Concordance Transit System

Faster Than Light - or FTL - travel is hard. While the Chord was assembled to make interstellar transit take less than a few hundred years, travel along the cosmic strings is still something of a miracle to many. If everyone who wanted to travel the stars needed their own FTL apparatus, well, the producers of such technology would be much richer. But the common people would certainly be worse off. To make interstellar travel more commonplace, there is the CTS.
The Concordance Transit System consists of a fleet of 16 active Tahoro-class star ferries, and the infrastructure that allows them to transit the Chord regularly. The CTS liners pass from system to system once every Concordia-standard day, ferrying massive amounts of people and cargo as they go. A stellar system can expect to see a CTS leviathan in their skies once every two days.
In many ways, the CTS is practically a nation of commerce all its own. Its ships run like cities within a larger state, each having their own ordinances, law enforcement, defense, utilities, schools, institutions, and so on. No two Tahoros are the same, each having its own cultures and traditions. The CTS Fabriker, for example, is just as much a factory as it is a logistics ship. It has a wealthy elite living aboard the upper decks, but also a rugged, blue-collar working class that loves carousing the pubs with one-transit or whole-cycle passengers. The CTS Debardeur, by contrast, runs like a giant democratic worker's co-op, managing their own affairs and electing their deck reps while maintaining a polite distance with short-haul passengers. The monumental crews of each ship can live their whole lives aboard, without taking a single step beyond the airlocks and hangers of their home. 
As of now, those living aboard CTS ships have Concordance citizenship. Buts as the Concordance breaks down further, the CTS hears more calls to join many of the one-time member states, and declare their independence from the Concordance. Though at this point, it may be nothing more than a formality.

Public Agenda

The CTS is explicitly non-partisan and apolitical. Whenever CTS and Concordance interests intersect, the CTS's interests win out. The one and only goal of the CTS is to facilitate peaceful trade and free movement along the Chord. No matter their relations with the Concordance, the CTS services every country and people in the Chord.
Through heavily taxed and monitored by the CTS, even warships of rival nations can be found aboard. Though, should anyone bring their conflicts aboard their ships, the CTS will respond with sanctions and enforcement. So far, this system has worked, and all the major players play by the rules. But secretly, the board of the CTS fears the day that someone fights back, expropriating their ships or even blockading their system. They pray that this day never come.

Assets

The CTS maintains a fleet of 30 Tahoro-class ships, with at least 15 active at all times. At an average length of four kilometers long, with hangers fit to carry entire fleets on board and modular cargo bays for a planet's worth of supplies, these vital ships make interstellar civilization possible. As politically fractured as the Chord is these days, no one abides a threat the CTS.
In addition to its physical transit service, the CTS also maintains a fleet of over 100 Infranet bottle ships. These ships with no human crew aboard push the limits of Concordance law on automation and AI, and are strictly regulated. Their purpose is to transit into a system and burst its zettabytes of data to that stellar system's local network. Then, the system's local net offloads all outgoing data to the bottle ship, and its gone within the hour it dropped in to repeat the process at the next system.

Freedom of Movement

Founding Date

740, Stellar Era

Type

Corporation, Transportation

Alternative Names

The StarTram, the Big Bus

Parent Organization

The Concordance

Location

Concordia*

Controlled Territories

• CTS Debardeur
• CTS Fabriker
• CTS Hobbsmith