The true question to ask here is. What would stop me from making a grey matter bomb? AIs? Those are normal nanobots, people? good try they cant be hacked because they dont have no radios, other nanobots? Not If have more than you(and a grey bomb would solve that fast and easily).

The rep system helps counter free riding, your radioactive guy "should" have a sky high Rep and be able to requisition/make anything he needs, unless this Hab has some really, really weird prioritizations loaded into it. Such Habs are likely to fail because of... Ease of movement would also change the Habs habits. Your radioactive character could relatively easily move to a hab that appreciates him more via farcasting, unless he is held there by unstated reasons. The Fall plus some nearly Darwinian selection in the post-fall environment means that habs filled with morons tend to either collapse or dissipate as a cloud of debris.

MAD Crab wrote:

As somebody who's had to try and make blueprints for conventional manufacturing, this a thousand times over. Making stuff is hard, even when the tools are quite simple.

My initial attempts of joining maker culture and programming for a 3D printer were the most stressful months of my life. Making a goddamn replica of a 28mm miniature for a game was a lot harder than it looked.

MAD Crab wrote:

Actually, this is part of the concept for my first EP character, although he runs the engines of a mobile hab (and is massively in debt and under appreciated because of it. And radioactive). Undocking, you say that 'the hab' would make sure he's supplied, but that goes right into Tragedy of the Commons territory. Nobody wants to make the sacrifice to keep the hab running, and since one person holding back wouldn't have any effect [i]everybody[/i] ends up holding back.

What Halden points out in his paper is that unregulated commons favours free riders—selfish egos—over altruistic egos. Looking at the issue from an anarcho-collectivist lens, the Tragedy of Commons is opposed to the philosophy of "to each according to his/her need". Even the anarcho-transhumansits (Blue Anarchists) use a similar credo: "From each according to their imagination, to each according to their need." EP points out in Rimward that certain types of anarchy are not for everyone. Anarchist habitats (collectivist, blue, individualist) would not last very long if nobody siphoned resources off to the life support system to make repairs. Those basic functions are needs. Limited resources outside of basic functions would be scheduled for use or petitioned with @-rep. Running and maintaining the engines is one thing, but upgrading them and attaching on new fiddly bits that take up extra resources would be another.

MAD Crab wrote:

The hab is not one monolithic organism, it's a group of people who explicitly don't answer to anybody.

That is more anarcho-individualist, like scum swarms or certain types of extropian/an-cap.

MAD Crab wrote:

I haven't actually read rimward yet, so I may be missing some details. And I have to admit that I'm not entirely brushed up on all the variates of anarchism.

Definitely read the anarchism section of the AA chapter. It examines what I'm outlining in more detail. Eclipse Phase assumes that the 'base' anarchy expressed is somewhere in the anachro-collectivism/anarcho-syndicalism/anarcho-communism/anarcho-socialist vein. So when the board refers to 'the hab' in a monolithic sort of way, it is because the anarchists on the habitat are a collective with similar ideals and goals for the society in a philosophic sense that is expressed in their actions. An anarchist habitat will have a couple hundred people who enjoy and believe in collectivism and altruism. Forced riders can leave, providing another habitat accepts them, and free riders are driven off.

MAD Crab wrote:

I guess my issue with any of the anarchist habs is what I feel is a disconnect between the flat organization and philosophy, and the discussion of stuff like needs and how people -actually- act. How do you siphon off resources for needs? Who decides what the needs are? The guy running the mining operation physically has control of resources, so doesn't he have an uneven say in what goes where?

