Quest Deep Periphery Quest (Battletech Sandbox Empire Builder)

Turn 93 - They’ll Never See The Likes Of Us Again!



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OPERATION - BUMP - Final Report

The Grand Fleet was delayed by 4 months waiting for repairs and resupply, with the remaining Exeter-class ships actually requiring multiple resupply runs in that time due to their extremely low cargo capacity. In early December TF 3 jumped in as planned in the revised plan. Two weeks later, TF 1 and 2 jumped in.

There wasn’t a single actual capital ship left in the system, and as TF 3 closed all of the ‘base’ infrastructure present detonated, even as sheets of capital missiles erupted from the wreckage into the task forces face. At the jump point were 50 highly modified Congress-class Frigates that were immediately identified as CASPAR drones.

The Black Steel forces that remained in the system were destroyed, but losses were heavy, especially among the older ships in the fleet. Not a single ship was left without serious damage, and TF 4 is fully occupied at the moment in simply repairing ships enough to allow them to safely jump back to New Phoenix.

Total losses for Operation Bump are as follows.

• Heavy Cruisers
  • 6 Exeter-class Heavy Cruisers
  • 10 Wichita-class Heavy Cruisers
• Light Cruisers
  • 13 Cleveland-class Light Cruisers
  • 1 Dido-class Light Cruiser
• Destroyers
  • 50 Fletcher Flight II-class Destroyers
• Corvettes
  • 10 Lyr-class Corvettes
• Dropships
  • 35 Bainbridge-class Parasite Destroyers
  • 15 Canopus-class Parasite Battleships
  • 10 Saipan-class Parasite Carriers
• ASF
  • 10 Heavy Carriers Wings completely destroyed
  • Severe losses impacting wing quality for all involved units, will take 2 turns to restore quality level

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Personnel losses weren’t as bad as you feared, the report notes that the CASPAR drones didn’t target escape pods and shuttles, and indeed tended to ignore any dropships that weren’t firing on them, focusing their fire instead on your warships. Reports from your Rasalhaguian allies indicate that they lost a dozen of their oversized wings in the engagement, but are quite pleased with their overall performance.

The NRI had managed to get a half dozen more of their little Corvus corvettes, straight out of the production yard and still with yard personnel on board when they arrived at the staging area. All six had been lost in action. For some reason the CASPAR drones appeared to focus fire on the Corvus as a higher priority target than even your Scharnhorst and Canarias-class heavy cruisers.

All indications are that the Black Steel had withdrawn from Stahlkampfauge in good order, leaving behind a rear guard to bleed you. You have taken the system in which they’d been based, but they are free to set up another base nearby with the same forces. A victory, but not a total one.

Unfortunately, the Griffon’s Eye is not declared secure enough for the engineering crews to bring in the new White Tower stations to re-secure the jump points. All indications are that this will be accomplished in January of next year.

You lost every Fletcher which had been engaged, leaving only those older hulls that lacked the latest upgrades. The ships themselves performed magnificently, the second best of any of the legacy designs deployed behind the Wichita-class Heavy Cruisers who continued to punch well above their weight class. Indeed, HMS Wichita herself was one of the survivors, accounting for no fewer than four times her tonnage in CASPAR drones. At this time, HMS Wichita is the single most successful ship in your fleet, having been involved in every major fleet action and surviving them all, all with multiple enemy kills to her name.

There has been some quiet talk about retiring HMS Wichita and preserving her as the symbolic permanent flagship of the entire Imperial Griffon Navy, permanently spacedocked in the Griffon system. The crew is adamantly opposed to this if anybody brings it up in their presence, declaring that HMS Wichita belongs on the front lines fighting the enemy, she is a fighting ship, not a pretty piece of fluff, and a fighting ship needs to fight, not be protected as some sort of symbol.

You can understand both points of view, and no decision is anywhere close to being made in this matter.

You finally manage to get your hands on an image of the ‘heroic nude’ statue of you in the NRI temples and are quite tempted to go throw General Messerschmidt out of the Tyler Lee Memorial Window of Defenestration. You’d been expecting something tasteless, but it’s actually quite nice in your opinion. Yes, it’s a nude, but it shows you standing in a quite nice pose with your mechwarrior neurohelmet tucked under one elbow. It’s actually quite tasteful in your opinion, despite being a nude.

