Paradigm
| File:Paradigm.svg | |
Trade name | Paradigm |
|---|---|
Company type | Public |
Traded as |
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| Industry |
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| Founded | September 3, 1998 in Chicago, Illinois |
| Founder | Michael Lange |
| Headquarters | Cassini Colony, Martian Free Trade Union |
| Threat level | Moderate |
Area served | Interstellar |
Key people | Philip Smithson (CEO) |
Number of employees | 14,239,123 (Jun 2273) |
| Subsidiaries | |
| Website | paradigm |
Founded in 1998, Paradigm Aerospace (stock ticker PARA), originally the Paradigm Mining Corporation, is a off-world mining and aerospace organisation that was responsible for the construction of the first private colonies on the Moon, Mars, and Europa during the Second Space Race. It is the largest mining corporation in the Coalition, and boasts the largest of all hauler fleets. It is also the most profitable commercial spaceflight company in all of humanity.
The corporation has been criticised for inciting the Ir'vaki Conflict in their accidental shootdown of an Ir'vaki diplomatic vessel by automated anti-asteroid batteries on Europa, and their collusion with BioCorp, which they are closely allied with, to dispose of the evidence. This has led to heavy sanctions on the organisation by the Coalition, but comparably less so than BioCorp itself.
Locations
Paradigm maintains an uncountable number of facilities, surface colonies, and starbases across the Solar System, as well as more distant star systems. Some of the most prominent are the Archimedes Colony located on the Moon, the Diogenes-2 and Hades-VI bases on Europa, and the Reldresal Colony on Phobos. It owns the space elevator linking Phobos and Mars, giving it a monopoly over one of the most critical trade routes in the system.
Mining
Paradigm's original and most lucrative field of business remains to be mining. The vast majority of its operations are asteroid mining, including common materials such as iron, copper, and nickel, as well as rare metals like cobalt, gold, platinum, and rhodium. Paradigm mining efforts also seek to extract water from asteroids; not only for producing the hydrogen fuel critical to spaceflight, but also to support deep space colonies where water is a scarce resource.
Most resources extracted by its mining operations are sent to in-space manufacturing facilities of corporations such as CORE Heavy Industries, Voima Tech Industries, and Samson Steel. Material supplied by Paradigm and other mining corporations became critical across the Solar System and beyond as Earth began to exhaust its natural resources in what became known as the Resource Crisis.
Spaceflight
Paradigm maintains a large range of flights to and from locations both in the Solar System and to certain extrasolar locations. It provides cheap and luxury consumer spaceflight, corporate charter flights, as well as military transport services for governments and PMCs. It also itself operates a large number of spaceports, giving it a level of monopoly in some areas (especially planets or moons with only one spaceport) and allowing it to give its own flights preferential treatment.
Paradigm's cost-effective consumer services are extremely popular, owing to their status as the cheapest available. However, they tend to be at the bottom in terms of customer experience and safety. Delays and cancellations are routine, and passengers may be forced to wait hours or even days at interim spaceports in the event of a failure or the preemption of the service by a higher priority flight. The profit the company makes on its consumer services is vastly overshadowed by its corporate and military ones, leading it to often neglect this area of the business.
Research
Paradigm once possessed an interest in substratic exophysics, and the organisation was the second to discover and excavate four galraite-based precursor artefacts, known as the Lion Statues, from subterranean complexes on Mars. It constructed the Hades-VI Ontological Research Base in the oceans of Europa in order to study substratics outside of Raven's knowledge.
After a destructive encounter with native marine megafauna resulted in the facility becoming inhospitable with the loss of critical project documentation, Paradigm scrapped their secret substratics program and sold all four statues in their possession to an Earth-based fringe science organisation, Industrial Occult Systems. Several years later, this resulted in the catastrophic Avalon Reactor Meltdown. Raven's subsequent investigation led to the prosecution of Paradigm and many of its employees under the Dimensional Security Accords.