All anarchists make heavy use of ANI and robots. ANI and robots handle all the menial tasks that most people wouldn't want to do (like washing the floors). If an ego actually volunteers to do that, then it is because the ego wants to. More vital functions that require an ego for operation are either 'chores' with an ANI scheduling the shifts, which can be traded or given away to egos with proper credentials, or volunteers. Generally, robots under control of an ANI would do the mining. If an ego volunteers to run the mining, they are not doing it for selfish reasons, but for the benefit of the habitat. Resources are split based on the requirements for the habitat's function by an ANI. Extra resource consumption beyond what is needed are then scheduled by an ANI and sorted by a mix of Rep, urgency, and desire. Your character's engines on a collectivist habitat would have enough resources for fuel required for the necessary corrections and for repairs to keep the engines operational. If your character desires additional resources for enhancing performance, then he would sign up through the ANI for the schedule to use the specific resources. If he wanted the resources now, his Rep could help get them sooner. If the engines needed critical repairs or extra fuel for emergency corrections, then the urgency factor would kick in. Regarding how people act, those who collectivism does not work for have other options: more individualist anarchists like Extropians/An-cappers and scum, or starting their own habitat.

MAD Crab wrote:

Yes and no. He's not terribly social, and literally radioactive. People don't like hanging around him that much, even if he's not overly hazardous if you've got basic biomods. Nothing I've read about the rep economy says that such people end up with high rep. He contributes, after a fashion - but nobody cares much about the engines, as they're very disconnected from the day-to-day of the hab. People keep talking like the hab itself can assign rep. If the hab has somebody sleeved into it I guess it could, but no more than anybody else. Or am I missing something? My understanding of reputation economies is that it's a collective assessment of your value to the group. The trouble with that is that people are terrible at actually assessing who's contributing.

That is an actual draw-back of the Rep system: those who are not socially involved will suffer from lower Rep. Keeping your head down and not tweeting how the engines are doing in a public feed, providing a narrated XP stream of your engine work, or telling people about your work for the hab will keep your character on the lower level of the Rep economy. Sure, whenever the habitat needs to make a maneuver, the community would be very concerned about the engines and grateful enough that your character has been working them to give a bunch of +1's—but without being involved on the local social networks he will fall through the cracks.

savanah wrote:

I'm having a few problems trying to wrap my head around a few problems with the anarchist ideology and how it works. My first question is about freedom of information, as I understand fabers are open and blueprints are completely free in any anarchist hab, so what happens if someone simply decides to mass produce anthrax and pump it to the hab?

Freedom of information goes both ways. Somebody decides that, for whatever reason, he has a [i]burning[/i] desire to manufacture anthrax... Well, anthrax is actually a living organism, you can't make that in a nanofabricator, you'd have to grow it in a genetics lab. Let's assume something similarly nasty, then; VX gas. So, sure, you can manufacture VX in a nanofabricator. It's basically an organic chemical molecule produced in large quantities; quite frankly, the bottle to store it (until you're ready to use it) is probably an order of magnitude more complicated than the blueprint to manufacture the gas. And the moment you do this, everybody and their muse on the station knows you're manufacturing VX gas, because it's a weapon of mass destruction, even though its impact will be severely limited compared to our early-21st-century world. Instantly, you'll get a flood of messages, everything from people asking you if you're all right, to people asking what you plan to use it for, to people telling you that you'd better not be thinking of gassing the habitat, to some asshole with low rep suggesting you go and connect the canister to your own vacsuit's atmospheric ports and liveblog the results. As well as that, the AIs - and, on an anarchist hab, probably AGIs and infolifes - in charge of the atmospheric system decide, unilaterally, to shut down all circulation until the situation is ascertained. Folks can breathe for hours in a non-circulating habitat. Additionally to [i]that[/i], everyone nearby who has a reasonable concern for their own health and safety is either triggering their smart fabric vacsuits to go into vacsuit mode (thus providing an airtight seal,) or heading for a suitlocker if for some reason they weren't wearing a smart vacsuit, and they're probably drawing their weapons. They don't want to just assume you're up to trouble, but if you're manufacturing a WMD, they're reasonably sure that trouble is afoot, and either you're it, or you've become aware of it and have decided, for whatever reason, that nerve gas is the appropriate response. Either way, they want to be well-armed, vac-sealed, and on-hand. Also, even most anarchist habitats aren't utterly stupid. The public fabbers will, by the consensus of the population, almost always have a block on manufacturing WMDs without authorization being granted, presumably by a supermajority of the population. There was one anarchist habitat that the corps tried to take back by force, and after several days of brutal fighting when it seemed the corps were going to win, the whole place went nuclear. So the blueprints for atomic bombs and such are definitely around.

Quote:

Second, the resources are all divided in the community, but what happens if say, the guy responsible by the waste system don't have enough rep to acquire what he needs to keep the system running?

Resources on an anarcho-collectivist habitat aren't just divvied up and then assigned permanently to people based on their reputations. Almost all of it is held in communal resource pools. Habitat needs take priority over everything, and it doesn't matter if the guy taking a zero-g swim in the waste tanks has reputation where he's physically located (in the shitter); if he [i]needs[/i] X, Y and Z to keep the waste recycling systems going, he's going to [i]get[/i] X, Y and Z. To put it in perspective, what you're asking is what happens when the mechanic crawling through the guts of the metropolitan sewer wastewater processing facility is deep in debt and doesn't have the money to buy a new electric motor for the stirring tanks. It doesn't matter, because acquiring the motor isn't his financial responsibility.

"Police Force" smacks of hierarchy. On an anarchist habitat, the militia consists of anyone and everyone who takes up arms to deal with a given threat. It's not impossible that some anarchist habitats might recognize the value of hierarchy in a threat situation and have a system set up to suspend horizontal government if a major threat (such as the Ultimates showing up to conquer the station,) appears in favor of a Cincinatus-style dictatorship, especially if they have some really badass old general on the hab or whatever. That would be a self-correcting situation, though, as such a dictator's power would only last as long as those under him were convinced there was an emergency to respond to.

Canonically some habs do have full time militia volunteers. There's even an example character in Transhuman who is exactly that. While it's true that the majority of the militia force is only on the job as necessary there is a need for people who understand military and police action on a professional level to act as supervisors in an emergency situation. These people won't have the same kind of powers as a police force, but will be called in as any other emergency responder when there is a problem. There are also "conflict resolution" collectives who act as a sort of marshal service in Anarchist space. Appropriately for a bunch of tree-hugging hippies they're mostly psychologists and social workers, but one in particular - The Black Marshal Brigade - has a contingent of former security professionals from the inner system who assist habs with developing a good security culture. If you haven't read Rimward you really should. There are some great eye-openers in that book.

On the topic of volunteer militias, I really enjoyed RPPR's Know Evil campaign's example, when on a Scum swarm, a knife-wielding maniac attacks and the civilians near by are fleeing and shouting "will someone volunteer to do something about this?!" on the Mesh. Security seems to be a very ad-hoc sort of thing on Anarchist habitats, like informal deputies and posses and such. Very wild west feeling.

V_Lhhw wrote:

I generally think of anarchist habs as running on a system of "rule by those who give a shit". In the case of habitat maintenance, I'd expect that every time someone uses a public facility, their Muse effectively gives a hi-5 (or other feedback as appropriate) to the Muse of whoever maintains it.

This too, is the truth. It mentions in the books that most people empower their muses to automatically +bump or -ding people they interact with automatically. After all, the muse has lived with you forever, for the most part, and it has access to your mind and biomonitors, so your muse knows how you're feeling at any given point. So, f'rinstance, when you need to visit waste extraction and everything is sparkly clean and pleasant, and the equipment operates efficiently, your muse automatically sends a +bump to the ego(s) who've taken on the responsibility of overseeing the public works droids that keep the lavatory clean, and the egoes who keep the sewerage system clean. On the other hand, if what you experience is the [i]exact opposite[/i] of a successful toilet flush, the guy maintaining the sewerage system is probably getting a -ding, assuming you don't feel the need to (a) write a scathing, personal review, or (b) take a gun down there to lodge your complaint ballisticly.

As mentioned by many, the way the anarchist work in the setting is kinda weird for anyone with a classical mindset about population and government. After reading Rimward, I noticed several kinks on the system, but in general it feels sounds, probably like something that would work in real life provided the tech used in EP existed. It did leave me with certain doubts that I don't think are addressed. For example, what happens with a community actively ostracizes someone but that person is too valuable to let them leave? Let's say that the mentioned engine techie is a wonderful tech and keeps everything running smooth, even in spite of the damage this has caused to his morph. According to Rimward, this guy should be a rep goldmine, as he's providing a vital community service and at a fantastic level of competence. However, let's say this guy is a grade A d*ckface. Obnoxious, grating, actively antagonistic and just not pleasant to have around. Hell, he might not even be an anarchist, just some dude that ended up with them cause of the fall, and he much rather be in Mars, making big bucks and living in a big condo with a trophy wife (or husband, or both, equal opportunity future and all that). Now obviously, you could say he could move, but what if the community doesn't want him to move? What if he's the only engineer they have with knowledge on how to fix those engines? With the fall as background, this is perfectly reasonable. A bunch of refugees board a ship, leave for the outer rim running away from earth and they decide to go anarch. However, none of them lived in space before and while they quickly adapt, no one can keep the ship moving if this guy leaves. I can see then the community pretty much enslaving him in all by name. Keeping his rep down but at the same time blocking him from egocasting out or just moving to another nearby hab. They could even say he doesn't have enough rep to use the communal egocaster. I imagine other anarchs would not be thrilled to find about this, and maybe some place big like Locus would intervene by forming a posse or something, but this is perfectly reasonable. The other issue I haven't seen covered about anarchs is about organizations and institutions. It is mentioned in Rimward that there are several anarch-organized institutions. In effect, they work exactly like any other organization, it's just that they are more ad-hoc and all their workers are volunteers. I can see, for example, larger habs creating a militia or police force made entirely of volunteers, who get a constant influx of rep from their co-workers and others benefiting from their work. The problem with this is that you can then have politics between organization. In my Locus game, I've basically come up with the idea that there's several militias, engineering corps, logistic companies, etc... that are basically made up entirely of volunteers. Some are very flat, but others are, by necessity, hierarchical. The militia has ranks, though probably less than a proper military. This opens the floodgates for this orgs to apply their "weight" when deciding hab policy or even giving out rep. If you wanna dock with Locus and set up base there, the militia can tell you to piss off and go somewhere else, and if you say that they don't have the authority to stop them, the militia can say that they have taken a security concern on you and if you don't like it you can taste their seekers and plasma cannons. Obviously this could start an outcry among the inhabitants of the hab, but who risks pissing off the guys with all the guns? Sure, you could form an alternative militia, but then the two could butt heads over certain issues and even end up on civil war. There's probably checks and balances that you could establish to stop this from happening, but it's still a damm good question. Overall, I still like the AA the most from all the factions in EP, but I do see why many people have accused them of being overly utopic.

Regarding flaws in EP anarchism. I would like to point out that, in setting, the rules and laws for such forms of government is still under development. They haven't figured out everything yet (much like how things are now). Problems are to be expected. Many habs have different rules and experiments. In fact, they make opportunities for stories. It might be interesting to show players that some people do suffer under anarchism, and that some might be willing to go to great lengths to escape.

I love these great questions.

obsidian razor wrote:

It did leave me with certain doubts that I don't think are addressed. For example, what happens with a community actively ostracizes someone but that person is too valuable to let them leave? Let's say that the mentioned engine techie is a wonderful tech and keeps everything running smooth, even in spite of the damage this has caused to his morph. According to Rimward, this guy should be a rep goldmine, as he's providing a vital community service and at a fantastic level of competence. However, let's say this guy is a grade A d*ckface. Obnoxious, grating, actively antagonistic and just not pleasant to have around. Hell, he might not even be an anarchist, just some dude that ended up with them cause of the fall, and he much rather be in Mars, making big bucks and living in a big condo with a trophy wife (or husband, or both, equal opportunity future and all that). Now obviously, you could say he could move, but what if the community doesn't want him to move? What if he's the only engineer they have with knowledge on how to fix those engines? With the fall as background, this is perfectly reasonable. A bunch of refugees board a ship, leave for the outer rim running away from earth and they decide to go anarch. However, none of them lived in space before and while they quickly adapt, no one can keep the ship moving if this guy leaves. I can see then the community pretty much enslaving him in all by name. Keeping his rep down but at the same time blocking him from egocasting out or just moving to another nearby hab. They could even say he doesn't have enough rep to use the communal egocaster. I imagine other anarchs would not be thrilled to find about this, and maybe some place big like Locus would intervene by forming a posse or something, but this is perfectly reasonable.

This is what those "conflict resolution" collectives I mentioned above are for. There's a reason they're mostly social workers and psychologists: so situations like the one you mentioned can be worked out in a way that benefits all parties, not through force. Those collectives are not 100% effective, of course, but can work out a lot of those situations. The situations they can't work out are scenarios best inflicted on your players. Said engineer manages to escape the hab when the players need them to move the hab in a hurry. What now?

obsidian razor wrote:

The other issue I haven't seen covered about anarchs is about organizations and institutions. It is mentioned in Rimward that there are several anarch-organized institutions. In effect, they work exactly like any other organization, it's just that they are more ad-hoc and all their workers are volunteers. I can see, for example, larger habs creating a militia or police force made entirely of volunteers, who get a constant influx of rep from their co-workers and others benefiting from their work. The problem with this is that you can then have politics between organization.

Yep. Most Anarchists would argue this is a good thing as it keeps these institutions from becoming stagnant. The end effect is similar to competition in capitalist regions. Boundaries are tested, new ideas are created, society progresses. Not to mention constant politicking keeps people watching these organizations for signs they are becoming authoritarian.

obsidian razor wrote:

In my Locus game, I've basically come up with the idea that there's several militias, engineering corps, logistic companies, etc... that are basically made up entirely of volunteers. Some are very flat, but others are, by necessity, hierarchical. The militia has ranks, though probably less than a proper military. This opens the floodgates for this orgs to apply their "weight" when deciding hab policy or even giving out rep. If you wanna dock with Locus and set up base there, the militia can tell you to piss off and go somewhere else, and if you say that they don't have the authority to stop them, the militia can say that they have taken a security concern on you and if you don't like it you can taste their seekers and plasma cannons. Obviously this could start an outcry among the inhabitants of the hab, but who risks pissing off the guys with all the guns? Sure, you could form an alternative militia, but then the two could butt heads over certain issues and even end up on civil war. There's probably checks and balances that you could establish to stop this from happening, but it's still a damm good question. Overall, I still like the AA the most from all the factions in EP, but I do see why many people have accused them of being overly utopic.

A similar situation to the one you describe is already happening at Small Majestics hab in the Twelve Commons neighborhood near Saturn. A civil conflict between rival nano-artist collectives is threatening to boil over into a full scale civil war using nanoswarms as weapons. Conflict resolution has failed, but neither side is willing to just up and move. But yeah, everything you've listed is a good idea for developing conflict in outer system games. Its good to remember the conflict is below the surface in the outer system. Less Section 9 and more I.S.I.S. Oh man. Now I really want to run a Special Outreach campaign inspired by Archer.

omphaloskepsis wrote:

Hierarchy is considered best for managing a large number of unskilled workers. Entrepreneurial systems (management with leeway for worker discretion) are best for organizations that have identifiable superstars (NBA, NFL, high-end sales teams, etc.). Of course, the above is just the half-remembered "for dummies" version, but I wanted to point out that alternatives to hierarchical systems are well-known in academia, corporations, and grassroots organizations. It's just that there isn't mainstream mindshare or media attention around the subject.

