The Megacorporations

The megacorporations are the driving force behind mankind's conquest of space. They build and run the space stations, colonize worlds with profitable resources, and engage in intestellar trade. They also buy the minerals, biodata, map data, and alien artifacts that freelance prospectors bring in, making them a welcome source of income for enterprising ship captains.

The Big Four Megacorps
The 4 most important megacorps in this sector are:

Eridiani Explorations
This company's expertise lies in charting stars and mapping foreign planets for interested parties. A smaller, but also important market for Eridiani is trade in exotic goods from far away systems.

Smith Heavy Industries
SHI is a production conglomerate. You need to live the life of a hermit to never come into contact with one of SHIs products. Any starship captain can rest assured a good portion of his ship was built by SHI. Predictably, they are always interested in easily exploitable resources of raw materials.

Triax Traders
Most merchantmen hauling the spaceroutes of this sector bear the logo of Triax Traders. They also employ a large fleet of battleships to protect their valuable cargo. Still, space piracy remains the thorn in Triax's side.

Omega Bioengineering
High-tech drug manufacturing is the main trade of Omega Bioengineering. Of all the megacorps, Omega spends the largest portion of its income on research and development. Their scientists often come up with astonishing uses for exotic life forms. For this reason they are constantly on the lookout for biodata from alien worlds.

Dealing With The Megacorps
Unless you're playing a pirate, the megacorps will be your main source of income, as their space stations are the only place that you can turn your minerals, biodata, and map data.

Every game, each of the three space stations is generated with a different megacorp owning it. This means only three megacorps are in each game. A station's owner mostly determines what the station is most interested in. For example, an Eridiani station will pay more for a complete planet map than other stations, while SHI probably pays more for minerals.

In practice, this only makes a little difference. Just turn in whatever you can find to whatever station you can most easily reach. Oddly enough, the megacorps don't care whether prospectors deal only with their company, and there is no penalty for switching stations.

Another difference between the megacorps is that they each considers themselves the exclusive supplier of certain types of cargo. If you go to that megacorp's station with "its" cargo, it can be siezed as contraband.

All this aside, it pays to know where all the space stations are. Over time, stations can take damage from pirate attacks. Over a long game, it is not uncommon for a station to be destroyed outright. If you find that your favorite station is suddenly missing, this is probably what happened. If you're in that situation, it pays to know where you

There is another, final way to interact with a megacorp, but it's a spoiler.