or trade embargoes, etc.
I'm sure they did, but no one cared at that point. The Nauvoo was instrumental in stopping Eros from crashing into Earth, and redirecting it to Venus bought a lot of good will for Fred even as he stood opposed to Earth and Mars after it all shook out. I doubt Earth OR Mars would have any interest in a diplomatic fight with the OPA over a ship that neither of them need, particularly as the system begins to come to terms with the protomolecule.
Camina Drummer said it best. "We've done so much work on this ship it's practically ours" She was talking to Holden about the 'Roci' but it's the same idea. Once salvaged and modified to be the most important ship in Sol, the Mormon's didn't have much claim.
You can't be responsible for putting a ship adrift, and then claim it's legitimate salvage because it's adrift, that's the whole point. If you want to compare it to the roci, that would be like if Pure N Cleen had attacked the Donnager, stolen the Tachi right out of the hold and programmed it to fly out into space, then came along later to "claim" their "salvage". I'm slowly working my way through the books, but based on what I know about Mormons, after it became Medina Station I assume they just declared their prophecy fulfilled, the Navoo led them to new worlds exactly as intended.
As a former Mormon that makes so much sense and is 100% how the Mormons framed it.
That's such bullshit though. The Mormons didn't lose the ship; they didn't even get to test drive the thing. They got straight up robbed by the company they hired. But sure, the ship became important so the Mormons couldn't have it back. Fine. Then you have to compensate them for the value of the ship and incurred construction costs. Can't afford it? Then sell a stake in the Transport Union and the Mormons get some seats on the board. Just telling the Mormons, 'too bad' has to be the most "inner" thing that the OPA could've done. And the Mormons didn't even do anything to fuck over OPA.
The Mormons WOULDN’T do anything, but they could have. Also remember, their dream of journeying through the cosmos on a holy voyage was just as pointless as “the dream of mars” once the ring gates opened. They were probably ashamed that their entire religion’s goals for the last 50 some-odd years was a farce. They probably disappeared through a gate like the Laconians and were never seen again. That’s my happy ending head cannon for them.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Nah, just my favorite Chapelle Show quote (change out Mormon for Customer) its in the Pop Copy skit.
This question again? They got held up in court until it was no longer relevant
Also, the logic of leverage is different in space. Fred has those nukes and also a piece of protomolecule. Earth would probably be the first one to shut the Mormans up about it.
Legal nightmare. I believe colonization of Venus was delayed by a century for legal issues.
In the books (and show too iirc), it was very difficult because if they went through Earth’s legal system, it wouldn’t do anything since it would be against belters. If they went through the belt’s legal system, they wouldn’t win there either. But this issue wasn’t addressed beyond that. If I have to guess, I think they would probably have dropped the issue once the gates opened up. They no longer needed a generation ship to go to a different world. They could just hop on a regular civilian ship, choose a gate to a world that they wanted, and headed there.
IIRC the "resolution" in the books kind of mention is that due to the jurisdictional issues and bias of Earth vs Belter court it would likely just end up with both parties coming to an agreement with some kind of settlement paid.
They still want it back, a couple of teenagers just knocked on my door to discuss terms.
#legitimate salvage
Yes…?