The relatively low personnel casualties from Operation Bump are a godsend as they allow you to fully man all of the new construction without further cannibalizing your training cadre. Expansion of your training assets is taking place, with five new Wolverines and Ensigns joining the fleet.

That being said, you attend a number of commissioning and keel-laying ceremonies. You took heavy losses in Bump, but your navy is in many ways growing stronger despite the losses.

The colonization of the Grand View system has reached the point where the colony is quite functional, adding a true jewel to the Empire. The system government and judicial systems are likewise in place. Work on Iskra continues, the twin planets requiring one more year to get everything settled before you’ll add that world. Jump point defenses are in place in both systems, thankfully, providing the new colonists with some security. New Eden and Okusawa both see their orbital defenses enhanced with additional Silver Tower stations.

Economic growth this year has been rather moribund across the Empire, unfortunately. However your development foci of Edelsteine and Skala see a welcome boost to their economies. The direct economic investment into the Nowa Warszawa system was similarly quite successful in boosting the local economy into a more healthy state this year. Kainga’s infrastructure has been a bit of a mess since colonization, the DoME focus as well as the major investment work on it have done wonders, although the system is still in rather rough shape for a Core world.

The expansion of the Colonial Office and Civil Service goes ahead as planned.

The sports camps are a great success, albeit at a substantial cost due to just how many of them are opened due to the historically horrible performance at the Olympics. Hopefully this will help address the issue in the next Olympiad.

The overhauls and upgrades to the various strategic materials factories goes ahead on budget and on schedule, significantly boosting production rates of critical materials. According to the analysis, it will be more cost effective for some time to continue upgrades rather than expansion.

The new tranche of ASF factories come online across the Empire, giving you a total of 90 ASF production lines allowing for very solid production levels going forward. General Romanov sends you a memo noting that they won’t be asking for new factories for some time.

The new shipyards all come online by the end of the year, ready for new construction next year. With the increased number of training vessels, hopefully you will be able to properly crew the products of all of these new yards. A memo from the Academy director somewhat squelches that enthusiasm as they note that they are still behind the eight-ball thanks to the production speed improvements, but hope to finally get ahead of the curve in two to three years.

New Phoenix now sports a brand new major fleet base, making the system overall a major military logistics and command & control node for the Empire. Colonists are flocking to the system, along with industry, in order to support the military forces based out of there. At the current growth rates it is believed that New Phoenix will achieve Core status in several years at most.

Terraforming work on Awha, Baris, Pieklo and Skala has been completed to great acclaim by the local residents. The work on Pieklo was particularly successful. All four worlds are petitioning, well begging really, that you seriously consider continuing the terraforming projects through additional stages.

In the R&D area, work on improving agricultural yields has been completed, allowing for substantial boosts to agricultural output across the Empire. It’s not simply staple crops either, but also many ‘garden’ crops and luxury crops which benefit this time. Tuscan melons… yummmm.

Work on the new Assault Battle Armor has been completed. The new suits are quite impressive but come at an unexpected cost, they are too heavy and bulky to be carried on your mechs and require twice the tonnage for infantry bays on IFVs while likewise being too bulky to simply ride on the tanks themselves. On the other hand they effectively have enough armor on each suit to shrug off a full power gauss rifle shot, only a class 20 autocannon can guarantee a one shot kill on a single suit.

Work has begun on refitting all of your ASFs with the new, more compact ferro aluminum armor. Multiple proposals are floating around for how best to handle these upgrades, General Romanov promises you that she’ll have a proposal on your desk soon.

Finally, last but most certainly not least, the new LRM ammunition is now available to the troops. The launcher is substantially identical, with only a minor software patch being required, but the ammunition is able to guide onto targets almost instantly after leaving the launch tube, eliminating the minimum range issue that has long plagued the long range missile system. Distribution of the new ammunition has begun in earnest, with many companies heavily investing in the project.

