Stellvia Corporation

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Stellvia Corporation
Stellvia
Flag Roundel
CapitalStellvia, Cislunar Space
Largest City Sagan Town, 2709 Sagan, the Main Belt
Official language(s) English, Japanese
Ethnic groups (2015) Human
Self-contained AI
Membership Fenspace Convention
Government Corporate State
 -  President, Majority Shareholder Noah Scott
 -  Vice-President Yayoi Fujisawa
 -  Board of Directors Leda Swansen, Jake Hansen, Patty O'Neill, Kelly Harrison, Micheline Rouleau, Jerry Freedman, Lea Meadows, Dr. Sergy Gudanov, Yayoi Fujisawa, Safety, Miyuri Akisato, Takami Sakuragi, Kagome Mishima, Yuu Inagawa, Helen Scott (honorary until she either reaches the age of majority or inherits, whichever comes first)
Formation
 -  Incorporation July 1, 2009 
 -  Kandor Treaty March 28, 2010 
 -  Declaration of Sovereignty October 10, 2014 
Population
 -  2022 estimate 1275 
Known Allies Senshi
Blue Blazers
Warsies
Space Pirates
Soviet Air Force (until 2017)
Political influence Minor
Major Achievements Kaboomite

Founding member of the Space Patrol

The Whole Fenspace Catalog
Stereotype Mostly-agreeable Fendanes with an annoying boss.


Stellvia Corporation is a holding company founded on 1 July 2009, with Noah Scott being the sole stockholder until the company's declaration of independence from Earth on October 10, 2014.

Like many Fen businesses, the inner core of the organization form a small pseudo-faction in their own right. Noah Scott is the de facto leader of the Stellvian pseudo-faction, and has been since he created it in May 2008. The pseudo-faction's other full members are Leda Swansen, Jake Hansen, Patty O'Neill, Kelly Harrison, Micheline Rouleau, Jerry Freedman, Lea Meadows, Dr. Sergy Gudanov, Yayoi Fujisawa, Safety, Miyuri Akisato, Takami Sakuragi, Shizuka Hayama, Kagome Mishima, Yuu Inagawa, and Honami Takase Ambler.

A.C. Peters and Katz Schrödinger have been given "honorary Stellvian" status, which primarily gives them access to the original Stellvia station ring. Natsuko Aki has been offered the same status on occasion, but always refuses it.

Former members of the Stellvian pseudo-faction include Yoriko Nikaido, Sora Hasegawa, Yomiko Readman, Star, Kohran Li, and Oliver Towne. Most of these people remain on friendly terms with StellviaCorp.

The company holds its annual meeting on April 12.[1]

Relations

The Stellvians as a pseudo-faction are known to be on friendly terms with the Senshi[2], the Warsies[3], and the Blue Blazers[4], and have rivalries with CHOAM[5] and the Ninja.[6]

Until 2017, they were also on friendly terms with the Soviet Air Force. This early alliance of the socialist VVS and the capitalist StellviaCorp was an "odd duck," held together at first by the necessity of everybody working together, then by a mutual distrust and dislike of the founding CinC of Great Justice. Eventually, something was going to break that alliance apart, and that "something" happened in 2017.

The Stellvians "punch above their weight" in Fenspace politics because of their financial backing of the Space Patrol.[7]

The company declared independence from all Earth nations on October 10, 2014, less than an hour before Helen Swansen-Scott was born. This makes StellviaCorp simultaneously one of the oldest organized groups and one of the newest nations in Fenspace.

Citizenship

Not everyone who lives in a StellviaCorp facility is a citizen of the corporation. That duty (and it is a duty - citizens are expected to work for the betterment of the employees, the clients, and the company, in that order) is reserved for the company's shareholders.

Noah Scott is the President and majority shareholder of the company, keeping 745 shares of Stellvia Corporation for himself after he declared independence.

