Interplanetary Shipping-Northstar

Interplanetary Shipping-Northstar (commonly abbreviated to IPS-N) is a trans- and intra-solar shipping conglomerate. Both major subsidiaries originally grew out of the engineer, mechanic and laborer unions that repopulated and reactivated the Theseus shipyards on Luna. Currently, IPS-N is headquartered on Carina, in the Argo Navis system, while its original meeting hall on Luna is now a museum dedicated to the history of spaceflight. IPS-N has long had a hand in the development of anti-piracy doctrine, ever since the days of low-orbit pirates and ring raiders. IPS-N, as a part of this work, also laid the groundwork for the development of the Union Naval Department's ship-to-ship and point-defense weapons and their use. The Albatross, the Cosmopolitan order that serves as Union's interstellar police force, grew out of specialized IPS-N anti-piracy patrols, while the related but distinct Trunk Security grew out of shipboard security complements. Northstar Realignment is a philanthropic organization run by IPS-N that assists Cosmopolitans returning to realtime--in practice, this is mostly retiring Albatross operatives. IPS-N also, owing to its necessarily significant involvement in the lives of Cosmopolitan transsolar shipping crews, maintain lounges on all major and many minor stations throughout Union space, where the corpro-state provides food and drinks, entertainment, and newsfeeds. Of the three major corpro-states, IPS-N is by far the least hostile to union organizing; IPS-N continues to be a firm believer in redundancy in all aspects, including its production lines and maintenance docks, and the volume of shipping and the size and complexity of ships requires very large shop floors, which lends itself easily to overwhelming numbers of workers--and despite numerous anti-union campaigns over the almost four thousand years of its existence, IPS-N's boards have never been able to truly eliminate union organizers.

A view of Carina from Vela, one of its major moons.