Quest Deep Periphery Quest (Battletech Sandbox Empire Builder)

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
Would building warships be the best move or is making potemkins and loading them up with our dropships a more effective route?

The heavy combat DropShips I've designed for us outgun light WarShips at significantly lesser cost, but said WarShips are a *lot* tougher since they mount capital-grade armor and their firepower is much more concentrated due to mounting true naval weapons. At that scale, the most effective combination is to use both in conjunction.

But Larger WarShips scale vastly beyond what any DropShip can dream of mounting. Although the Dart is primitive and very lightly armed, it's a big, robust platform and a modern 'half sister' class to it built with our tech would be terrifyingly powerful.
 

Jarow

Well-known member
Would building warships be the best move or is making potemkins and loading them up with our dropships a more effective route?
Well, potemkins are warships...
Probably going to be a while before we get Potemkins, but in general dropships are more efficient for carrying ASFs (and I believe other mech scale combat), and warships are a lot better at capital-grade firepower. Which means warships can do a lot of damage before our dropships strike back. So probably the best bet is going to be max collar warships. Perhaps not any canon designs, but ShadowArxxy has already made several designs to modify based on whatever logistical needs Sunhawk ends up requiring.
 

Orangeduke38

Well-known member
The two Mammoth's could help with the trouble on Nowa Warszawa. If there is a substantial number of Japanese people that want to immigrate to the TPP but haven't because there is limited transportation these can help solve that problem.
 

kashim3

Texan, Mandalorian, Alabamian.
[X] Accept the deal
-- Try and get any maps they are willing to sell, especially of the home worlds of the pirates that have been bothering us. As well as the general fleet strength for the various Amaris Empire factions.
 

SuperHeavy

Well-known member
Well, potemkins are warships...
Probably going to be a while before we get Potemkins, but in general dropships are more efficient for carrying ASFs (and I believe other mech scale combat), and warships are a lot better at capital-grade firepower. Which means warships can do a lot of damage before our dropships strike back. So probably the best bet is going to be max collar warships. Perhaps not any canon designs, but ShadowArxxy has already made several designs to modify based on whatever logistical needs Sunhawk ends up requiring.
Forgive me if I am remembering wrong but don't we have some form of capital missile launchers for our Dropships? I though the plan was to fire nuclear tipped missiles along with ASF waves armed with the same if we had to fight a real Warship.
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
Forgive me if I am remembering wrong but don't we have some form of capital missile launchers for our Dropships? I though the plan was to fire nuclear tipped missiles along with ASF waves armed with the same if we had to fight a real Warship.

We have Barracuda capital missiles and we have several types of subcapital missiles. Barracudas are the lightest and least powerful of the Star League's trio of capital missile designs; the Plumbata deal would unlock (among other technologies) Killer Whale capital missiles, which are the largest and most powerful.
 

VicSage

Carpenter, Cobbler, Chirugeon, Dataminer.
[X] Accept the deal

These guys might be the least morally reprehensible of the likely adversaries we've seen so far. Yes they purchased slave infants, at the same time they intended full manumission of them from childhood to be raised as citizens in their own families. It isn't like they had a good option to be able to wage war on them to liberate what slaves they could, they had their own war to fight. They're weird, and possibly a little shortsighted, but I've seen much worse.
 

Artifex

Well-known member
[X] Accept the deal
-- Try and get any maps they are willing to sell, especially of the home worlds of the pirates that have been bothering us. As well as the general fleet strength for the various Amaris Empire factions.
 
Turn 63 - Hosanna Deus

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
Turn 63 - Hosanna Deus
During the discussion finalizing the transfer of TAS Plumbata, you rather diplomatically, in your considered opinion, ask just why they call themselves the Amaris Remnant, since from your understanding of history, the Rim Republican Army had been opposed to House Amaris.

Commodore Rein sighs at that. “Just under twol hundred years ago we encountered a group centered around a McKenna who identified themselves as Clan Wolverine, we got as far as saying the word ‘Rim’ in our previous affiliation when they opened fire on us. Six of us suffered fatal death at that point. Since then, most of us refer to ourselves as the Amaris Remnant in a simple sieve for crazies like that. The crazies open fire immediately, the non-crazies don’t.”

She shrugged at that. “Our population was never large, even before the civil war between the RRA and AE refugees that led to the big oopsie.”

You suffer a bit of an epiphany. “Ummm, how many of you are there in the Crimson Storm? Individuals I mean…”

“We’re one of the larger factions, about 150 of us, why?” she replies, and you resist the urge to facepalm.

“And you are planning on raising 100,000 children?” you boggled, you actually boggled.

“We’re really rather good at multitasking.” Commodore Rein says quite seriously, looking rather confused at your reaction. “We designed a specialized remote unit for child care, based on our records, and each of us is easily capable of handling a hundred of those remote units simultaneously. It’s not quite the ideal ratio, but going much over a hundred would prevent us from operating our ships efficiently.”

You decide that this may be a good time to sit the commodore down and have a rather serious discussion, from the perspective of a ba, about the intricacies of child rearing, and how their plan is a quintessentially ‘bad plan’. These people seem to be extremely intelligent, have a rather sound if quirky ethical basis, yet are completely lacking in anything even vaguely resembling common sense.

Kids need parents, not caretaking remotes. They need human contact at an individual level, not faceless robots.

Then you discover that while the Crimson Storm has a terrifying lack of common sense, they do have very good planning capabilities. Evidently the plan is to keep the babies in the stasis pods and release them in a staggered yearly release over ten years, plus you discover that the chassis you’ve been interacting with (and isn’t that a trip) is based on the same design that they are using for the caretaker units, the only difference being the lack of a brainbox interface on the caretaker remotes.

In the end you and Commodore Rein wind up having a several day discussion about their plans, and you wind up rather impressed. They seem to truly wish to do what is best for the children, and have made some modifications based on your input. With their level of technology, along with their limitations, they do appear to have worked out a viable solution, but they do promise that if anything unforeseen comes up that they’ll send a courier here for help.

So it might not be a ‘good’ plan, but it’s the best of an unpalatable salad of options for them. They either find a way to expand their numbers enough to successfully resist the Black Steel or they wind up getting swamped by pure numbers. They can only expand their numbers of actual people artificially, they cannot naturally procreate, and while they can use cloning other factions have tried that with very… unfortunate results. Evidently there’s now a faction among them who built the most powerful combat station anybody had ever seen and are calling themselves the Masters of IKEA, because one of them found an IKEA catalogue and got obsessed with building the universe's most heavily armed furniture store.

Evidently instability is a thing at this level of cybernetics, and cloning only makes it worse. The Crimson Storm has gotten a handle on the cybernetic instability, but they are afraid of using cloning as a result.

Or they could unshackle their helper AI’s and have them run additional ships, but AI’s still go psychotic briefly after a KF transition, which makes this a rather dicy solution. Plus there’s a faction which went that route anyways and they are one of the ones who call themselves pirates, evidently after finding an ancient movie from old Terra called ‘Pirates of Penzance’ and modeling themselves after it.

Commodore Rein assures you that this group is essentially harmless, since they spend so much time making dramatic speeches and posing and singing endless patter songs that by the time they are actually ready to attack you’d have had plenty of time to recharge your drives and simply jumped away, and that the one time their ‘victim’ didn’t these pirates had absolutely no clue what to do next.

They did solve the AI psychosis problem, but all of the rest of the Remnant are too disturbed by their antics to want to know how, lest they wind up having to sing all the time.

Or they could completely copy the Black Steel and use outright slaves, which they refuse to do on moral and ethical grounds.

You spend another few days taking Commodore Rein around various child care facilities, giving her tips on taking care of infants, teaching her suitable recipes for young children, and generally giving her the same sort of Motherhood 101 lessons you’ve given your own kids.

After that TAS Plumbata is moved to a parking orbit, out of the way of any traffic. Two of the Mammoths are formally handed over to you, the other four, with all of the Crimson Storm’s remotes on board… as you realize that the only ‘brainboxes’ in this entire squadron were Commodore Rein’s and her second-in-command aboard the other Dart. Two ‘people’ to run two warships and multiple dropships, and according to the Commodore only the other Dart was ‘fully optimized’.

Quirky they may be… but very dangerous. You are rather glad to be parting on very good terms with at least one faction of the Remnant.

With that, crews are sent aboard the two Mammoths to bring them down planetside, the cryostasis pods are offloaded, and they are significantly more advanced than you’d expected. Something else to send to the research teams.

The babies are given a full check up once brought out of stasis and are precisely as advertised, genetically there are no harmful recessive or dominant alleles present in their genomes, they have peak human genetic potential, and there are zero signs of any traps hidden in the DNA, RNA, or other genetic or biological materials. The babies are exceptionally healthy.

You’d already decided to care for them as any other children in the adoptive system, but with even more vigorous screening and oversight over the process than normal due to the overall situation. Several of your newlywed grandchildren offer to take some of them in, while Sergeant Major Ngo’s family takes in a good number as well across her numerous grandkids, nieces, and nephews. Willis’s nephews and nieces also are well represented in the volunteer adoptive parents and, all things considered, there is no issue in finding good homes for all of the children.

You receive the list of candidates to replace Dr McEvedy as your Research Minister. She’s rather happy to finally retire, and get to spend more time with her grandkids and great-grandkids. You are somewhat envious of her, to be honest.

Dr Rebecca Franklin is a biologist and medical researcher who has been involved with all of your advances in the biological sciences. She’s the oldest of the candidates, as well as the most experienced, however she has little experience outside the biomedical field.

Dr Adam Woods is an engineer heavily involved in weapons development, he led the team that developed the Improved PPC and reverse engineered the Heavy Naval PPC. He is a former naval officer, having served aboard HMS Defiant as a plankowner when she was first commissioned.

Dr Elizabeth Hunt is a materials science researcher who has worked on numerous fundamental science projects over the years as well as the development of Ferro-Carbide Armor. She is the youngest of the candidates but has an impressive record of accomplishments.

Dr Aaron Patel is a hyper-physicist who was closely involved in the work developing the HPG transmitter and is currently the research lead for the Basic Compact Core project group. He has a reputation as a somewhat absent-minded genius, but has proven to be quite capable of picking competent subordinates to handle the routine matters that he tends to forget about while focusing on his research.

Dr Anna Bryant has worked in administration for years serving as Dr McEvedy’s chief assistant and troubleshooter. Many R&D team leads dread seeing her name pop up in a meeting request, as she has historically been sent to deal with troubled projects and get them back on track. For all the dread, however, none of the leads have ever said anything negative about her and she is very highly respected.

Dr James Cox has a reputation as a maverick and dreamer. He’s the most closely tied into the educational side of the position of any of the candidates, having recently returned from Calliope IV where he was overseeing the setup of a modern educational system that was up to Griffin’s Roost standards.

QM Note - With the retirement of Dr McEvedy you will be losing +1 Military R&D Project and +5 Target Number

[]NameBonuses
[]Dr Rebecca Franklin
  • +10 Bonus to Biomedical R&D
  • -5 penalty to non-Biomedical R&D
  • Reduce upkeep by 1,000,000
[]Dr Adam Woods
  • +10 Bonus to Weapons R&D
  • -5 Penalty to non-Weapons R&D
  • Reduce upkeep by 1,000,000
[]Dr Elizabeth Hunt
  • +5 Bonus to Materials R&D
  • Reduce upkeep by 1,000,000
[]Dr Aaron Patel
  • +5 Bonus to KF related R&D
  • Reduce upkeep by 1,000,000
[]Dr Anna Bryant
  • +5 Bonus to All Projects
[]Dr James Cox
  • +1 Research Projects
 

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