Darmstadt Depot

Darmstadt Depot
Station
Owner
Landwirtrechtbewegung
Location
4F, Stuttgart
Technical Data
Gravity	Partial
Docking bays	Yes
Amenities	Limited
Crew	Unknown

The planet Stuttgart has been the breadbasket of Rheinland since its settlement in 94 A.S. Over time, its farmers formed a powerful union, named the WVS. The organization managed to successfully lobby the Rheinland government to subsidize Stuttgart agriculture for hundreds of years, generating a huge amount of wealth amongst the farming dynasties and increasing the planet's food output considerably, especially in the growing of Blue Jillies. But with the end of the Eighty Years War in 669 A.S. and the government completely bankrupted, the subsidies were no longer tenable and were cut almost overnight.

In a secret deal during the war, the Rheinland government desperately borrowed huge sums from Liberty. Facing default on their loans at the end of the war, they were forced to offer something to House Liberty. Synth Foods wanted complete access to planet Stuttgart, which the Rheinland government granted in exchange for renegotiated debt repayment terms. The Liberty food giant moved in immediately, buying out huge numbers of nearly bankrupt Stuttgart farmers and proceeded to crush entire farming dynasties over the following decades. Some collapsed in suspicious circumstances, such as the Erlichmann family whose farms and plantations suffered a number of sabotages shortly before their buyout by Synth Foods. Much of Stuttgart was subsequently converted into vast expanses of the bio-engineered mono-crops of Synth Foods.

The government backed the foreign company wholeheartedly and looked the other way as Synth Foods used unscrupulous business practices to further consolidate its control over Stuttgart. The remaining independent farmers were ultimately forced to buy all of their fertilizers and seeds from Synth Foods and sell all of their production to them at low fixed rates -- prices that were designed to squeeze the maximum out of the farmer and shift all risk away from Synth Foods.

The once proud Stuttgart farmers were reduced to indentured servants. Inexorably, Synth Foods assimilated the bulk of the planet's arable land, dutifully paying its Rheinland federal taxes and feeding the bribe machine in New Berlin. The WVS tried to fight back legally in the courts but soon discovered that their influence had been sold to a higher bidder. This sparked a number of sabotage incidents at Synth Food owned factories and it lead to Synth Foods forcing the Rheinland government to replace virtually all of the original WVS board members with their lackeys in 775 A.S., destroying the farming union's voice in New Berlin. It was this final act that lead radicals from the WVS, including the former head of the Erlichmann family, to found the Landwirtrechtbewegung -- farmers rights movement -- simply referred to as the LWB, later the same year.

The LWB built a small depot called Darmstadt within the Ostnebel. This serves as a base for operations targeted at Synth Foods convoys within Rheinland space. The Red Hessians also use it as way station along one of their routes to Omega-11. The "war" has been going on for over forty years now, and both sides claim to be winning -- although Synth Foods now controls 90 percent of the planet's agriculture vs. 55 percent just four decades ago.

Commodities

Exports

None

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