Has anybody (like me, possibly, I seem to have clonked my head but good on some extruded structrually-hardened hull-wax) pointed out that those captains choosing Mission 1/Mission 5 are basically going head-to-head, claw-to-claw, antler-to-antler with those captains choosing Mission 3?
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery and the quantum-super-imposed-banana-reactor (just look at it!) revolutionised post-industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, PostModern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by post-industrial zillionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern Unizone.
PostModern industry established the universal market, for which the discovery of Charybdis paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion Unizone developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how Unizone is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production, expansion, and of exchange.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of Unizone.
Unizone, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
Unizone has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the space-priest, the blind poets of the spaceways, the lobsters of science, the mooses (meese?) of navigation, into its paid wage labourers (and on occassion space-skeet targets, throw-pillows, and Soylent).
Unizone has torn away from the vessel its sentimental veil, and has reduced the inter-crew relation to a mere money relation.
The weapons with which Unizone felled PostIndustrialism to the ground are now turned against Unizone itself.
But not only has Unizone forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the sentients who are to wield those weapons - the modern working class - the Captains.
###Fellow captains, are we not loosely affiliated sentients?
Can we somehow agree not to conflict amongst ourselves? We are not the enemy! Please let us not make it so.
#WE have nothing to lose but our contracts!
And our ships.
And our lives.
But you know, spilt pollen, and all that.
