I swear to Halford the next installment will be about the threats the Imperium faces, but I realized that after the post on Imperial Law, or the lack of same, I needed to address how the Imperium regulates things.

Cleon the Great realized that even with a light hand on the member worlds, some things needed to be defined and controlled to prevent the conditions that brought on the Long Night. To this end, many of the early Imperial Edicts established regulatory agencies with broadly defined powers to established regulations and enforce the same. In the early 12th century, the main ones functioning are:

• The Imperial Treasury. Responsible for managing the Imperial monetary supply and ensuring the the Credit is the sole currency used in interstellar trade. There will be more on the economics of the 3I in a later post.


• The Starport Authority. Oversees and administers all legitimate starports in Imperial space. Over the centuries they've also acquired a role in inspecting starships for safety and compliance with regulations.


• Standards and Measurements Bureau. Originally the Office of Calendar Compliance, this office has grown to enforcing common standards for everything from weights to struggling to keep Galanglic from drifting into different tongues.


• Colonization and Migration Bureau. Created to repopulated the barren worlds after the end of the Long Night, this bureau now oversees ongoing colonization projects and manages any requests for large-scale movements of populations.

I'm welcome for suggestions for any I may have missed.

This literal Celestial Bureaucracy will have offices on almost every world of the Imperium, even if it's four bored C&M agents who spend the day playing cards. But their main jobs is data. All of these various bureaus produce reports in staggering numbers. Take the Starport Authority. One of the responsibilities of a Port Master is to maintain a log of all ships passing through the port. Name, transponder code, name of the ship's master, and reason for visit. This information is dutifully collected and forwarded to the County capital, where it is collated with reports from the other worlds of the county. Those reports are sent to the Sector capital, and finally, to Capital.

Capital is a temple to data collection. Those port logs from across the Imperium are feed into massive data farms where they can be used to do everything from modeling trade patterns for the coming century to tracking a single ship's travels. Beyond the Imperial Palace and the Moot Spire, the Imperial Capital city is filled with the magnificent offices of these agencies.

From these offices, updated regulations and reports issue forth based on the incoming data stream and the wishes of the Emperor. Dissemination can take years to reach every backwater world, so these new regulations tend to come out every ten years or so, except in cases of vital changes or emergency alerts. I suspect that a large proportion of the traffic on the X-boat network is encrypted Imperial data. Getting a specific report, or changing the data before it reaches its destination could be a fun adventure.

Who enforces these regulations? The SPA has it's own police and security apparatus, as it has physical plants to defend; as does the Treasury when it comes to mints and the branch Imperial Banks in the counties. They others depend on the the threat of an Imperial intervention to force compliance. Or they just hire mercenaries to do the job.

So we have 1100 years of regulations, some of which may be out of date, or ignored, and varying degrees of enforcement depending on the local official. This is why Bribery is a skill.

As always, I'm looking for comments and expansions.

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