Yayoi Fujisawa holds fifty shares in the company and the position of Vice-President. Leda Swansen and Helen Swansen-Scott hold twenty-five shares each, with Leda voting Helen's shares until she reaches the age of majority. Jake Hansen, Patty O'Neill, and Kelly Harrison each hold ten shares, as did Kohran Li until 2018.

Micheline Rouleau, Jerry Freedman, Lea Meadows, Sergy Gudanov, Safety, Miyuri Akisato, Takami Sakuragi, Shizuka Hayama, and Kagome Mishima hold five StellviaCorp shares each.

A.C. Peters, Katz Schrödinger, and Yuu Inagawa each hold one share. One more share has been set aside for Natsuko Aki; this remains unclaimed.

Sora Hasegawa previously held one share of Stellvia Corporation; this share reverted (and was redeemed at fair market value) when the VVS announced they were pooling all of their resources in common.

Twenty-two shares of the company are held by StellviaCorp in a separate fund, and are awarded to new members of the Board of Directors as they are appointed (one share per person). The dividends paid to this fund support the Nikaido Foundation.

Major Holdings

Stellvia Corporation owns Stellvia Trading outright and holds a controlling interest in the Artemis Foundation.

Stellvia Trading

Founded on 1 July 2009 to administer the Stellvia space station, Stellvia Trading is 100% owned by Stellvia Corp. This is the company that most people think of when they hear the name "StellviaCorp".

Emblem of Stellvia Trading, Inc.

Stellvia Trading specialized in selling finished materials from Earth to Fen for the first few months of its existence, continuing how Noah Scott was earning a living before incorporating. However, Stellvia Trading's reaction to the Kaboomite Incident at Worldcon Floating Island that summer drove most of the Fen trading business away from Stellvia and into Fenspace proper, especially to The Island.

Faced with bankruptcy, Stellvia Trading began an ambitious project of offering space tourism to the people of Earth. Purchasing one of the two Concorde aircraft owned by the Airbus Factory, the company rebuilt and handwaved it into a luxury passenger spacecraft, christened it Ad Astra, and began offering weekly luxury transportation between Sydney's Kingsford Smith International Airport, Kandor City, and Stellvia, which had been renovated to include a small hotel facility. This worked so well that Stellvia Trading began an expansion project to increase the station's available hotel space, which was scaled up to meet vastly increased demand after the company's directors acted to prevent the destruction of Aukland in July 2011.

The expanded hotel was opened for business in April 2012, mere weeks before the SOS-Con. Stellvia Corporation rented out an entire level of the new hotel facility to Operation Great Justice until mid-2013, which brought some of the previously-lost Fen business back to Stellvia and paid for the station's first dry-dock facility. Many groups that wanted a near-Earth presence rented space in Stellvia, beginning with the Banzai Institute, the SEBureau, and Stellvia Trading itself. The dry-dock was rented to the SEBureau's Above and Beyond Development as soon as it was completed in February 2013, and was used to support Operation Great Justice until the end of the Boskone War in January 2014. Despite all the construction, the original Stellvia station ring still exists; it is now Noah Scott's private residence, and access to it is restricted to the Stellvians (see above).

In order to help stave off a post-war economic depression and in a paranoid response to a possible increase in 'danelaw interest in cislunar space, Stellvia Trading began an ambitious station expansion project in early 2014, with the intention of adding an additional ring to the station. This plan fell through with the successful completion of the April Fools' Purchase and the creation of the Artemis Foundation (see below), but the ring was near completion. StellviaCorp quickly changed its plans, built a hub for the new ring, and moved the new station to Mars orbit to become Odyssey.

In order to expand StellviaCorp's presence out of the Solar ecliptic, a third station was constructed between 2015 and 2019. This station, Ultima, is a copy of Stellvia as that station existed in 2014 except that it does not have the original station-ring construction. It sits near The Limit, on the line between Sol and Beta Hydri.

Stellvia Trading owns the Stellvia, Odyssey, and Ultima stations, its support agricultural station Wonderland, and the Ad Astra outright. It also maintains and provides home port facilities for Noah Scott's private yacht Epsilon Blade, Leda Swansen's car Haruka, and (after 2014) their daughter's private yacht Digamma Thunderbolt.

