To senualpilgram's Free State Proposal

Don't underestimate the cost of rules and regulation from government :-(

Besides, like who would come trying to invade you and for what purpose?

Besides to create an effective defense system is not all THAT expensive,
especially if you are willing to think outside the box, which should
certainly be a given if you are high tech enough and bold enough to be
considering Space Launches :-)

For less than a 100 million you could be pretty defensable. You can even do
the rest of the world a favor by buying up the black market weapons out
there for your defenses, pretty cheaply :-)

Defense 1, tomahawk / harpoon and other cruise missile categorys will do a
tremendous damage against incoming ships...launch 3-4 of them against even a
plallenx anti missile gun and your pretty sure to have a 'hit' Cost per
missile between $1million (Terrorist R' US Superstore) and $10 million each.

There are many older missile systems that are retired from US /Soviet
arsenals because they are not as useful against stealth agents...but they
still work great for low tech adversaries, even line of sight with laser or
wire guidance.

Cheap "eye in the sky" continuously flying solar powered recon aircraft can
provide long range advance warning of incoming threat. Infrared and such
with telescopic video cameras...bad weather moves in fly higher to 40k above
most clouds. If its really bad weather why worry about low tech (or even
high tech) adversaries making it through :-)

Even a decent weather radar on a high enough perch to look beyond earth
curvature can provide incoming data.

Add a couple of older fighter jets, or even converted commercial aviation
aircraft (737 without stage three noise level jets can be had for under
$2-million each with 50,000 lbs + payload) Coverting them to iron bombers
would be easy enough, even literally dropping "iron" on an enemy from 20,000
ft would be devasting to many small water craft invaders... designed to
spread out as they fall to cover a 1/2 miles square foot print would all but
insure a hit and sink or at least have the perps seriously reconsider the
act.

Add to your arsenal a few dozen torpedos at low spread also insure a certain
contact no matter how fast their incoming boats are or manueverable.

Along all the coast, a series of well placed vulcan gattling gun bunkers,
remote controlled, with overlap can reduce the attractiveness of sea
invasions if they do indeed get by the harpoons, 737 iron bombers and
torpedos.

Now if its a big invader like the US, you can hang it up because of the
inequality of volumes, but just about anything else you can defend against
cheaply.

We haven't even touched gas or chemical type weapons which are very cheap.
You don't even have to be lethal with them. Knock out gas etc. does the job
as well too. In that way, your own personal does not get harmed, yet you
incapacitate invaders.

Remember that most of the world countries do not have a defense system even
equal to whats been mentioned here, look at Panama, Belize, Costa Rica,
Honduras, Ecuador, etc etc. A few simple non agression pacts and mutual
assistences agreements goes a long way... If you are doing Space launches,
then you can provide cheap satellite launches for your neighbor countries
and get their assistence that way. :-)

Now being a rogue nation with a nasty attitude would be bad idea, but almost
anything else, what the hey? Besides, you'll want tourist coming in to see
launches for extra income so you don't want to get too strong an image, do
you? :-)

> > In the end, it may be cheaper to launch from the US and jump through