It bears mentioning that in another real-life anarchist situation, Anarchist Catalonia in the late 1930s, the way they dealt with unskilled workers (and even with skilled workers) was to essentially have constant educational workshops, both hands-on/practical and sit-down collaborative discussions. As just one example, the way the anarcho-syndicalist trade unions were organized you had the creation of tools and machines for agriculture being handled from below separately from the steel workers, who were handled from below separately from mining and resource extraction, who were handled from below separately from processing the ores into steel for the steel workers, who were handled from below separately from unions of educators and academics. So each workplace would, if necessary, elect from among their ranks a temporary representative to do various things (i.e. a time-sensitive thing like supervising a massive co-ordinated project between a mine, a refinery, the steel workers and tool makers to get stuff out to the agricultural sector), but they'd go back to being regular workers afterwards. So, one thing that occurred was that anarchist academics wanted to spread knowledge for free outside of the Ivory Tower. So one thing that was done was that people in all the above-mentioned sectors elected reps from their workplaces to go to regional conferences where an academic would come and teach them the actual science of the process they were doing as industries in tandem with each other every day. These reps would get to ask questions and basically get a chemistry/physics/geoscience class for free, then go back to their fellow workers and disseminate the information, and if there were any questions, they'd get that rep (or a new one in some cases) to go to a follow-up conference with questions from their co-workers. Franco crushed these programs in their infancy because people in those industries had to get working overtime to get steel to the steel workers and arms manufacturers so they could get more guns to fight back against fascists, but you get the idea of how a bunch of unskilled labourers (or, again, in this case skilled labourers) don't even need a manager or managerial system (and certainly not a dedicated management team). You elect from among yourselves, and in a real anarchist economy/polity, you've got all industries working together to better themselves and each other without worrying about profit. Free university educations on topics that are specifically relevant to the individual lives of everyone on a hab would be even [b]easier[/b] to implement with the wireless mesh/data storage of Eclipse Phase. Even in this century, I've worked plenty of white collar jobs where my co-workers knew better than my managers how to run our section to the best satisfaction of our clients/customers, and I've worked plenty more outside of the white collar world where that was doubly true.

The whole concept of handling risk is one of the major problems in anarchism. The anarchistic principles have a very hard time handling oppressing everyone to prevent the few from doing harm. Democracies might have a constitutional issue with such things, but other than that at if it is the will of the people to ban nukes, bombs, guns, virulent disease manufacture or whatever, and/or force licenses and safeguard procedures on the use of such things, and/or use surveillance to make sure no one is breaking the law, that is within their right. I would expect that anarchists would at some point have to be practical about it. These people aren't necessarily fanatics. Like democracies have constitutions that limit what the people can decide democratically, anarchists could also in some cases disregard their anarchistic principles to avoid something that is obviously wrong or too risky. In that sense, I think that the problems anarchists face with this are unlikely to be the big ones like WMDs, but more everyday stuff. Like the EP equivalent of people racing down the street way too fast in their tricked-out car, and lack of gun control leading to problems as seen in the US.

I'm pretty sure you can't just push the "nuke" button on a CM and get a suitcase nuke, unless someone has made the amazingly poor decision to hook up the community CM to a source of high-grade plutonium. I don't recall where but I'm pretty sure it's stated that anything made of exotic materials (Such as radioactives and, depending on the hab, precious or rare-earth metals) isn't just available out of the public fabricators. Ultimately, most anarchist habs are small, and on larger habs like Locus, everyone is slotted into collectives that replicate that small community system. Everyone knows everybody, except times fifty thanks to muses, rep systems, and spimes. And of course, practically everyone on anarchist habs is an anarchist - anyone who doesn't adapt to that system for whatever reason can egocast out, probably to Extropia or Titan; or, most likely, they never bothered to egocast in. Anarchism in the EP universe exists under seriously favorable conditions: Post-scarcity nanofabrication tech and AI automation makes for a world where providing for everyone's survival and comfort is practically automatic; the panopticon of spimes means that everyone's behaviour is completely transparent; muses and rep systems expand the person's natural capacity for social calculus; and almost everyone participating in the system is ideologically predisposed for it and wants it to work. So [i]of course[/i] it does, at least some of the time.

