User:Monty/Sandbox

This is the sandbox, stop peanut gallerying or I'll throw sand in your eyes

Founded in 2168 by an initial consortium of parties that stood to gain from bluespace's discovery, Nanotrasen has since become the leading name in Bluespace related research, applying it to computers and electronics of all varieties. While initially a research corporation tied to other, Earthly corporations, they have since shed their ties to such small-scale interests and become a megacorporation whose concerns affect the entire Orion Spur. Nowadays, they are part research giant, part manufacturing giant and full time entertainment extraordinaires.

What do they do?

The biggest claim to fame that Nanotrasen hold is their advanced computers. Making use of bluespace principles and trace amounts of phoron, Nanotrasen has managed to corner a market for computers that still follow Moore's Law, and their chips are used in the vast majority of modern electronics. Nanotrasen's computers have become so ubiquitous that their logo is present in almost every device's default background, and their systems are often treated as the industry standard for everything from communications to integrated computers.

This domination of communications and technology has given Nanotrasen a very lucrative business, one that was practically thrown into their laps: data harvesting. The company has servers established all over the Orion Spur for gathering seemingly random and assorted data from all of their services, processing it to look for patterns and then selling it to the highest bidder. Whether it be the purchasing habits of Biesellite males aged 18 to 23 or the activism and political beliefs of Himean immigrants, Nanotrasen has the important data to act upon ready for a price.

So what does a company do with the most ubiquitous electronics in the market and the best data to understand the psychology of consumerism do? Start an online gambling empire, naturally. Making use of research supported by Nanotrasen data gathering, in co-operation with Zeng-Hu psychologists, Nanotrasen controls a large portion of the online gambling market through a wide variety of websites covering every game of every planet and nation and species. The money that pays out on a human's blackjack win in Biesel could have come from a Tajaran's loss betting on the Velhalktai while sitting in a shuttle in Skrellian space. This massive share of the gambling market has drawn the ire of Idris, and regularly leads to lawsuits and counter-suits arguing over gambling technologies.

Further ingratiating themselves into a rivalry with Idris, Nanotrasen released an app onto any device with a Nanotrasen chip for ordering food from nearby "ghost-kitchen" restaurants to your door. Created after their merger with Getmore Food Company in 2398, the app is called "StellarBite™️" and can deliver the same recipe to anywhere in the Orion Spur assuming service reaches. Despite having no actual storefront, the expansive and regionalised menu is wildly popular with the general public and there are even online guides on fooling the app into giving you regional dishes when on other planets. Despite controversies over the payment of delivery drivers and the use of flying drones sometimes damaging meals in transit, the app remains a steadfast part of Biesel culture and stays firmly installed on almost every device sold by Nanotrasen to this day.

Data and investment give Nanotrasen one more major client: governments. Through acts of "philanthropy" and political favours to the correct candidates over the last circa 300 years, Nanotrasen has become a major power in UNIP politics, effectively being the entire reason that Biesel maintains its semi-autonomous status within the Protectorate and also the major force behind its extreme economic development. With so much money tied into Biesel, Nanotrasen has become an almost defacto government for the area, sometimes having even more power than the actual Biesellite government.