Poll for Weekly Flag Challenge 232

Which is the best corporate lunar colony flag?

  • One

  • Two

  • Three


Results are only viewable after voting.
Flag Challenge 232: Destination Moon

Create a flag for a colony on the Moon, that was founded by a private company but is internationally regarded as part of a country's territory, no matter how loose or firm the law may be 400,000 km away from Earth.

Submissions Close: 23:59 BST 20th September 2020
One said:
Lunar Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR)

The LSSR was founded on May Day, 2020, combining several Soviet moon development companies into one.

General Secretary Malinkov, having successfully popularized “public computers” in the whole Union, started to turn his eyes on cheap and affordable space travel. In the mean time, the fall of Israel brought “home” to the Soviet Union a large group of Jews, among whom a young engineer named Elon Maskirov, who promised to manufacture space rockets like GAZ trucks, and space stations like flats. Lot’s of young Russians, who were supposed to be sent to Afghanistan IOTL, were in turn sent to the moon, whereas the living conditions may be worse.

By the 2000s, the moon has been a place of exile for Soviet dissidents and Kremlin outcasts, living conditions improved, and some made fortune, in Lunar Ruble, out of entrepôt trade to the lucrative Martian Colonies.

The LSSR was founded on May Day, 2020, combining several Soviet moon development companies into one, to exert better control in this fledging colony.

The bear symbolize resilience of Soviet space colonists, tree the habitat they created, and hammer and sickle the Soviet Motherland. I’ll upload a neater one when I have my computer with me.
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Two said:
The United States Lunar Territory of Tycho Crater, or Tycho, was the first successful colony on the Moon not wholly formed from transient science or mining colonies. Its origins do lie with mining though with the creation of the US or American Lunar Mining Consortium, generally called LMC or LuMiC, as a mix of companies in association with NASA, with the purpose of mining Tycho Crater for helium and valuable minerals.
Its success came as LMC demand for workers impeded its profitability and a historic contract was made with the new Federal Department of Corrections who needed to deal with a growing population issue in prisons across the US. Thus in addition to the company habitats the Tycho Federal Correctional Institute was built to house the prisoners who would form part of the LMC workforce, their wardens, and associated families of both.
The Institute proved remarkably effective at rehabilitation and soon a large minority of wardens and LMC executives were former prisoners themselves.

The Flag of Tycho is based on the emblem of LuMiC - stars in a half ring over a crescent - with the addition of a voided orange star (replacing the letters LMC) in reference to the Institute. The field is deliberately white in reference to the colony's notion that life in Tycho is cleansing.

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Three said:
Magnitogorsk Lunar Mining Company
The discovery of various rare minerals on the moon was largely a scientific curiosity for years, overshadowed by the Second Space Race to Mars. Then, in 2041, a Russian robotic rover found something which changed the rules of the game. Iridium. This was the third most valuable element on Earth at the time (second to Rhodium and Palladium) due to both its scarcity and the difficulty in extracting it. The discovery of an entire crater rich in Iridium was something which promised rich rewards to whichever country could control that crater.
Unfortunately for Russia, it was only the previous year that it had invoked Article II of the Outer Space Treaty to prevent the USA from claiming ownership of the area around the Apollo 11 landing site (‘...outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means’). The President therefore felt it impossible to claim direct ownership of the crater, fearing international opprobrium.
The solution was to give generous tax breaks to a number of companies, most notably the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works and the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company. These then formed a new company called the Magnitogorsk Lunar Mining Company (Магнитогорская Лунная Горнорудная Компания, Magnitogorskaya Lunnaya Gornorudnaya Kompaniya (MLGK)). With the joint backing of its various corporate investors, it launched a series of lunar missions to set up a series of mines in the crater, including many manned missions. The company claimed ownership of the crater directly, thus circumventing the perceived ban on a country owning any part of the moon.
Over the next 10 years, the domes and tunnels of the mines grew to encompass the entire crater, now known simply as Iridium Crater (Иридиевый кратер). The work was extremely dangerous and the company found it increasingly difficult to find volunteers to go, even with the huge salaries on offer. The solution found was to work with the government. The details of the deal are still unclear, but for the past 10 years, large numbers of convicts have been transported to the MLGK mines, which now exist in a number of craters, all ‘owned’ by MLGK. Officially all these convicts are those serving life for murder and other violent crimes, but it is alleged by various non-Russian organisations, and exiles, that the mines have become a convenient place to send dissidents as well. Some call the MLGK mines the ‘new Siberia’ but the name which has stuck most is ‘Rusa Penthe,’ a play on the name of the deadly mining planet Rura Penthe from an old sci-fi film ‘Star Trek the Undiscovered Country.’
It is this use of convicts which makes most international commentators treat the MLGK mines as part of Russia, rather than purely corporate territory, but so far no-one has managed to successfully challenge this in a court.
All MLGK mines use the same flag, which consists of a stylised set of the company initials (in Cyrillic): МЛГК, using mountains and mining equipment, appearing to sit on the edge of the moon, with the black background of the flag symbolising space. At the bottom of each flag are the initials of the specific location. The flag shown below is that of the original Iridium Crater, so has the initials И К.
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