Inner Ring Police Force

Around three hundred years ago, Space transit careerism was coming into its own. New ships possessed enough power to travel heavily armoured and carried more plating than was possible to puncture with an armament of equal weight unless one employed explosives of significant power to destroy the entire ship and all cargo on board. As this did a pirate little good, ship to ship combat became limited to boarding and hand-to-hand fighting. This era of piracy lasted nearly 80 years before a think tank orbiting Venus came up with a new power source that put out radically increased power without taking up any more space or weight than the one in place before it. Now packed with enough extra energy to power ship-based energy weaponry, fleets of police vessels could be developed with the power to order surrenders of enemy ships without having to board them, and the Inner Ring Police Force was founded. Originally formed as a private enterprise security force, the IRPF experienced such dramatic success in its first decade of existence that it went from almost laughable to universally respected nearly overnight. For a good while, it was also universally feared as an upstart power with too much military might for its own good, but it didn’t take long for the more established megacorps to shore up their fleets with the newly upgraded power system, and just as quickly as they had risen to supreme power, IRPF found themselves at the bottom of the heap, outclassed and outnumbered. It was from there that the general policing agency known by the Sol system today emerged. “Put in their place” as it were, IRPF branched out as a contract protection company, selling its services to patrol borders, monitor operations and more or less keep the peace with a set of universal rules that helped keep behaviour consistent around the system. By hiring IRPF, citizens of an area could be sure of receiving public trials if they were arrested and being treated with certain established rights and privileges universal to the company. For many, it was a welcome relief. The IRPF rarely changes its policies, which was a far cry from most corptown habits of changing things dramatically whenever a new CEO or local manager arrived. The IRPF is the most widespread megacorp in Sol in terms of actual physical locations and presence of personnel, and as such has a few unique problems. In each of its contracts, it has to put certain corptown laws above its own in order to operate in their area. Over the years, decades and centuries since its founding, those exceptions have bred uniquely different outlooks on life between IRPF’s own members. IRPF officers serving in an Applied Science and Robotics corptown have dramatically different moral and social values than IRPF officers serving in a Pulse corptown, for instance. Many of these officers are born in the same corptown in which they eventually serve their contract, and as such consider their own interpretation of how the IRPF works to be “the correct one.” In situations where two conflicting beats of IRPF officers have been forced into the same area for one reason or another, results have ranged from uncomfortable to outright violent.