Turn 94 - It’s Hard

As the Grand Fleet limps back to New Phoenix for full repairs you get a fully detailed report on Stahlkampfauge itself. The system is very similar to Oculus Venatus, having extensive asteroid belts, however here they are actually very near the jump limit. They don’t have much in the way of mineral wealth to offer, however, more that they are convenient gravitational anchors for orbital installations.

Admiral Fisher is not making many friends at the moment. “We lost precisely the ships we could most afford to lose and were lucky in that we didn’t completely lose the crews, who are far more valuable to the Empire than those poorly designed deathtraps that they were in.” Is not something calculated to win friends. “The new style vessels designed under my direction took damage, but survived to fight another day.” is taken as simply boasting. Especially given how smug the Admiral was about it.

General Bradley comes in for a briefing with you about the changes to the military. “Let me start off by stating that this will result in a slight downsizing of our current force, but the net effect will be an increase in effective combat capability. We are completely eliminating multiple old formations and replacing them with more tightly integrated combined arms formations. This will somewhat simplify procurement in some ways, make it more complex in others, but our combat deployments will be streamlined significantly.”

“These units are being completely eliminated, Your Majesty, and where possible changed to fit the new paradigm. Assault Divisions, Armored Divisions, and Cavalry Divisions. For the time being our Brigade Combat Teams will remain as is, but we will soon be reorganizing them as well to be more tightly integrated as combined arms units below the regimental level. Pathfinder Divisions are being transitioned to all LAM, while a new Light Division is the only ‘pure’ mech unit in the TO&E remaining. Garrison Divisions, for now, will remain as is, but we are investigating reorganizing those units to streamline our logistics by eliminating redundant equipment.”

She brings up a chart. “The complication comes with our production metrics. As it stands, we are organized for Regimental level procurement, which would be exceptionally unwieldy under the new paradigm. We are working with industry, R&D, and logistics to refine the final model, but by the end of this year we intend to have shifted from our current division between ‘medium’ and ‘large’ mech production to a fully integrated ‘Mech’ production template, with retooling taking place to more smoothly manage production increases without requiring the assistance of DoME. The Megafactories will remain by far our most productive complexes, but fundamentally there is no reason we cannot build lesser facilities as well to produce all existing designs. Thankfully our forethought in ensuring a very high degree of standardization across all mech designs will pay off in this regard.”

She pauses. “In addition, we will be separating out Garrison/Militia production from front line production. Garrison and Militia units are relatively straightforward to produce, while front line units tend to make use of strategic materials and require additional advanced electronics and subsystems.”


She checks her notes. “The total transition costs will be $1,080,000,000. The SLEP program will continue during the transition, but in 5 years will terminate as the new procurement program goes into full effect. The Army is taking this opportunity of having a primarily naval war on our hands to get all of our ducks in a row and our house fully in order for when more conventional warfare becomes, once again, necessary.”

As a Mechwarrior you can fully approve of such an action.

You get some unabashedly good news as well, you are again pregnant with your third child, another girl according to the doctors. Your husband rather playfully moans and groans about not yet having a son, in the sort of teasing over the top manner you love him for, and you spend a productive afternoon chasing him around with a foam rubber mallet, with your eldest toddling alongside with her own foam sword giggling as he pretends to be terribly afraid of you both.

You don’t get much work done that day, but it’s totally worth it. Your kids are important, after all, and you want to make sure that they have a great childhood so that they become well-adjusted adults when it’s their turn to take over the Empire.

You get back to your office just in time for a crisis to land in your hands. A massive embezzlement and fraud crisis involving the largest casino in the New Port Royal system has erupted. Ironically, the locals aren’t involved, the conglomerate involved is actually based here in the Griffon system and most of the accused parties are from other planets in the Empire, not New Port Royal. One local rather pointedly observed that everybody expects the ex-pirates to be criminal scum, which gives perfect camouflage for others to piggyback onto that reputation.

Regardless, the failure of the largest single employer in the system has had a profound effect on the local economy, sending the system to the brink of an actual recession. The criminals involved were caught by the Special Branch and are already facing prosecution for their crimes, and the fines and remuneration required by the law ensures that the actual direct victims of the fraud and embezzlement will be made mostly whole. However the economy is in trouble.

Elizabeth Lee points out that the system has relatively little non-military manufacturing, relying almost exclusively on their casinos and services for an economy, which leads to a great deal of volatility. Her department has been kicking around ideas on how to correct this with the local system authorities for several years, and she proposes that now may be a good time to actually pull the trigger. The system authorities are on board with that.

What Interior is proposing is a subsidization scheme whereby the Imperial and system governments would provide no-interest loans to cover the financial expenses involved in building civilian industrial areas in already industrial zones regions of the system’s three planets. The system government anticipates sufficient revenues in upcoming years to sustain the scheme on their own without requiring Imperial assistance outside of disasters, but due to the severe local recession would need up front financing from the Imperial government to kickstart the program itself.

Turn 94 - It’s So Incredibly Hard

General Romanov comes in for a comprehensive briefing on the Aerospace Force. Your great-aunt had been a wonderful pilot, you? You were a mechwarrior, you preferred your feet relatively close to the ground and velocities measured in kilometers per hour, not per second.

“Your Majesty, the first thing we would like to bring up is that we are retiring the Roc design completely, on the grounds that it is redundant to the Griffon and offers no true advantages over the other design. The Griffon had more effective firepower, more missile firepower, and was judged to be the more viable of the two designs. We have, however, developed a new ASF to replace the Roc, taking cues from the Stingray design and actually eschewing missiles entirely to maximize direct firepower.” She pauses, then gives you a tight grin. “Our engineers decided to be extremely geeky and name it the Quetzalcoatlus after the dinosaur, the test pilots have already dubbed it the Quetz, and it is an exceptionally nasty assault fighter. The lack of internal missiles is irrelevant to the mission, which is to carry a pair of Alamo anti-ship missiles on anti-shipping strikes..”

She consults her notes. “We will be reorganizing several of our formations as well in the upcoming years, but for now we are in pretty solid shape. We will be scaling back procurement of the Eagle in favor of the Condor, but we are by no means retiring the Eagle.”

She brings up a display showing all of the new designs.



She looks up. “I’ll make one significant note, the Sparrowhawk and Peregrine may look redundant to each other, but there are more significant differences than the cost. The Peregrine is slower, less agile, but more precise with heavier overall armament, the Sparrowhawk is faster, more maneuverable, but relies on a mix of extended range and pulse lasers, without the targeting computer support of the Peregrine. The Sparrowhawk is also completely ammunition independent, massively reducing the logistics strain on the parent vessel. Therefore, Interceptor Wings equipped with the Sparrowhawk are designated for deployment to capital ships with native carrier bays.”

You are a groundpounder, one small step removed from a grunt, as far as you are concerned, these things go fast, have plenty of guns, and are never available when you need them for ground support because they are busy fighting other things that go fast and have lots of guns that would like to give ground support to the other guy in the training exercises you’ve been in. So in the end nobody gets ground support, and when you get back to base you find out that the pilots not only have nicer quarters than you do but they get their own golf course.

So you decide to tweak General Romanov a bit, asking her if the Aerospace Force has studied going to a cockpit with only the same amount of room in it as a Mech cockpit rather than their current cockpits. The expression on her face is priceless, and you are pretty certain that if your great-aunt was still alive, not to mention your great-great-grandfather, you’d probably get pitched out the Tyler Lee Memorial Window of Defenestration for that crack.

You remind yourself to gift the General with a new bag of golf clubs for her birthday.

No, you aren’t a jealous ground pounder troll, what makes you think that?

Later you find yourself in a position that is quickly becoming familiar again, and you’d thought he’d gotten over it in college, as Tiberius chooses to announce himself by having his two interns walk in first, pull out actual ceremonial horns, and blow a fanfare for him. With the horns pointed right at you so you got the full aural effect, and the little bastard then grinning at you and whispering, right after you’d gotten deafened.

So you do the ladylike thing and give him the finger, and have Sekhmet eject him from your office by his toga. A few minutes later he returns, dripping wet from one of the ornamental ponds, and looking properly chastised.

For now.

The Pan-Griffon Games have begun, hosted on the bejeweled beaches of Edelsteine this year. The scenery is absolutely gorgeous, and the competition is rather fiercer than it had been in the past. It seems that the humiliation of the last Olympics is feeding into things, and the competition is almost vicious in its intensity.

Unfortunately there is an early tragedy in the Women’s Swimming event, as the 4x400 medley has to be stopped halfway when a young swimmer from the TTP and a young swimmer from Chula somehow manage to hit each other, replay shows that the Chula swimmer got out of sorts, hit the lane marker, and inadvertently swamped the TTP swimmer, who very nearly drowned as she’d been just taking a breath at that very moment. Luckily rescue swimmers were on the ball.

There’s another tragedy later in the competition, as the buses carrying the Pieklo and Griff’s Leap teams for the Women’s Naked Volleyball event manage to collide with each other. This normally would have been rather mild, but the Pieklo team bus was speeding at the time, and the impact happened right along a scenic cliff. The safety measures in place were overwhelmed by the mass of two very heavy buses striking them, and unfortunately the Pieklo team bus wound up going over the edge.

Team Pieklo seems to have no luck at all either, as several of the competitors who were severely injured in that accident (thankfully there were no fatalities, a testament to the efficacy of your emergency medical teams as well as the safety measures built into the buses themselves) were also on their Women’s Soccer and Softball teams, forcing them to withdraw from those competitions.

Tiberius returns, with his entourage, and whisks you, your husband, and your eldest daughter along with his wife and eldest kids off to a park near the Palace, mixing family time with some business reports.

Parliament has been rather busy, but he hastens to add that it’s in a rather helpful way, with the Eldest leading the charge, so to speak. The Chamber and Senate have passed the Banking Reform Act of 3024, which seeks to better balance the major commercial and investment banks with the smaller consumer and local banks. Regulations which are of vital importance in governing the major players in the financial industry become excessively burdensome for the little ones, especially when regulations that are ultimately intended to prevent investment banks from engaging in unethical practices prevent small, local consumer banks from offering needful and beneficial services to their customers.

The example cited to you is one you are actually familiar with from school. You’d actually done a paper on this for one of your macroeconomics classes in fact. There are regulations requiring that any bank which floats business loans to maintain a certain balance of commercial equities to cover a fairly high percentage of the total value of all such loans, in order to help prevent a default spiral from crashing a bank's liquidity and harming large numbers of depositors in the process. Unfortunately, when written, the list of eligible equities was very tightly constrained, in order to prevent a number of major banks from dodging the requirements by having a large number of nearly impossible to liquidate cheap equities on the books to cheat the system.

However this has an unintended consequence, that various system governments have tried to mitigate in the past with varying success. Very small community banks are bound by the same rules as the massive investment banks, and the prices of those constrained equities has risen so high that a single share in one of them exceeds the total net worth of a start-up community bank in a Peripheral system as well as enormously exceeding the equity requirement. Proposals to allow fractional purchases have been floated, as have subsidies from system governments to start-ups. These have been band-aids on the problem, however, and you’d noted in your paper that the entire banking system was becoming increasingly centralized as small banks simply couldn’t compete fairly.

The Banking Reform Act of 3024 tackles the bull by the horns. Under the act, all banks, regardless of type, would be graded on two bases. First, their total market share across the Empire, second, their ratio of assets to liabilities. A floating series of categories would be created, based on quartiles of market share, with banks within each quartile then further categorized based on quartiles of their A/L ratio. The Interior Ministry would be responsible for maintaining this database, and a cross-Ministry agency drawing from Interior, Political, and Justice would be responsible for enforcing compliance, ensuring accurate reporting, promulgating gainful and equitable regulations across each categorization, and regularly reporting to the Empress on the state of the financial system.

Considering that this was almost word for word the same as the proposal you’d included in your final paper in that class, which, now that you think about it, you’d written with Tiberius… You give him a very level look, and he grins at you. “No, actually, I didn’t just submit your old term paper. Actually the junior Senator from Nowa Warszawa led the effort to write the bill, and the actual legislation is the result of multiple committees. The Eldest liked what he saw, got behind it and pushed, and the Chamber delegations from several Peripheral worlds who’ve been struggling with this very issue got behind it and pushed hard.”