Enoki
SOC-14 1K
What I see is things likely work something like this:
You can't buy a ship on a straight-out loan. You have to make a down payment. This goes for any larger price tag item you buy. The down payment is then used by the lender to take out insurance against you skipping out on the loan. Your loan payments include a cost per month to cover that insurance payment. For smaller stuff, there's 'lay away.'
You skip and the lender gets the loan paid off in part or full by the insurer. Your ability to get another loan plummets and that spreads at the speed of the X-boat service across the Imperium. That means you find your J2 ship is arriving at ports where they already know you skipped on the loan, and then bad things happen... To you!
At the same time, the lender then sells off the bad loan to collection agencies who specialize in getting their 'pound of flesh' they've purchased out of you quite literally. That is, they hunt you down and do very mean things to you until you pay up.
Since they technically can collect your ship as payment for the amount they bought, they get quite the deal, and you get a cheap coffin. So, what you have are companies that are bad debt collectors buying up the rights to your defaulted loan and the property attached to it. They work barely within the law in terms of how they go about collecting.
One method is you and your ship / property are put on a hot sheet between these sorts of 'black' companies and that spreads far and wide at the rate of movement of the X-boat service. So, some local bounty hunter sees your wanted poster, sees you, and things get dicey PDQ for you.
Your best bet if you plan on skipping out on the loan is to get the hell of the Imperium ASAP. No X-boat service per se, and who knows, if you pick the right small polity or system, they might actually be friendly to you showing up with a running (pun intended) ship.
Same thing with the library example. You have to pay a membership fee to use it. The fee is sufficient that if you don't return lent materials, you get put on the naughty list and the library uses some of that membership fee to cover the loss via insurance.
Now, given that insurance is in play here, the thing to do is not skip out on the loan per se but rather set things up where you ship gets "pirated" or "destroyed" or the like and those who pirated or destroyed it actually paid you a pretty good chunk of change for it. You then turn around and get the insurance to pay off making sure it covers the whole cost of the ship plus a little extra for your troubles. You make out quite well, the lender is satisfied, and only the insurance company gets screwed, but they really don't care because they're set up to make a profit even if some of their policies go this route. Of course, you might end up getting a serious mind probing by the insurer's psionics division personnel who might--will regardless of the truth--say you're lying and pulling an insurance scam. Now you're back to dealing with their division of leg breakers and knee cappers.
You know, this is the guy you get reviewing your insurance claim...
You can't buy a ship on a straight-out loan. You have to make a down payment. This goes for any larger price tag item you buy. The down payment is then used by the lender to take out insurance against you skipping out on the loan. Your loan payments include a cost per month to cover that insurance payment. For smaller stuff, there's 'lay away.'
You skip and the lender gets the loan paid off in part or full by the insurer. Your ability to get another loan plummets and that spreads at the speed of the X-boat service across the Imperium. That means you find your J2 ship is arriving at ports where they already know you skipped on the loan, and then bad things happen... To you!
At the same time, the lender then sells off the bad loan to collection agencies who specialize in getting their 'pound of flesh' they've purchased out of you quite literally. That is, they hunt you down and do very mean things to you until you pay up.
Since they technically can collect your ship as payment for the amount they bought, they get quite the deal, and you get a cheap coffin. So, what you have are companies that are bad debt collectors buying up the rights to your defaulted loan and the property attached to it. They work barely within the law in terms of how they go about collecting.
One method is you and your ship / property are put on a hot sheet between these sorts of 'black' companies and that spreads far and wide at the rate of movement of the X-boat service. So, some local bounty hunter sees your wanted poster, sees you, and things get dicey PDQ for you.
Your best bet if you plan on skipping out on the loan is to get the hell of the Imperium ASAP. No X-boat service per se, and who knows, if you pick the right small polity or system, they might actually be friendly to you showing up with a running (pun intended) ship.
Same thing with the library example. You have to pay a membership fee to use it. The fee is sufficient that if you don't return lent materials, you get put on the naughty list and the library uses some of that membership fee to cover the loss via insurance.
Now, given that insurance is in play here, the thing to do is not skip out on the loan per se but rather set things up where you ship gets "pirated" or "destroyed" or the like and those who pirated or destroyed it actually paid you a pretty good chunk of change for it. You then turn around and get the insurance to pay off making sure it covers the whole cost of the ship plus a little extra for your troubles. You make out quite well, the lender is satisfied, and only the insurance company gets screwed, but they really don't care because they're set up to make a profit even if some of their policies go this route. Of course, you might end up getting a serious mind probing by the insurer's psionics division personnel who might--will regardless of the truth--say you're lying and pulling an insurance scam. Now you're back to dealing with their division of leg breakers and knee cappers.
You know, this is the guy you get reviewing your insurance claim...