The company is run directly by Noah Scott, with the assistance of his "angels" and specialists in various fields, both human and AI.

StelOil

A wholly-owned subsidiary of Stellvia Trading, Stellvia Oil (or "StelOil" in casual conversation[8]) was formed in September 2010 to reduce Fenspace's dependency on Earth fuels and increase the Crystal Millennium's cash flow. This was the first project that Stellvia Corporation entered into with a major faction (the Senshi had the raw materials, while the Stellvians had the know-how to make something useful from them and the contacts to buy the necessary equipment), and its success is a large part of the reason the two factions allied despite the general low opinion the Fen had of the Stellvians between Island-con and SOS-Con.

Based in Crystal Titusville, Venus, StelOil purchases raw hydrocarbons from the Senshi, processes them into 89-octane and 91-octane gasoline, diesel fuel, avgas, Jet A-1[9], and a limited amount of bunker oil[10], then ships these fuels to refueling stations at Crystal Tokyo, Crystal Paris, Colony, Wonderland, Kandor City, the Island, Helium, Port Phobos, Serenity Valley, and elsewhere. They also refine some JP-7 for the Roughriders' Blackbirds, which is delivered directly to 36 Atalante. Other fuels are available, but only with an advance request of at least seven days.

StelOil does not sell its products directly to Earth, in order to avoid destroying the economies of the OPEC nations. StelOil occasionally buys fuels from Earth, in order to supply the Fenships that have quirks requiring the use of "natural oil" or the like.

Stellvia Travel & Tourism, UnLtd.

Another wholly-owned subsidiary of Stellvia Trading, ST&T is a travel agency specializing in hard-to-book excursions. While they never run a tour themselves, their ability to connect a tourist with just the right gondolier is legendary. ST&T is based out of Greenwood City.

Stellvia Hotels

Founded in July 2016, Stellvia Hotels runs the chain of lodgings owned by StellviaCorp: the Hotel Stellvia, the Hotel Odyssey, the Hotel Ultima, the Hotel Chawla, and the Hotel Choiseul.[11] In addition to these five wholly-owned hotels, this company has partial ownership in various independently-owned hotels throughout space and on Earth.[12] The company is run by Kelly Harrison, and has its head office in Stellvia.

Along with the usual amenities, each Stellvia Hotel (and the partially-owned hotels in Fenspace) hosts a ST&T office.

Artemis Foundation

Artemis Foundation logo

Main Article: Artemis Foundation

The Artemis Foundation was founded on 1 April 2014 to support the April Fool's Purchase. Nobody was more surprised than Noah when the Purchase was approved, and he quickly expanded the Artemis Foundation from a shell company to an actual corporation.

Their primary business is administration of Project Artemis, the space science body formed after much of NASA's space operations were absorbed by the TSAB. In support of Project Artemis, they also operate the shipyard Ley in the Main Belt, where they build unmanned probes for themselves and Shuttles for themselves and anyone else who can afford to buy them[13]. In order to break even, they also deliver 'Danelaw satellites to Earth orbit and maintain the International Space Station.

They have begun to design their own ships, but have not built any original spaceframes as of 2022.

They are owned 85% by Stellvia Corp., 5% by 'Dane interests supposedly not connected with NASA, and 10% by other Fen organizations and individuals.

The Artemis Foundation is directed by Sullivan Dwyer and employs many of the civilian scientists and researchers previously employed by NASA. They lease the Shuttle processing facilities located at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Their physical assets include the Shuttles Challenger and Phoenix, Main Belt Research Stations McAuliffe and Chawla, shipyard Ley (located on asteroid 2709 Sagan), many varieties of unmanned exploration drones in orbit around all four of Sol's gas giants and throughout the Alpha Centauri system, and administrative offices in Crystal Kyoto, Starbase 1, Starbase 2, and Stellvia. They also rent small offices in Canberra, Australia; Baikonur and Astana, Kazakhstan; and Washington, DC, and Cocoa, Florida, USA. Their main administrative offices were originally in Port Phobos, but moved to Odyssey in the last quarter of 2014.

