Re: [FH] Alarishi Sovereignity

>even if there wasn't a lease, you might not care if there were
residents.
>say i establish the republic of tom, claim a rock, set up a
mining robot,
>and live out my days in the Smoke Ring Hilton as a perpetual
visitor. the
>sov is being useful and productive, so where's the problem?

The Emperor wants his cut.  Paying for all those warships ain't
cheap.

>another suggestion might be some sort of market scheme whereby
people
>could forcibly buy your land, so unless you were using it
productively,
>and thus had cash to defend it, someone else would get hold of
it. maybe
>if someone goes to the imperial property court with an offer,
if the
>holders can get together enough cash to beat the offer, they
keep it (and
>don't need to pay), whereas if they can't, they have to accept
the offer.
>it's a rather mad scheme, but it might work. the tenants might
also be
>able to get loans from other parties interested in them staying
there, eg
>trading partners, which of course would be purely paper, as the
money
>would never actually be spent, whether the tenants get to stay
or not. i
>can't decide if this is communist or libertarian, though. it's
probably
>just bananas.

I thought about that but rejected it, since you may very well
have sunk 1 MCr into the place but not have the cash on hand
right now to counter a hostile takeover, and may not be able to
get a loan.

>> His Imperial Majesty is tentatively going to retroactively
award
>> sovereignty status to MHE Corp's planetoid, despite its zero
>> citizen count.
>
>hmm. don't do that unless you have a pretty solid explanation
of why a
>zero-population sov can exist, whilst they aren't incredibly
common (there
>must be business advantages to setting up various empty sovs).

Not especially.  Usually it would be cheaper to set up in a
location where people already have habitats.

BTW I neglected to separate out two concepts in the course of
this discussion.  "Citizens" could mean either "people who have
a part in the political life of the sov", or it might just mean
"residents".  MHE-hab thus would have Residents (the techs) but
not Voters.