Popular Trade Goods in Fenspace

or, How can I make some credits in Fenspace?

Entertainment Media

As most of the Fen are strongly into anime, science fiction, or both, shipments of new DVDs generally sell at a decent profit. Video games, music CDs, comic books and manga, electronics to play the aforementioned media, and computers are also good sellers.

However, the "information wants to be free" attitude of many Fen (called "data piracy" by many 'Danes) makes entertainment media difficult to sell after their initial releases. Without the option of suing their customers, some Earthside companies have written off Fenspace altogether, while others release Fen-Edition sets with physical extras specifically for the space market (such as the Utena series set complete with replica Rose Sword). A few companies have even made the data media into collectors' items; thus, branded USB computer-memory dongles are more common in space than are unbranded memory.

Foodstuffs

What about Ninjaburger?

Some people look at the lack of ground beef in space, and wonder where Ninjaburger gets the raw materials it needs for its eponymous sandwich. The lack of reported cases of biomodification rules out the Senshi and the TSAB as their sources, and only those new to space would think they buy ground beef from Stellvia (the Ninja/Stellvia animosity is well-documented). It's possible that they're getting their supplies from Earth. (They may be getting their lettuce and tomatoes from Earth as well.) The expense of bringing fresh supplies up the gravity well makes this problematic at best. Another theory is that the Ninjaburger is a flavored soy-burger rather than a beef-burger. Soybeans require more space to grow than most people believe the Ninja have available to them, but the theory cannot be ruled out. The truly paranoid worry that Ninjaburgers might be "long pork," and stick to the Samurai Chicken Sandwiches. Many Nester Heinleinians have unreservedly stated that this theory is incorrect. As for the real answer ... as usual, the Ninja aren't talking.

Red Meat is something that's almost completely unavailable in Fenspace. Meat requires either large amounts of grazing land or some form of industrial lab culture to be cost-effective, and so far nobody's managed to create an effective industrial carniculture plant.

Prices for a decent steak, pork chop, lamb chop, or any other form of meat that isn't chicken, fish or rabbit range from expensive-but-still-reasonable on Stellvia and in the lunar cities to arm-leg-and-firstborn on Venus, Mars and Ganymede.

Experiments in vat-grown meat are ongoing - both the Senshi and TSAB are making attempts. Their difficulty is not just in getting the cells to multiply, but in keeping the results totally free of handwavium contamination. There are at least two known cases of independent experiments that resulted in inadvertent biomods. The results have tended to discourage any further attempts, although rumors continue that Boskone has at least one facility up and running.

Stellvia has been experimenting with vat-grown meat since they added a genetic engineer to their staff in 2013. However, their process does not use handwavium and they do not have access to trade secrets in this field, so they are only at the state of the art for mid-2006. They can produce thin sheets of muscle fibre - not good enough for steaks, but acceptable as substitutes for ground beef and ground pork.

The restrictions of grazing land are obvious: the only places that have sufficient land to spare for agriculture are Earth, Mars, and Grover's Corners, and Mars is using all of its arable land for other purposes.

Grover's Corners is unique in space in that not only do they have about a hundred acres of pasture and farmland immediately usable, they are using it already - just not for beef cattle. They are the top supplier of fresh eggs (and the occasional chicken) in Fenspace. And they also have game - at least a dozen deer, among many other wild animals, are known to have been trapped within the hull of the Corners the night the dome was raised and the ship launched. The crew allows limited hunting - gudgingly permitted by their environmental AI Gaia after much negotiation - to keep their numbers manageable.

Nutrition is still a problem in Fenspace, although less so in 2013 than even five years earlier. It is terribly easy for a careless Fan to end up with debilitating and possibly life-threatening dietary deficiencies. Fortunately, the Vitamin Man and his competitors serve Fenspace by traveling from settlement to settlement, selling nutritional supplements at reasonable prices.

"Legal" Drugs

Technically speaking, all drugs are legal in Fenspace (barring local regulations to the contrary), but some drugs are just too dangerous to use in the unforgiving environment of space. Use of alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana in moderation does not incapacitate the user to life-threatening extremes, so there are markets for these drugs in Fenspace.

Alcohol is trivally easy to make from any starch-based foodstuff, and many Fen do so:

• The stereotypical Belter is known for making back-of-the-car "white lightning."
• The White Stallion does a nice side business selling small batches of whiskey that aren't up to their very high standards.
• The settlement in the Grover's Corners is top-heavy with home-brewers; their beers, meads and ciders are considered among some of the better "local" product available in Fenspace. (They are also hard to come by - the crew came into Fenspace expecting to brew mainly for themselves, and at the moment they are limited to approximately ten five-gallon "brew buckets" at a time.)
• Crystal Sapporo (in Venus orbit) is home to one of the most noted breweries in Fenspace.

The Corners' crew are typical in selling their brews for a quarter their weight in biomass (or the equivalent in other valid currency) plus an amount of water equal the brew sold.

Marijuana is almost trivially easy to grow, as long as the necessary hydroponic greenhouse space is available. Hephaestus grows a strain guaranteed to be handwavium-free. The Martian Terraforming Project grows acres of hemp mainly intended for cloth and paper fiber, but some of that crop ends up in pipes and cigarettes as well.

Tobacco is somewhat more difficult to grow in Fenspace, and remains a major Earth export. (As with all botanical matters in Fenspace, there are persistent rumors that The Jason is working on this problem, but as of 2014 he hasn't announced anything.)