For obvious reasons, the Artemis Foundation does not get along well with the TSAB.

Minor Holdings

StellviaCorp has minor holdings in many 'Dane and Fen businesses, only a few of which are listed here.

Nikaido Foundation

Main article: Nikaido Foundation

This philanthropic organization was founded on 15 June 2013, after the loss of Stellvia Corporation's first vice-president Yoriko Nikaido during the Boskone War.

It acts to funnel contributions of all sorts - financial gifts, expertise, and anything in between - from factions, businesses, and individuals to where they will do the most good, especially but not exclusively to the Banzai Institute and the Space Patrol.

When it was founded, the Foundation was owned 51% by StellviaCorp, 15% by the Soviet Air Force, 10% by Great Justice, and 8% by Greenwood, Unlimited, with the remaining 16% owned by other companies and individuals.[14] The most substantial change to that arrangement came in 2018, when StellviaCorp sold off half of his holding in the Foundation, retaining 25% of the Foundation and giving up their majority shareholder position. These shares were sold to various groups that did not already have a major stake in the Foundation.

Thanks to extensive automation, including AI assistance, the foundation's staff is very small. Day-to-day operations are handled by Aoi-chan, the foundation's AI system, while personal meetings are attended by any of the organization's five field representatives. Oliver Towne manages the foundation on behalf of the shareholders.

The organization's physical offices are in the Watchtower, in Kandor City. They have three 'waved 1985 Lincoln Town Cars at their disposal for day-to-day operations.

Other Noteworthy Holdings

StellviaCorp owns 10% of Hermes Universal Deliveries (a company that's in direct competition with CHOAM) and 25% of the Solomon Space Agency (thus securing preferred access to a launch facility on what is quickly becoming one of the busiest trade routes between Earth and Cislunar Space).

Related Pages

The Stellvia Corporation Fleet
An incomplete list of spaceworthy assets owned by Stellvia Corporation, as of early-2015.
List of Stellvia Corporation cities
A complete list of Stellvia Corporation's settlements, as of early-2015.
Halcyon
The corporation's private data network.
Stellvia Corporation Table of Organization
A list of important people throughout StellviaCorp.

Crew Patches

These patches are found on the right shoulder of the uniforms of the people serving aboard the listed stations or ships, and occasionally on the left shoulder of the clothing of people who used to serve aboard these ships or stations.

Notes

  1. This is so that they can toast Yuri Gagarin during the shareholders' dinner.
  2. The Senshi and Yayoi Fujisawa have had a long and mutually-beneficial relationship. Also, the Crystal Millennium came to the Stellvians for their business knowhow - that lead to Stellvia Oil, which has been profitable for both factions.
  3. The Warsies and the Stellvians were next-door neighbors back when they were both First Fen, and Kohran's practice-target drones blow up real good when the Warsies shoot them.
  4. The Blue Blazers used to work with Yoriko Nikaido, and still work closely with the Nikaido Foundation.
  5. They're both aggressively competing for the same markets.
  6. Because Noah Scott is irrational that way.
  7. And their early monopoly of Kaboomite
  8. And to annoy a particular Dutch multinational.
  9. Jet A-1 works just like Jet A but has a lower freezing point, and thus is a better fuel for the extreme conditions of Fenspace.
  10. Bunker oil is produced mainly for the Inelegant Truth.
  11. The chain's naming convention, while unoriginal, does have the advantage of indicating where the hotels can be found.
  12. This usually means Stellvia Hotels took a minor partnership in exchange for capital that was needed for building repairs and modernization.
  13. Under a "perpetual" licence from the Soviet Air Force, which irks them no end.
  14. For many reasons, most of which were political, the Banzai Institute did not have a financial interest in the organization before 2018.