Trade in the Beteigeuze Reach

[locarno24]

The creatures disgorge the stuff in big, ugly lardy blocks ranging from brick size to Air/Raft size. They do this just after every mating season, and there are two mating seasons a year. Why they do this is anybody's guess

It's actually food for a symbiotic bacterial-analogue species the scientists hadn't yet identified, which uses the material for larval colonies a month or so later. Of course, thanks to the mass harvesting activities, the bulk of this generation is going to starve before they go back into the seas at maturity.

Which means that three or four months down the line their symbiotic pair will find the bacterial bloom they count on to feed their newborn young won't materialize. At the point at which their corpses start washing up, the players may get worried. Of course, it's an easily fixable problem - commercial anagathics dissolved in common-or-garden gelatin make a more than adequate substitute. But buying anagathics in bulk to leave them on the beach for bacteria jell-o is going to be a difficult one to sell to the loans company....

 

[alex_greene]

The creatures disgorge the stuff in big, ugly lardy blocks ranging from brick size to Air/Raft size. They do this just after every mating season, and there are two mating seasons a year. Why they do this is anybody's guess

It's actually food for a symbiotic bacterial-analogue species the scientists hadn't yet identified, which uses the material for larval colonies a month or so later. Of course, thanks to the mass harvesting activities, the bulk of this generation is going to starve before they go back into the seas at maturity.

Which means that three or four months down the line their symbiotic pair will find the bacterial bloom they count on to feed their newborn young won't materialize. At the point at which their corpses start washing up, the players may get worried. Of course, it's an easily fixable problem - commercial anagathics dissolved in common-or-garden gelatin make a more than adequate substitute. But buying anagathics in bulk to leave them on the beach for bacteria jell-o is going to be a difficult one to sell to the loans company....

Call for the characters to go off world to some function somewhere run by the pharma companies, and put on their best clothes and put their Diplomat and Persuade skills to best use ...

 

[locarno24]

On the plus side, explaining what it is and why you want it might be a good step towards getting said pharma company to invest in the colony once you've figured out how much you can harvest without screwing things up.

With anagathic precursors essentially being vomited up on the beach for free twice a year, they could make even more money if they were to put the processing plant on the planet so you only had to carry the refined volume...

 

[rust]

With anagathic precursors essentially being vomited up on the beach for free twice a year, they could make even more money if they were to put the processing plant on the planet so you only had to carry the refined volume...

Sorry, no anagathics in this setting, people just get old - a little older than
today - and die.

However, there are lots of other interesting ways both to cause a natural
desaster by damaging the ecosphere and to make a nice profit by finding
out what some substances produced by that ecosphere could be used for.
Much of this will be a process of trial and error, and I have confidence in
the players that they will try a lot - and make lots of errors ... :twisted: