Nomads in the HV?

penny wrote:Interesting. Even on present day Earth one can renounce ones citizenship. And there are 23 countries one can visit which require no passport. Perhaps there are systems in the HV which require no passport as well. Why can't one register as a vagabond when visiting places like Manticore? Having and wanting no residence. Would one even need a passport if one does not intend to disembark and simply hang out in system participating in digital trading in the MBS making a killing then moving on?

The system may request an ID for the purpose of executing and logging the transaction/trade and this is going to be for one of the most likely enforced reasons: taxation. If you don't have a passport from an issuing sovereign state that this one has a relationship with, they're not going to let you execute said trade.

There may be international laws or agreements that do provide some protection for citizenless people: for example, one may arrive in your system, say they've lost their citizenship and claim asylum. Otherwise, you're going to be under the mercy and goodwill of passers by. The Tom Hanks movie "The Terminal" comes to mind and that's based on a true story.

The system may be required to sell you fuel regardless of whether you have an ID, like there being regulations requiring every country to sell fuel to aeroplanes in distress. But given that the HV is more like naval, if you arrive in an unregistered ship with no ID, you're more likely to be impounded and arrested.

I would be surprised if there were not systems -- perhaps like Parmley Station -- privately owned and tolerant of such things. A veritable mobile home park in space. Charging only for lot space and what is needed or used.

Indeed, but who wants to live in Parmley? The few people we met there want out.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:[
Indeed, but who wants to live in Parmley? The few people we met there want out.

Parmley Station is a terrible or oddly good example, depending on your point of view.

They can't stop slavers from using the place as a meet point or intermittent base. There is ownership and it must have been registered and advertised somewhere in the past but nobody pays attention to that. Heck, Beowulf Biological Survey showed up to eliminated slavers and cold have just blasted the place to eliminate as a slaver location - at least they were going to try to take off the non-slaver locals.

It is home to its residents which are a mix of the original owner with a bunch generations of her descendants and people who they helped escape and then shelter from slavers. It's home. While the BBS group agreed to provide modern medical treatments- like Prolong for those who could still benefit from it, and they were helping some of the people to hire out on missions, it's not a place with very much a subsistence economy. It isn't clear if they do get any goods in from the outside at all other than barter with the slavers.

The Felix System - from the cursory overview we got- must have some materials that might be salable if you can keep the production costs low enough from astroid mining or possible gas harvesting of gas giants.....but apparently no place you can live outside of a station habitat. If it had quantities of usable materials that are suggested for the constructing the mining and shipyard facilities at Grendlesbane there probably too much cost to extract and then to ship to markets that you would have to develop.

Brigade XO wrote:Parmley Station is a terrible or oddly good example, depending on your point of view.

They can't stop slavers from using the place as a meet point or intermittent base. There is ownership and it must have been registered and advertised somewhere in the past but nobody pays attention to that. Heck, Beowulf Biological Survey showed up to eliminated slavers and cold have just blasted the place to eliminate as a slaver location - at least they were going to try to take off the non-slaver locals.

Yep - legal authority to deal with interlopers doesn't help when they've enough force to do whatever they want and there's no outside force that cares.

(If it was a corporation that was illegally exploiting resources around Parmley Station RFC's info dump says you could try taking them to court in their home system -- and those courts might be able to compel them to cease and make restitution. But of course part of the issue is that Parmley lacks the ability to patrol their outer system so even if it was someone who had a system you could take them to court it Parmley would lose unless the exploitation was happening within the 12-minute limit rather than in the outer 12-hour zone)

Jonathan_S wrote:(If it was a corporation that was illegally exploiting resources around Parmley Station RFC's info dump says you could try taking them to court in their home system -- and those courts might be able to compel them to cease and make restitution. But of course part of the issue is that Parmley lacks the ability to patrol their outer system so even if it was someone who had a system you could take them to court it Parmley would lose unless the exploitation was happening within the 12-minute limit rather than in the outer 12-hour zone)

And even if you did and won, Parmley couldn't pay anything. The only thing of value they had was the station itself and some of its contents. And knowing (or even suspecting) it was being used by slavers as a meet point, most honest companies would avoid touching it with a 10-attoparsec long pole.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:(If it was a corporation that was illegally exploiting resources around Parmley Station RFC's info dump says you could try taking them to court in their home system -- and those courts might be able to compel them to cease and make restitution. But of course part of the issue is that Parmley lacks the ability to patrol their outer system so even if it was someone who had a system you could take them to court it Parmley would lose unless the exploitation was happening within the 12-minute limit rather than in the outer 12-hour zone)

And even if you did and won, Parmley couldn't pay anything. The only thing of value they had was the station itself and some of its contents. And knowing (or even suspecting) it was being used by slavers as a meet point, most honest companies would avoid touching it with a 10-attoparsec long pole.

