I am interested in the side issue of the StM commods.
Where you have a high demand, and a SOLE source then you have a monopoly.
Monopolies are able to charge EXTORIONATE prices. You have to pay their prices or go without, even is it ia a necessitiy like StM. Add in a restricted supply then you do have a problem.
I believe in the past it has been used to give a huge advantage to the owning team as with the StM commods they could ensure that their team could get the levels of StM it wanted and thus has been made much richer as they could then much more effectively farm their galaxies.
Hal hinted at the solution we need another way of getting StM or another source of commods
btw the recent separation of the support skills has gone a long way to remove the power of StM as it used to be a prerquisite of the CA skill.
Good one programming team