Spice. Arrakis. The water of life.
FATHER, THE SLEEPER HAS AWAKENED!!
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I hate inventing magical unobtainable ‘stuff’ to drive the plot in science fiction.
Couldn’t the three corporations be fighting over the system in a bid to claim it in the eyes of the government, with the conflict over the possibility of future profits once more substantial rights are granted? An entire star system system full of perfectly ordinary planets and moons close to civilised space and trading links, for example?
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There reading three words?!? WERE DOOMED!!! 
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That’s strange. @SpaceJay took the post down. Maybe INS is changing the fiction. Or maybe they just don’t want to bother with a fiction for an arena game. “Look, just shoot at the other two factions, okay?”
I’m of the opinion that any economic motivation is absurd. We’re not talking about wiping out an indigenous population while nobody is looking. This is a public, high-tech war of equals, slugging it out endlessly. That doesn’t make economic sense. The corporations are destroying the very thing they’re trying to gain, with no clear potential to come out on top.
Ideological motivations make far more sense. Having Centauran, Deltan and Confederate forces fighting each other is much more believable. We’re Us and you’re Them, so we don’t trust your motivations, and we figure we’re all better off if you’re safely under lock and key. Or dead. Whichever.
Of course, having three groups of any sort all fighting each other is a bit crazy, even given idealogical motivations. No group in its right mind gets into a three-way slug fest. You wait for the two other guys to slug it out, then you show up and hammer the weakened victor. Ideally, you precipitate the fight between the other two guys.
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Umm, didn’t @SpaceJay just make up what he posted?
Perhaps the system is a ‘gateway’ system - their interstellar travel tech has finite range and this system is uniquely positioned in a void to cut days off a trip that would otherwise require going around the edge of the void.
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Tell that to all the parties meddling around in Syria? 
As for motivation, with 3 corporations the culprit, it has to tie back into some expectation of profit. Companies are known to engage in short term unprofitable behaviour - such as selling below production cost - when expecting long term benefits - such as pushing a competitor out of a market to gain a long-term monopoly.
I dont know what is the main value of the Rethe system, but it could be the Earthlike Moon, if those are rare it could become a local food production center for dozens of industrial planets.
I also do not know when in the Infinity timeline this conflict is happening - if it happens soon after one of the Deltan - Starfold conflicts, armed corporate militias might be abundant in the SFC and a cheap and quickly available alternative to legal disputes.
One thing that Battlescape should emphasize, imho, is trying to capture installations over destroying them. This is not a Deltan terror raid.
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These are corporations we’re talking about. Sure, maybe the vast majority of a corporation’s makeup has a certain political ideology, but a corporation’s purpose is to make profit, not to fight for ideological uniformity. By virtue of the SFC corporations being independent entities with their own laws, they do not have to conform to any governing code, unlike any corporation today. Therefore, the three corporations descending upon the Rethe system is comparable to imperialism, where in our world there have been plenty of equals fighting each other publically and totally. Just look at the 17th-20th centuries. There have even been corporations acting as nation states, like the Dutch East India Company, Hudson’s Bay Company, etc.
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This should pretty much be the conflict in a nutshell.
We just don’t see it now because most corporations are focused on their profits for the next quarter and don’t seem particularly motivated by anything too far ahead in the future. With the vast resources of the galaxy within arms reach (due to advent of warp/jump tech), they would now be looking much further ahead into the future and the corporation with the most resources at their disposal will stand the greatest chance of survival…or even domination. Those that fall behind in that race will be at the mercy of those that gain the most resources.
It is, in a sense, the wild west of land grabs with stakes and outcomes that will play out many millennia in the future. Strategic seizures would also allow one corporation to dictate business to any other corporations that have to transit their territory. With corporate militarization, they have to consider how their logistical train can be destroyed as well.
There’s also the economy of such rapid expansion. Is it more economical to place refining, manufacturing, and construction elements in every place they occupy, or would it be better to create centralized mega-hubs with minimal levels of extraction and defense in adjacent systems (i.e. expand fast, leave minimal footprint, reinforce if threatened)
The corporations of the future are essentially nation states. Any actual government would either have to keep pace with these corporations by massing their own resources, or play those corporations off against each other to keep them weaker. If they didn’t, they would effectively become puppet states and meaningless…if they aren’t already.
You may think such things are unnecessary with such abundance, but it boils down to a Darwinian survival of the fittest. If even one corporation goes down that path of gluttony/dominace, then any other corporation/government would have to follow suit or risk their own demise.
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First off I’d like to apologise to @SpaceJay if I came across as being a little too confrontational. Any lore would be better than no lore at all; I did enjoy reading that post in spite of the disdain I have for a few common tropes of the softer side of science fiction as a genera.
The Starfold Confederacy [in the old lore] was built out of a series of mining colonies who cut themselves off from a distant government. The Confederacy might be entirely made up of ‘states’ formed from old pre-split corporations.
These ‘corporations’, the likes of ‘Havoc Excavations’ and ‘Scoria Incorporated’, may well be entire nation-states with large populations of citizenry just as you’ve said; but instead of a centralised government, it could consist of an organisation built from the corporations themselves, maybe along the lines of the united nations, holding things together.
The confederacy never had a government to begin with, meaning whoever built it must have wanted it, starting out.
We just don’t know enough about the world they’re operating in to have even the slightest idea for their structures and motivations.
TLDR: more lore plz.
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