I was thinking of Parmley being the legal owner and winning a judgement against the outside party that was exploiting the system resources. In which case they'd be receiving payment -- not making it.
(But of course you can't really take pirates to court -- so in the event this was all irrelevant)

Jonathan_S wrote:Going back to that freedom of navigation -- I don't really understand why this is codified into Honorverse interstellar law.

Ships basically don't drop out of hyper unless their destination is in that system - and so wouldn't even cross the 12-hour limit unless planning to visit a planet or habitat of that system -- where they don't have automatic freedom of navigation. And that's been true at this point for hundreds and hundreds of years. There just isn't anywhere in that outer 12-hour zone for ships from other systems to freely navigate to!
(Yeah there might well be asteroid miners or refineries or the like out there -- but they'd be soverign terriotiry of the system so I can't believe a ship from outside would be allowed to freely navigate right up to docking with them without getting explicit permissions anyway -- so what's the point of codifying their right to swan around in the mostly empty space they've no real reason to be in without permission to enter other parts of the system?

I guess it has a little use in that warships can navigate through that outer part of the system to maintain legal surveillance on potentially hostile systems (as the pickets from Hancock were doing to Seaford Nine in the runup to the first war). But it seems unlikely that a freedom of navigation would be enshrined into interstellar law solely to allow surveillance.


And it doesn't seem like ships need to ensure they exit hyper outside the 12 light-minute limit and request permission to cross it - instead they seem to exit hyper well within that 12 light-minute zone to save in-system transit time. So you don't seem to need the 12-hour limit as a defense identification zone. In either case the ships seem to get a reasonable amount of time to identify themselves and confirm they're permitted to continue (or to reenter hyper if they're denied permission)


It's a concept that makes a lot of sense on Earth's seas where the only way past such an extended zone is often through it -- but that just doesn't apply to how travel works in the Honorverse.

I understand why it has been codified. It is obvious. I included it in the opening post.

The codification protects the HV version of the contiguous zone. A ship is essentially traveling above private airspace when it is in hyper. If the ship drops out of hyper at the wrong time -- for whatever reason -- it is now in private airspace.

As a traveler in space, I must be able to essentially "cross above your airspace" in hyper and not be fired upon if there is an emergency, or engine problems or hyper generator problem or a myriad of other things that made me have to temporarily pull off the main highway and change my flat tire on private property. In other words that law protects me if that Demon Murphy intervenes. If not, hyper travel wouldn't be practical because it would be too dangerous. Especially early space travel when the MTBF rating of most ships' systems was a lot lower. A flat tire shouldn't become a death sentence or an act of war.

hyperspace = contiguous zone

penny wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Going back to that freedom of navigation -- I don't really understand why this is codified into Honorverse interstellar law.

Ships basically don't drop out of hyper unless their destination is in that system - and so wouldn't even cross the 12-hour limit unless planning to visit a planet or habitat of that system -- where they don't have automatic freedom of navigation. And that's been true at this point for hundreds and hundreds of years. There just isn't anywhere in that outer 12-hour zone for ships from other systems to freely navigate to!
(Yeah there might well be asteroid miners or refineries or the like out there -- but they'd be soverign terriotiry of the system so I can't believe a ship from outside would be allowed to freely navigate right up to docking with them without getting explicit permissions anyway -- so what's the point of codifying their right to swan around in the mostly empty space they've no real reason to be in without permission to enter other parts of the system?

I guess it has a little use in that warships can navigate through that outer part of the system to maintain legal surveillance on potentially hostile systems (as the pickets from Hancock were doing to Seaford Nine in the runup to the first war). But it seems unlikely that a freedom of navigation would be enshrined into interstellar law solely to allow surveillance.


And it doesn't seem like ships need to ensure they exit hyper outside the 12 light-minute limit and request permission to cross it - instead they seem to exit hyper well within that 12 light-minute zone to save in-system transit time. So you don't seem to need the 12-hour limit as a defense identification zone. In either case the ships seem to get a reasonable amount of time to identify themselves and confirm they're permitted to continue (or to reenter hyper if they're denied permission)


It's a concept that makes a lot of sense on Earth's seas where the only way past such an extended zone is often through it -- but that just doesn't apply to how travel works in the Honorverse.

I understand why it has been codified. It is obvious. I included it in the opening post.

The codification protects the HV version of the contiguous zone. A ship is essentially traveling above private airspace when it is in hyper. If the ship drops out of hyper at the wrong time -- for whatever reason -- it is now in private airspace.

As a traveler in space, I must be able to essentially "cross above your airspace" in hyper and not be fired upon if there is an emergency, or engine problems or hyper generator problem or a myriad of other things that made me have to temporarily pull off the main highway and change my flat tire on private property. In other words that law protects me if that Demon Murphy intervenes. If not, hyper travel wouldn't be practical because it would be too dangerous. Especially early space travel when the MTBF rating of most ships' systems was a lot lower. A flat tire shouldn't become a death sentence or an act of war.

hyperspace = contiguous zone

But the 12-hour limit applies in normal space. It is NOT a rule about hyperspace; all of hyperspace is a free navigation zone -- you don't need any special rules about that.

Heck, the systems you might be passing 'above' can't even see that you're doing so because no sensor can see up into hyper (or down into normal space). Hyper isn't equivalent to an airplane flying overhead (and airplanes have different rules anyway).


The 12-hour rule says I can drop out into normal space in your outer system, and putter around there indefinitely as long as I don't cross the 12-minute limit (or approach any of your stations that might be out there) -- and there's just no reason a ship would be doing so during normal commerce.

And if a ship got a "flat tire" then the 12-hour limit isn't likely to help them. First, the odds that they'd experience the problem near an inhabited system is infinitesimal (actually that's not true, the most likely place to experience a problem is immediately after entering hyper; where they'd be making an emergency reemergence in the system they just left -- so a system they (presumably) had permission to have been conducing business in; no special rule needed.) And if they did reemerge in a random system along the way the 12-hour limit doesn't help because it doesn't let them get help. They'd still need to get permission to cross the 12-minute limit to limp to a station or planet to either contract for repair, get spare parts, or wait until they can send a request for help. (When Sirius faked her drive issue in OBS she wasn't out in the 12-hour zone. She had gotten permission to cross the 12-minute limit and wait in planetary orbit).

And, as I noted, ships don't normally exit hyper beyond the 12-minute limit. They exit within that "permission required" zone. A ship in distress would be even less likely to emerge additional hours from help.

So for ships in trouble you wouldn't want a generic freedom to navigate around the normal space of a system's outer limit -- you'd want rules about providing assistance to ships in distress; and those could work just as well if the entire solar system required the same permissions to remain in as the inner system areas inside the 12-hour limit. (Which in Earth terms is basically everything inside the asteroid belts; as the 12-minute limit reaches nearly to Jupiter)

Jonathan_S wrote:So for ships in trouble you wouldn't want a generic freedom to navigate around the normal space of a system's outer limit -- you'd want rules about providing assistance to ships in distress; and those could work just as well if the entire solar system required the same permissions to remain in as the inner system areas inside the 12-hour limit. (Which in Earth terms is basically everything inside the asteroid belts; as the 12-hour limit reaches nearly to Jupiter)

Your post is confusing minutes and hours.

Jupiter's perihelion is 41 light-minutes, so it lies beyond the hyperlimit + 12 light-minutes of Sol. 6 light-hours of radius is more than Neptune's orbit and does include Pluto for part of its year, whose semimajor axis is 5.8 light-hours.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:So for ships in trouble you wouldn't want a generic freedom to navigate around the normal space of a system's outer limit -- you'd want rules about providing assistance to ships in distress; and those could work just as well if the entire solar system required the same permissions to remain in as the inner system areas inside the 12-hour limit. (Which in Earth terms is basically everything inside the asteroid belts; as the 12-hour limit reaches nearly to Jupiter)

Your post is confusing minutes and hours.

Jupiter's perihelion is 41 light-minutes, so it lies beyond the hyperlimit + 12 light-minutes of Sol. 6 light-hours of radius is more than Neptune's orbit and does include Pluto for part of its year, whose semimajor axis is 5.8 light-hours.

Thanks for catching that. I just typed to wrong one there. (Worked out minutes; typed hours) D'oh.


(Now edited that mistake)

Jonathan_S wrote:Thanks for catching that. I just typed to wrong one there. (Worked out minutes; typed hours) D'oh.

"Admiral, if we go by the book, like Lieutenant Saavik, hours could seem like days." - Captain Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan