Turn 80 - Oh Nothing Gonna Stop Them As The Day Follows The Night
You hadn’t been paying much attention to the Olympics, with other things that you deemed more important occupying your time and energy. They are, however, going on and being hosted on New Rasalhague this year.
Only a few events really stand out to you. The Griffon Women’s Gymnastics Team manages to edge out the NRI team for the gold medal behind a trio of highly talented young gymnasts from Nowy Wroclaw. And in Motorcycle Racing the cycle of Griffon dominance is broken by an amazing performance by the home team.
In the end Team Griffon brings home 12 gold medals, with the host team coming in second in the gold medal count with 10.
The Department of Periphery Studies Mime Infestation is continuing, much to your disgust. You are very fortunate that only your kids have the video of you yelling at one enterprising mime who bears a shocking resemblance to your sister to ‘learn the damn words!’ before kicking her out of the Window of Defenestration.
A Black Steel Attack on New Phoenix, consisting of a single
Aegis cruiser supported by a number of drone dropships and fighters, is repelled by the orbiting
Silver Tower with assistance from a pair of
Fletcher and one
Dart. The
Dart suffered some damage, which is being handled by the Refit & Repair Yard in system. No enemy missiles made it past the defenders, nor was any significant damage inflicted on infrastructure in orbit. The squadron in New Port Royal is attacked by a single Black Steel
Vincent Mk 42 which it handily repulses with no damage sustained as they caught it as it was jumping in.
You receive a report from your ambassador in the NRI, the
Corvus class corvette has met its first combat challenge as a Black Steel raiding party of a pair of
Essex class destroyers were swarmed and defeated by a dozen of the cheap little monsters. On the other hand, seven
Corvus were lost, but the NRI seems quite satisfied with the little ship's performance. According to reports the NRI has another dozen of them under construction at this time.
Here in the Griffon system geologists are able to give ample warning of a volcanic eruption on the eastern coast of the continent of Castor. The region is only lightly inhabited and evacuations are carried out in a timely and effective manner. When the volcano does go off it is an extremely big one, rated as a 6 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, comparable to historical eruptions such as Krakatoa in the 19th century CE. Thankfully the prevailing winds are advantageous in terms of protecting population centers from the ash clouds. Some air traffic is needing to be rerouted, but in general it is a news story of interest rather than a disaster of concern. The system government is well on top of things.
The New Castor system government is requesting assistance from the IGMP due to a surge in crime, mostly from New Port Royal expatriates. The polite signs requesting that they pay for goods has curbed most of the casual theft, but the overall crime rate is still significantly elevated. Admittedly most of it is quite petty in nature, primarily serious misdemeanors rather than felonies, but it is becoming a concerning issue considering the relatively small size of the system police force thanks to how small the colony is overall. The IGMP is on the case and reports that they believe that simple education may well be the most useful tool in their arsenal, rather than any serious enforcement work.
And then it is time for the budget. You are so excited.
Really, you truly understand now why your mom always looked forward to budget time with such anticipation. And bottles of antacids, but mostly anticipation. Your granddaughter doesn’t believe you.
General Jenkins shows up wearing a tennis outfit, bouncing a tennis ball on a racket, and skipping. He then proceeds to give his part of the briefing while bouncing the ball off of the ceiling.
“Well, boss, you decided to bump me upstairs, so look what you got. We need more production, we need more garrison units, and after this meeting you and I have an appointment on the court where I will once again kick your majestic ass like I did the last time we played.”
You remember that last match much differently than he does, considering that you are pretty sure that you beat him in straight sets and didn’t let him score a single point.
“Our strategic materials are in fair to middling shape, more endo-steel would be nice, as would more ferro-aluminum and double heat sinks, not to mention ensuring that lamellar ferro-carbide production numbers stay up. We’d always like more mech and tank and fighter production. With that, allow me to introduce your new Army chief. General Bradley?”
You catch the tennis ball when the little shit tries to hit you with it, or more likely lost control of it knowing how terrible he is at tennis, and the former commander of 2nd Corps steps up.
“Your Majesty, following the review of ground forces in the recent fighting we have developed a new unit concept and will soon be soliciting bids for some new Mech designs as we finalize our plans. With that in mind, we would like to continue to expand our light and medium mech production as well as boosting conventional vehicle production as much as possible in addition to the new logistics factories.”
She checks her notes and brings up a display. “The new formations are what we are calling Light Mechanized and Light Armored Regiments. We have new AFV designs ready for production for these units. One outstanding feature of this new equipment is that, similar to our garrison kit, they do not make use of strategic materials in the construction, significantly reducing costs and boosting availability.”
The display shows a family of vehicles, all plainly sharing a common design lineage but not omnivehicles, ranging from a light tank all the way to an infantry fighting vehicle, artillery tank, missile tank, and AAA tank. All of around 50 tons in mass, all tracked, and all looking quite modern.
She then brings up the procurement display.
- Production Facilities
- Standard Mech Factories
- Conventional Factories
- Logistics Factories
- 2 on Edelsteine
- 1 on New Capricorn
- Procurement
- Mechs
- LAM
- 3 Raider LAM
- To complete 3 Pathfinder Brigades
- Light/Medium Mechs
- 3 Pathfinder Regiments
- To fill out the 6th Pathfinder Brigade
- 6 Armored Cavalry Regiments
- For both a new Brigade Combat Team and a new Cavalry Division
- 6 Light Horse Regiments
- For a new Cavalry Division
- Heavy/Assault Mechs
- 3 Standard Mech Regiments
- For a new Brigade Combat Team
- 1 Garrison Mech Regiment
- To fill out the garrison mech division
- 4 Assault Regiments
- To form the core of a new Assault Division
- Conventional Forces
- 3 Armored Regiments
- For a new Brigade Combat Team
- 3 Light Mechanized Regiments
- For a new Light Armored Division
- 6 Light Armored Regiments
- For a new Light Armored Division
- 14 Garrison Regiments
General Romanov is up next. “Your Majesty, thanks to prior planning last year we will not be overstressed in terms of ASF production this year, which is a significant relief. For all projected hangars to be filled this year we will need to procure 18 Fighter Wings, operating under the planning criteria that we will be procuring two
White Tower stations for New Port Royal this year. Under consultation with the IGN we are also requesting 18 of the new Heavy Carrier Wings to equip next year's tranche of
Saipan carriers.”
- Production Facilities
- Expand Ferro-Aluminum Orbital Factories
- Expand Double Heat Sink Orbital Factories
- Procurement
- 18 Fighter Wings
- 18 Heavy Carrier Wings
She sits down and your sister takes her place. “OK, we are still very satisfied with our dropship production numbers, at this point we can fully sustain that part of the navy without requiring expanded facilities. This is also significantly reducing the stress on the Naval Academies by reducing the need for more crews for such relatively minor craft, which is helping keep the commandants of said academies from murdering us in our sleep.”
She fires up the projector. “Our procurement requests this year are pretty straightforward. We want it all, and we want it now.” And heaven help you, she actually fires up
that song while showing the charts.
- Production Facilities
- 3 Small Warship Yards
- 1 in each of the Core Systems
- Expand all Refit & Repair Yards
- Procurement Requests
- Standard Dropships
- 35 Bainbridge parasite DD
- 35 Trenton parasite transports
- Large Dropships
- 18 Saipan parasite carriers
- 20 Canopus parasite battleships
- Jumpships
- 5 Galleon-class jumpships
- Escorts
- 2 Supply-class logistics vessels
- Small Warships
- 2 Atlanta-class Light Cruisers
- 1 Brooklyn-class Light Command Cruiser
Your new Interior Minister is nothing like Bridget, but she does irresistibly remind you of a female version of your grandfather. Which is appropriate, since Elizabeth Lee is related to you via the redoubtable Tyler Lee. “Your Majesty, we in Interior are fully prepared to support any building program required to meet our military's production requirements. In addition, we have a DoME team ready to roll out to meet any more involved requirements. We are recommending deploying them to our newest colony in the New Port Royal system to engage in a massive infrastructure construction and repair project to bring the system up to our standards as quickly as possible. It is a five year projected project with our experts highly confident in their ability to complete the work on time and on budget. That being said, another option for the DoME team is to hold off on any new assignments until we see the results of the latest terraforming research so as to be able to take immediate advantage of any new opportunities in that regard.”
She looks down at her notes. “Economically speaking, we recommend Core World development focuses here in the Griffon system, and Peripheral focuses in the New Castor system. The most beneficial investment opportunity is most likely going to be in the Griff’s Leap system to complement the new O’Neill Cylinder cluster there, or alternately in the New Phoenix system to boost potential growth in that part of the Empire or even in the Okusawa system despite the unrest as a sign of confidence in the future prospects of the system.”
She then returns to her seat. Dr Teitelbaum is up next. She’s a rather distinguished looking woman who doesn’t appear to be the sort to brook any nonsense. “Your Majesty, Foreign Affairs are moving along smoothly with no issues to report or projects of note at this time. There is, however, one decision that will need to be made. We have been in discussions with the Crimson Storm officer who provided transport for your sister and brother-in-law home and they have requested the appointment of a formal ambassador. Unfortunately, due to the distances involved we will not be able to be in HPG communication with whomever you send, thus they will need to be absolutely trustworthy to represent the Empire’s interests on their own without the luxury of checking in with us. Of our current senior diplomatic personnel with the qualifications for the position, I believe that the best fit would actually be Ambassador Addams, our current ambassador to the NRI. He has an excellent charge d'affaires at this time who would be eminently suitable to take over as our ambassador to the NRI.”
Lien is up next. “Your Majesty, your political team is in excellent shape, Parliament is behaving themselves and everything. The only two things that we would recommend which would be beneficial to the Empire would be further expansion of the Civil Service and further investment in parks and recreation.”
Then it is another new advisor's turn. Grace Rivas is a stocky Hispanic woman who quite obviously is no stranger to the weight room, despite the overall air of outright nerdiness, for lack of a better term, that seems to fill the air around her. And she’s pretty enthusiastic, plus she’s brought a pet raptor to the meeting with her. “Your Majesty, we’ve got one R&D team fully stocked and ready and eager to get started. If you wish, we could restart work on the Kraken-T project, the post-mortems pretty much all point to some freak accident in the experimental magazine itself. Yes we have to start from scratch, yes that sucks, but oh well. Or we could do something different. I know we don’t use these things much, but upgrading machine guns might be more valuable than it seems at first glance. Yes they would be mostly useless in and of themselves, but I wonder if we’ll be able to apply what we learn from that project to other weapon systems. Besides, the boys in the munitions department have a running pool as to whether or not the upgrade will result in Yet Another M2 Browning. I recommend putting your money on yes, that design is like life, it always finds a way. We have a number of projects hopefully completing this year. I’ve ordered that all final testing is to be conducted remotely for the time being, after thorough sweeps for invasive squirrels. I am not willing to take a chance that it’s not squirrels. Lowca here is pretty good at hunting squirrels.`` She pats her pet raptor’s head, who is grinning and has been extremely well-behaved during the meeting.
Uh-oh… General Messerschmidt is grinning, and gesturing for Martina to go first, which she does.
“Your Majesty, our deployment of the IGMP to New Castor has so far been productive, but the limited resources of a standard deployment means that progress is pretty slow. They’ve indicated that the single biggest issue is that New Port Royal simply has absolutely no cultural ‘memory’ of ‘law’ or ‘order’ or ‘justice’. We would like to organize a mass deployment of the Special Branch and IGMP to New Port Royal, not in some sort of massive criminal sweep, but rather to engage in mass community outreach in order to teach people in the system the importance of law and order as well as the difference between a civilized justice system and the anarchic abomination that they had previously.”
Now it’s the good General’s turn, and he’s grinning. “Well, Your Majesty, we still have no Black Steel prisoners, the NRR is getting pretty quiet, mostly thanks to the Olympics, and the folks on New Port Royal have been quite forthright with us about that entire mess. I would like to especially commend Agent Rivers for discovering that hot cocoa with little marshmallows is apparently the way to get any resident of New Port Royal to cooperate with you.”
He pauses, and you almost think you’ve dodged a bullet, when his grin widens. “And congratulations, Your Majesty, the NRI Senate has approved a proposal to install a 50 meter tall gold plated marble statue of yourself as Jupiter, Rex Deorum. I’m told that the same sculptor who did the statue on Nova Jupitereum has been retained for this vital project. Further, the Admiral in command of the squadron which defeated the Black Steel attack has been granted a triumph, which she has dedicated to Your Glory.”