Flying Office

[Mithras]

I was musing on megacorporate affairs and began to wonder how effective a mobile office would be. Execs, troubleshooters, inspectors, PR folk and accountants flying from one world to the next gathering data, inspecting, producing reports, holding conferences with local staff, conducting interviews and so forth. A bit like the medieval lord touring his estates with his entourage.

Does this sound feasible?

 

[rust]

In my view, yes. I am currently working for a company with facilities
all over Germany, and there is a team from the headquarters which
occasionally visits the facilities to inspect them and to supervise the
work there - a bit like a mobile audit unit. While much can be done
through long range communication, headquarters will want to check
now and then whether the reports coming in from the remote facili-
ties are true or mostly made up to look good, and such a check can
only be made on the spot, comparing the content of the reports with
the real situation.

 

[Mithras]

I was thinking something like the Subsidized Liner might work as a mobile office, plenty of staterooms others converted to offices, and large lounge areas for a meeting/conference room. It can reach worlds in a subsector pretty quickly without warning, and has lots of cargo space to shift emergency cargoes to relieve some local crisis or backlog. That cargo space could also be used to bring in new equipment for refits, trials or repairs.

 

[Golan2072]

[shameless plug]Outer Veil has a ship which fits your description - the Silver Light-class executive transport (pp.56-57). At 100 dtons, it provides very comfortable transport for two ranking executives (or an executive and a bodyguard/secretary) as well as a crew of six. It gets you to Jump-2, is armed enough to protect the exec and costs MCr36.5 - the same order of magnitude as a real-life executive jet.[/shameless plug]

 

[Captain Jonah]

Be off with you Sir, SHameless plugs indeed. Have you no shame :lol:

For the bigger Corps and mega corps I would say not just feasible but vital.

Modern companies have all but instant contact with every office, you can phone, text, email, skype etc and next day courier if you need to.

In the Traveller verse the office on the next world is two weeks away, one week for the bad news about that problem to reach you and another week to send someone there. You have vast amounts of data transferred by X-boats and mail ships but you are still dealing with data and not people.

If you are big enough to have a dedicated ship for your sub sector or sector manager then get it set up properly. At the low end a converted Far trader with extra staterooms made into offices and you can still run cargo to keep profits up. At the high end the Liner has been mentioned above. You don't need something too big; think a staff of Senior manager, a few advisors, technical consultant, accountants, fraud investigator, corporate security expert plus a few junior staff. Even bigger Mega corps probably wouldn't need more than 20 or so people on the team and would just operate several teams if they were big enough and busy enough.

It’s actually a good idea for a campaign. Crew and support staff for a larger Mobile office with the Sector wide (or larger) company. A bunch of NPCs who are the actually company types and the key ships crew then a mixed team of “Support staff” made up of odd crew members and people officially attached to the Security consultants team.

On one world you could be breaking into the Local HQ to test security, on another investigating blackmail of a senior manager, company ships involved in smuggling, Planetary VPs daughter gone missing, a rival line getting nasty in a trade dispute.

Need a team of deniable reprobates?

Who are you going to call :roll: :wink:

 

[Greg Smith]

[shameless plug]Outer Veil ..... a real-life executive jet.[/shameless plug]

Which are you shamelessly plugging, your RPG supplement or your your executive jet? :twisted:

 

[BP]

Sure!

Heck, I had corporations that were entirely mobile! This avoids all those local law issues (you know the kind - labor standards, safety standards, contraband definitions, etc.) and allows the industry that provides one-time sale stuff and then moves to a new market. 'Fly by night' getting an expanded literal meaning

Basically the equivalent of 'offshore' for the likes of high-TL construction and repair along with 'news' reporting, and sales of otherwise contraband materials, or training in special fields... etc.

 

[Golan2072]

[shameless plug]Outer Veil ..... a real-life executive jet.[/shameless plug]

Which are you shamelessly plugging, your RPG supplement or your your executive jet? :twisted:

RORFL! :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

 

[phavoc]

I can definitely see executive transports, or ones kited out for specific functions.

But the fly in the ointment here is the simple fact of how communications work in the Traveller universe. Messages have to be specifically routed to the location of where you expect your management teams to be, which has to be assumed at the time of transmission to get to the appropriate system. While it's possible that you could leave breadcrumbs along the X-boat network to get messages re-routed, it's still going to be tough.

I would suspect your executive transports would hold small teams (6-10 tops) of troubleshooters. The vessels would probably have J-4 drives to give them good jump capability, and at least a 4G drive to provide them speedy movement within a system. Bumping up the capabilities to J-6/6G is also possible, though I'm not sure the expense would warrant it.

But having a multi-million ship sitting around just in case is going to be quite an expense. Not that a very large megacorp could not absorb the costs, but even they have to watch the bottom line.

 

[AndrewW]

But the fly in the ointment here is the simple fact of how communications work in the Traveller universe. Messages have to be specifically routed to the location of where you expect your management teams to be, which has to be assumed at the time of transmission to get to the appropriate system. While it's possible that you could leave breadcrumbs along the X-boat network to get messages re-routed, it's still going to be tough.

Messages can be sent to multiple locations.

 

[Mithras]

But the fly in the ointment here is the simple fact of how communications work in the Traveller universe. Messages have to be specifically routed to the location of where you expect your management teams to be, which has to be assumed at the time of transmission to get to the appropriate system. While it's possible that you could leave breadcrumbs along the X-boat network to get messages re-routed, it's still going to be tough.

Messages can be sent to multiple locations.

Neat! Send your encrypted megacorp updates and memos to every world in the subsector.... Every day.

 

[phavoc]

Awww... Mithras beat me to it! Lol.

The problem with sending your messages everywhere is you potentially don't know that "where" is going to be. Unless you found Grandfather's crystal scanner lying around and you can see into the future.

 

[AndrewW]

Awww... Mithras beat me to it! Lol.

The problem with sending your messages everywhere is you potentially don't know that "where" is going to be. Unless you found Grandfather's crystal scanner lying around and you can see into the future.

They don't have to be there forever, set an expiration after which time the message will self erase. And I didn't mean anything that was too sensitive. Doesn't even have to mean what it says. Even if decrypted the message could mean nothing or something different to outsiders.

 

[jwpacker]

For in-system travel, a ship's boat kitted out with office and stateroom space would be ideal, as you could get work done while you're traveling between worlds in the system, and can set down on the most remote moon if need be and have brought your luxury accommodations with you.

By the same token, if your company has fleets of ships going from system to system, it might be cheap to stow your ship's boat on one of those vessels as impromptu cargo - you wouldn't even need to take up a stateroom that way, and could continue to get work done, and bother the crew and put your nose into everything (I smell a patron opportunity here) - and then fly away as soon as the jump is complete at higher speed than the merchie you just travelled on.

And for the real "situations" you have a J3 or J4 executive shuttle style ship dedicated to sending your experienced troubleshooters around.

As for the messages, I'd say that in most of these cases you're not moving around enough to cause the kinds of trouble that you're talking about here, unless you're a roving quality assurance team or something, and then you'll have a planned route ahead of time, so the mother company can keep track of your expected location.

 

[Captain Jonah]

Corporate message traffic is carried by every company ship, courier and x-boat in the sector. Whenever you arrive in system you pick up everything and you computer sorts out the ones who have read already and sorts the others out using date of message sent and priority.

Also you don't keep the ship sitting around waiting for things to go wrong, that’s what the 2-300 Dton jump 4+ ship with the “Troubleshooters”, body concealers and legal team are for.

The floating office takes senior management and specialists from world to world regularly, you schedule high level meetings, conferences and negotiations round known visits.

You jump into a world and conduct reviews, personal meetings etc with the company staff there, let them know that the management is looking over their shoulder so to speak. Then you pick up the most recent data from the next world you are going to visit and spend the week in jump going over the details, that way you emerge from jump at the next world fairly up to date about local goings on.

Pick up anything immediate or high priority when you arrive and your management team is all ready to spend a week or two meeting the local staff, dealing with any problems, looking out for potential problems, reviewing the local staff to see if any need promoting, re motivating or sacking etc.

You can have scheduled meetings such that on day 215 the ship will be at a set world to take part in high level trade deals to open up new and lucrative opportunities. But if the ship has jump 3 or 4 it can make unannounced visits to several other worlds while on the way to that meeting, keeps the staff on their toes knowing senior management along with a team or lawyers, auditors and nasty suspicious security types may make a surprise visit at any point in the year and conduct a serious audit of their operations. :twisted: