Wheelbreaker | The Red Star Ice Machine Company

Turn js on, I need it to do stuff that could be done from the server if I ran the place myself.

Cut your palm and firmly grab the invisible hand of the market.

The Red Star Ice Machine Co. is an interstellar company, one of only two such companies operating after the end of the Ethnostate Wars. They are ostensibly, though not exclusively, an equipment manufacturing company specializing in industrial scale refrigeration technology with vertical integration of ice distribution on roughly half of the worlds they service directly.

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The Red Star Ice Machine Co. directly operate ice production facilities on roughly a hundred worlds and licenses their technology for use by local governments, guilds, or businesses on well over a thousand worlds. Beyond ice production and distribution Red Star also produces a diverse range of products for wide distribution. Other companies are prevented from operating over such a wide scale through strict legal requirements, guild contracts, and forge obligations that either make operating at scale not profitable, or are completely denied access to interstellar transit by the Navigator Guilds. Red Star, along with PrisCom, an interstellar communications company, are exempt from many of these regulations by virtue of the incredible value of their technology. Red Star more or less enables the modern agricultural industry and as such the company has managed to secure exemptions and allowances in the first few centuries of its existence that have enabled it to operate at a scale which other companies could not hope to match.

Red Star was formed by a merger of five other companies, four ice producers and one ice distributor, following the political restructuring of the Golden Age of Navigation as a way to sufficiently consolidate corporate power as a bulwark against the changes that interstellar trade was undergoing. This proved to be a very prescient move and enabled the newly founded company to exert monopolistic control over basically all large scale refrigeration operations and to exert extreme control over distribution as well. The company quickly moved to establish the Rimward Kassell Improvement and Oversight District, often shortened to "The Kid" (for Kassel Improvement District) within the rimward region of the Kassell Republic who, at the time, controlled the disks of the Kassell archipelago. The Kid served as a special government taxing district and was granted the powers and responsibilities of a multi-disk government. Land owned by businesses within The Kid are afforded representation in the same way as land owned and inhabited by citizens and as such are directly represented in The Kid's government. Red Star is the largest business in The Kid and owns a majority of the land in The Kid which gives them majority control of the government.

The Kassell Republic has long since waned in power and much of the archipelago is now governed by newer polities. In the narrative present The Kid makes up 75% of the remaining Kassell Republic. It is this unique position that has enabled Red Star to operate in the manner that they do. Their economic importance combined with with a lack of local government restrictions on the worlds they own has lead to guild contracts, forge agreements, and trade partnerships that would simply not be possible in any other situation for any other company no matter how important a role that company played economically. If Red Star is unable to obtain exceptions or special treatment then the Kassell Republic is usually able to operate in their place with very little practical difference for Red Star's business operations.

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In the narrative present Red Star does not exclusively produce refrigeration technology. While that technology is central to their business strategy they have also expanded into basically every market that they see as potentially profitable. They make a majority of their own equipment themselves and frequently produce versions of this equipment for sale outside of the Kassell Republic. In rare circumstances Red Star will attempt to market products or services that they do not themselves use, though such a practice only takes place outside the Kassell Republic.

Notable products include firearms, coilguns, motorcycles, ink stones, roll top desks, playing cards, dish detergent, fish food, mechanical counters, prefabricated houses, sublight void ships, sealed power armor, and squeeze boxes. Their coilguns in particular are highly sought after by collectors for the highly experimental nature of their configurations. Red Star coilguns often deviate from convention in strange ways that make them appealing to collectors and for professions where eccentricity is common.

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Their refrigeration technology remains highly sought after as it produces far less magical interference than models produced by other companies. This interference is what prevents practical home refrigeration and necessitates factories for ice production. A single factory can be insulated to block magical interference and while the insluation is expensive and large the factory can be located somewhere with ample space for such a thing. Then the ice produced can be delivered by icemen to homes and businesses to place in iceboxes.