Fracture Station limits what cargo someone can load onto their ship, based on the ship’s home world technology and flight plan, but obviously that doesn’t stop people from flying wherever they like once they take off. The station’s policy is to maintain the technological hierarchical status quo, but ultimately, they don’t really care what you do outside of their borders, and don’t have a way to enforce it anyway.

Someone planning on violating tech hierarchy still needs to be a little clandestine about it, as they’ll report that stuff to the galactic authority, but it’s not exactly impossible to get away with it, especially if you’re doing something small scale. Really, the thing that keeps is from being a problem is pre-FTL civs usually have no way of getting their hands on post-FTL tech anyway, and post-FTL civs have little to gain from selling to the pre-FTL ones. As discussed on a previous page, or at least in the comments, there’s not usually a whole lot the pre’s can offer the post’s. Even without stuff like matter replicators, if your post-FTL civ is still really in to gold and jewels, you can probably mine an asteroid field or a lifeless world and really strip mine the shit out of it without having to worry about cutting the locals in on their share, or ecologically destroying their world.

There are definitely reasons to trade with pre-FTLs though. Like if you want to ingratiate themselves to them so they’ll join your federation and not the Dominion or the Hierarchy or the League of Obviously Exploitative Space Dicks Who Are Really Bad at Branding. Or the species has something unusual to offer, like they’re all psychics or mages or whatever.

You know, in addition to what he actually bought, Deus presumably has those hover trolleys as well. A guy could get rich if he made actual working Back to the Future Hoverboards. And probably get sued a lot as well, no matter how many warnings the company puts on them about wearing helmets and not using them over water.

This is a somewhat inauspicious page 700. It’s not normally a big landmark number but it’s round anyway. Maybe I’ll try and do something exciting for #750.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.