TERMINOLOGY:

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3MT:  Modular and Myomer Movement Technology:
    The technology that most hope will lead to the creation of re-alistic robotics.

Brilliant Pebbles:
    Sometimes, it becomes necessary to beam a high power transmission from one location to another.  Only large spacecraft and colonies can transmit these powerful broadcasts.  They are designed to traverse many thousands of par-secs.  This amount of power is so high if a small spacecraft with its radio systems on "receive" (which is common) where to be caught in its cross-fire, it would overload the ships systems like a power surge through a computer.  These cases are slim.  When this occurs, the crew usually refers to it as a "Brilliant Pebble"

Burner Range:
    The maximum radius of human knowledge of our universe in detail.  This is the radius of Burners and Trawler Nets that have scanned deep space.  They have spanned more than 10 000 parsecs out.

Carcass/Hulk:
    The nickname given to fairly-intact ships and hulk found in deep space.

Commission:
    The share the mule crews get on the ship they salvaged.

Drill Head:
    A Ground Based mining system that scrapes along a ground, eating everything a value and then trans-porting it into orbit on shuttlecraft.  These are still legal although they are considered strip-miners since there is little to no chance for the land left behind to recover.

Firms:
    Groups of 3 to 6 mules that work together to find Wrecks.  Really aggressive groups use public domain leads and don't hook up to Syndicates.  Most do hook up, however and they are subject to the same contract duties.

    Flash Traffic:  A related radio-term, this refers to a ultra-high priority military transmission.  Flash Traffic is usually coded and given a top secret clearance.  However, when any military ship receives Flash Traffic, it usually means something very important is going down.

Ice Drive:
    This job is devoted to high power Mules (Cobbs, Outriggers, Crabs) who tug the chunks from Berg Park to colony planets.  Often enough this is used for terra-forming where Bergs are often the prime ingredient.  This is the only known time when these Riggers actually toss the huge 30 kilometer chunks of ice directly into a planet's atmosphere.  Inefficient but effective, there is no better way to take out a forest fire on a hot planet (figure of speech).  Often enough, these chunks are low-ered to a planet with the help of the tug, grav pods and friction screens (clumsy force fields used only for re-entry).  An awesome sight of a farmer on a desert world would be to wake up and see a 4 kilometer chunk of ice in the distance slowly melting away...that's also a figure of speech.  You can't miss these things coming down.

Leads:
    The short snip of information that tells where a wreck might be and the probability of it being there.  There are several types:
    Copper--Slim chance of a craft.
    Bronze--Mediocre chance of a craft.
    Silver--Good chance of a craft.
    Gold--Very Good chance of a craft.
    Lead information is acquired from Burners.

Mecktechs:
    Mecktechs are small service robots made for work, not looks.  They don't have legs but often have many arms.  Some work as public relations like cash registers and such but most work as maintenance and service machine.  They have a rudimentary intelligence and have bee around for 500 years.  Since their inception, not much has improved.

Perimeter:
    Past the Burner Range, where unknown perils and riches might wait.

Rigger:
    The crews of Mules.

Rock Raids:
    These involve getting under planetary screens and skimming towards the crater no more than a meter above the surface at times--grabbing the newly fallen rock and getting out before guns or worse can be trained on you. Not a very scrupulous business but profitable.

Staking Claims:
    When a fast mineral deposit is found on a planet, the person or persons who found it can stake a claim, saying that this is theirs.  At that point the person/s in question get a share from everything mind.  All land with any min-eral left in the territory is currently nationalized (Authority or Bloc controlled--about 80%).  The rest are privately owned but most of those are stripped.

Syndicates:
    The only Corporations not under Government rules.

The Territory:
    The area of space where colonies, mining planets and spacelanes lie.  The Territory range is around 8 000 parsecs from Earth.  Burners have pushed another 2 000 parsecs out.  Mules often go out of the Territory but the chances of finding anything reduces as they go farther out. If they find anything near the edge of the Burner Range, it probably isn't Terran.

Trawler Nets:
    A network of tens or even hundreds of Burners designed to sweep an area for an exact reading. Expen-sive...but effective, especially if a previous Burner revealed a possible large cache of ship or ships.

Rail:
    The term given the police officers of the R.F.P.

Wetwear:
    It uses encoding sequences built in the Nucleic Acid chains.  It encodes RNA like a Human Cell. Biome-chanoid technology has not been developed but it is rumored that BAHAL and Schiller are competing in this field.

Primary English:
    This is the main language spoken by  mostly everybody.  It is assumed that everyone knows this.

Pan-Terran Language:
    PTL is English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Japanese, Italian or an other language. It is a mix-mash of all of them.  The easiest terms of all of them were combined to please all cultures.  It is very peculiar to hear.  It was developed after the cataclysm by several offshoot camps.  It lasted for about a hundred years and was quickly overcome by PE.  Several independent colonies in what is left of the Commonwealth speak this unusual tongue.  Pavilion is the largest colony.