[i]Transhuman[/i] page 175:

Quote:

Fissionables can be as difficult to acquire as antimatter, but the favor required to get a hearing may vary from Level 3 to Level 5, depending on the size of the polity from which fissionables are requested. Well-connected Guanxi networkers (using multiple Level 4 or 5 favors with –10 to –30 modifiers on Networking Tests) may find a seller, but black market trade in fissionables also risks drawing attention from organizations like Firewall and Oversight.

So, you can't expect CMs to be hooked up to any feedstock more exotic than base metals, for the most part. Another thing is that the public fabricator in a small autonomist hab might not be a true cornucopia machine but rather a more limited fabber, which is probably enough for most daily needs but cheaper and more rugged, not to mention safer, with real CMs being in the hands of collectives that use them for specific purposes. So in many habs you can't just walk up and order a dose of weaponised smallpox with a side of anthrax; the public fabber just isn't capable or designed to fabricate large viruses. The real danger would be fabrication of simple chemical agents - chlorine, which has numerous legitimate uses but is also an extremely poisonous gas, comes to mind. The other concern is dangerous things being smuggled into a hab rather than just manufactured on-site - Locus doesn't have a formal customs office to make sure nobody is boarding the station carrying a suitcase nuke, for example.

Even if a bioweapon wipes out the biological population of a hab, the stacks can still be popped by the local synth population (As well as whatever exotic pods and biomorphs are somehow immune to the bioweapon) and translife goes on. It would still be disastrous and extremely distressing to the population of the hab, but they wouldn't be gone or anything.

If you detonate a nuclear device right outside a cluster hab's shell... even if all you're doing is flinging the hab across space, you're not actually doing that; you're flinging the point of impact across space, and everything else is dragged along. The entire hab could be torn apart by the shear (And sheer) force of one end of it trying to fly off into space at blinding speed.

The way you keep antimatter from coming into contact with matter and ruining your day is with powerful magnetic fields to make it stay put. Any antimatter containment system is going to needs it own beefy poewr source, and since magnetic fields aren't magic, is probably going to be pretty detectable. Unless you have some clever way of disguising the thing (Probably by figuring out some excuse for the magnetic field and power supply) or encase all of it in heavy metals (Thus attracting attention anyway), if you board a hab with an antimatter containment unit, every muse monitoring the spime feed at the airlock is going to go "holy shit someone just lugged live antimatter onto the hab." Really, the biggest threat to autonomist habs is someone 10000km away with a mass driver, but it's not like that doesn't apply to every space habitat, everywhere.

Nuking* it might actually piss off [i]fewer[/i] people, because it's easier to cover up as a reactor failure. *Which I am using as a general term for any explosive WMD, whether traditional fission bombs, fusion bombs, or antimatter bombs.

Given that antimatter isn't really a way of generating energy so much as storing it (It takes more energy to create antimatter than you get out of it. It just has high energy density which makes it a good fuel.), I'm pretty sure we can all agree that an antimatter reactor on a hab is usually a pretty stupid idea. I think fusion reactors can still have catastrophic failures (Especially if they're bigger), but they're not going to be as bad as fission reactors. With a fusion reactor, when the mag bottle fails, the reaction stops because there's not enough pressure anymore. BUT, you still have your high-pressure superheated plasma which is rapidly expanding. Which would take a sizable chunk out of any hab.

Any hab that isn't some fly-by-night operation would have physical shielding on their fusion cores so that a containment failure would stay contained to the fusion reactor area itself and not take out the hab, presumably. I assume that if you can nanofabricate diamond like it's no big deal, you can build an outer reactor shell that can take a plasma discharge from a failing mag bottle and not crack open like an eggshell, especially considering that it only has to withstand the failure impact once. Sure, a truly catastrophic failure could involve a faulty outer drive hull cracking open when the faulty containment unit inside breaks, but that's the kind of scenario that looks and smells like foul play (Or chronically bad maintenance) anyway. It's like cloud diving: Yes, every layer of security could potentially fail simultaneously, resulting in a tragic mishap. But if that actually happens, you have to assume gross incompetence over a significant period of time, or outright sabotage.