The Long Rim

in Lancer

The Long Rim was a corridor of frontier space with the Dawnline Shore forming one end and Rào Cỏ Station, the Shore's nearest operational blink station at the opposite end. At any given moment, The Long Rim will be host to an inordinately large number of near light vessels transporting several billion collective tons of goods to and from the Shore, including food, colonists, equipment and construction material. However, outside vessels traveling through the Long Rim are drastically more likely to face the threat of piracy, more than anywhere else in the Orion arm. Vessels flagged as belonging to the major powers K.T.B. or Harrison Armory often face less piracy in The Long Rim than average, due to the known possibility of crackdowns.   Few permanent piratical organizations exist, though those that do commonly operate more akin to mercenary companies than pirates in the traditional sense; some of the groups serve the bulk of their time contracted as K.T.B. convoy muscle, often leading to grudges and skirmishes between fleets. There is another small group of pirates that primarily rely on playing their hand at collecting rent and tribute from both locals passing through their everchanging territory boundaries.  

Politics + Culture

For the most part, people residing within the Long Rim were brief tenants, transferring between the high-traffic destinations on either end with little regard for the low-value space between. However, this lack of interest in the region resulted in a low-to-minimal presence of any of the major powers of the Orion arm (though this was somewhat less so the case for the parties with a major vested interest in the growing conflicts in the Dawnline Shore). As a result, the Long Rim and its inhabitants developed a culture and semi-earned reputation as being an area defined by local might-makes-right law, commonplace criminality, and freedom from regulations that would be found in other parts of the galaxy. However, for as much as outsider media depicted the Long Rim's inhabitants as selfish and duplicitous, the majority of the area's population centers also developed a culture of cooperative assistance, born from the hazardous environment of station-based life and the value of mutual aid in a hostile social environment.[5]

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The scarcity of a large number of essential resources resulted in capitalistic, social Darwinian ideology dominating the societal nature of the Long Rim, with many of its inbound immigrants arriving in the area to seek profit or access to otherwise illicit and/or restricted goods.[6]   The remote nature of and lack of worthwhile resources within the Long Rim resulted in minimal presence of outside powers and their associated legal influence, most notably the Utopian Pillars of Union. As a result, with the exception of enclaves of more decentralized groups, the Long Rim was predominantly controlled by domestically-formed local powers (known as Enterprises) and piratical firms, both permanent and temporary. This arrangement facilitated the Long Rim's reputation for lawlessness and might-makes-right politics, though the presence of some form of legal social contract (official or otherwise) was more variable from station to station in practice. [16]