Kajeska-Maelstrom Engineering Company

The Kajeska-Maelstrom Engineering Company is a space engineering company that provides experience and design services for a variety of projects, particulariy Downlines, Orbitals and other Really Huge Things. Most of them would love to move into stellar engineering if it weren't for the Theocratic Science Service's monopoly on it.

History

Founded in 926 by Archland Crucible Kajeska-Maelstrom and still using the same office on Sophia the company began as a way of speeding up the development and planning of public works projects by bypassing the bureaucratic nightmare that dominated Sophia's / transitional period. It managed a major coup by poaching a handful of disillusioned scientists and engineers from government projects despite paying them less. The company gained a reputation for ingenious solutions to power science problems and for using some clever black girders, however the company began to take on more and more people, eventually becoming almost as stagnant as the groups it was designed to replace. Things came to a head as one of the original crop of engineers found the delivery of his magnetically linked meta-material grid system had been cancelled by a bunch of accountants pending a "feasibility and safety study", this led to the company having little choice but to lose the baggage or lose the talent. They kept the Talent. Almost overnight the company was restructured into what is more-or-less it's current form, unfortunately this was a horrible breach of some employees contracts and the ensuing legal battle almost bankrupted the company. Those that remained were a varied bunch of engineers, physicists, chemists, logistics experts and a couple of the more down-to-earth accountants. It was at this point that the company developed it's religious tendencies, in part due to the nature of it's remaking. Since that point the company has never employed (at least permanently) more than 300 people.

Famous Projects

Project Ideon

The corporation was hired in 875 to work out how to remove one of the moons of Lexis V and put it into orbit around Newton's World. The whole operation took 8 years, with most of the work done in a 6 month period before the jump, the rest was making sure the thing would orbit properly despite the moon displaying odd gravitational responses.

Structure

The Kajeska-Maelstrom Engineering Company is structured in cells of employees ranging from five to ten members with employees changing cells quite frequently although long term partnerships are respected. The company has no real offices apart from the one on Sophia, instead it simply pays for it's employees to stay wherever they are needed and also pays for any equipment they may need to acquire in order to do their jobs. Mostly employees pay for things and then claim back expenses vetted by their cell-mates, and by a neighbouring cell or cells for larger expenses. This act-now-worry-later model is only possible because of the immense stacks of money the company makes from it's work. When you need a space elevator Now then they are the people to go to.

Unfortunately this also means that the company takes some odd risks when it comes to indulging the eccentricities of some of it's engineers however cross checking on larger projects leads to more sensible designs (and a few truly impressive arguments). For big project the company organises itself into super-cells that consist of everyone they need for the project, they then go out and hire everything they need for the job, preferably from local resources, this can however lead to a lot of as certain things are not always available everywhere. The same approach is applied to their science although things are (almost) always quite rigorously tested before being allowed into anything vital, in the past this has lead to some very innovative, some would say insane, solutions to construction problems. The company's lack of centralised resources can become a problem when constructing large and specialised objects, mostly they outsource actual construction or use the facilities of anyone they can persuade/bribe to let them, seeing as how their projects are often for the good of the local public they are rather successful and can usually source most things. They have little in the way of proprietary technology which is a big weakness for their competitors to exploit, made worse by their engineer's habits of leaving as little black-boxed as possible for ease of maintenance.

Executive authority is wielded by a handful of people in the company who are chosen by their peers, aside from in serious disputes they are simply just another employee and this status can be revoked by a vote of no confidence. Having no offices can make communications difficult, the company equips it's employees with everything they can to stay in touch with each other, even to the point of sending cells out with portable cloud hardware capable of making a connected environment in the middle of no-where as well as phones, Worldnet access tools, rented nodes and places for storing plans and other data securely. The main office even has a secured, dedicated interspace relay for dragging up plans of old projects and acting as a mail server. When they are not actively on a project employees are encouraged to experiment with new technology, although the company has no directed research and development agenda, engage in building links with groups who may become new clients or sources of materials or labour or help out with other projects where they can. People that do not make productive use of their time are normally quickly ratted out by their co-workers however.

Employees

<ooc label="Plot Information"> The Kajeska-Maelstrom Engineering Company was written for a one-shot called Macro-Exorcism based around the space elevator it built on Angel's Eye</ooc>