Battletech BattleTech discussion thread: May the light of Hanse Davion guide us

[PsihoKekec]

One of the crazier ideas I had was basically House Cameron setting up a bolt hole in the Periphery. So that in case of a worst case scenario they would have a Cameron to inherit the throne and a fall back position for the SLDF to rebuild from. A Brian Castle on a planetary scale. Full of people who served the SLDF and retired there AFTER being reported dead.

You don't need to report them dead, especially if you are trying to build viable population as reports of dead women and children draw attention. This is 2000- habitable worlds area that doesn't have best communications, you can vanish people via administrative mishap instead of zombie unit on a large scale.

 

[Typhonis]

You don't need to report them dead, especially if you are trying to build viable population as reports of dead women and children draw attention. This is 2000- habitable worlds area that doesn't have best communications, you can vanish people via administrative mishap instead of zombie unit on a large scale.

Not dead women and children, hell not dead civilians at all. As I said for the most part it was military personnel sent to the world. The idea was that those military were reportedly killed in action when they were actually offered 40 acres and a mule as it were.

Of course, they could lose them in the admin as well. Still, the basic idea is a Brian Castle on a planetary scale that can build everything the Star League needs from first principles. Including warships. The sort of program you have a Cameron cousin keep an eye on in case someone like Amaris shows up.

I first used the idea in An Entry With a Bang as Comstar trying to figure out what Motherload was with the data at hand.

 

[PsihoKekec]

You can't build a viable planetary population with only handful of burned out ex spec ops troops, you need women and children as well, plus many more civilians of various trades.

Also Cameron bolthole in periphery doesn't really make sense for Camerons, Hegemony and Terra were their boltholes, that's why they were so fortified along with several secret systems within TH.

What would make sense for Camerons is simply expansion, being boxed in by other five great houses they first turned to colonization of marginal worlds via improvements in terraforming, then there were shared worlds, but next? The only viable solution for expansion was beyond the existing borders of Inner Sphere. It would have to be done in secret though as doing it publicly would trigger a scramble for Africa Periphery, with other great houses having an edge due to being on their border. And since shipping everything from TH to Periphery is such a bother, they would have establish a world (for example) between OA and TC, build up industry needed to support colonization of other worlds, spreading from there. While there would be a military base for protection, most of population would be civilians, in general population should be self replenishing and mostly self-sufficient (can't have them fully independent from Terra, can't we).

Building up this world would be multi-decade effort, gradually moving the settlers there, building up infrastructure... the need to keep it secret taking primacy before doing it faster.

 

[PsihoKekec]

 

[Culsu]

One ton corresponds to one infantry squad or one battlearmor trooper.

Thank you!

 

[Morphic Tide]

You can't build a viable planetary population with only handful of burned out ex spec ops troops, you need women and children as well, plus many more civilians of various trades.

One, Kerensky did exactly that, relative to Inner Sphere population numbers, and the Clans are still rather extreme about pulling off shit they really should not have the demographics for. Two, a longer-term "out of the way" bolthole setup trickling in said troops as available to gradually build up the hidden fort still meets the parameters. Three, the SLDF's scale makes finding the intersect of ex-spec-ops/blacksite-qualified women and useful civilian trades not that big a deal.

 

[Typhonis]

Star League was founded in 2570. Even they they could do shifty things. So say they spend 150 years to slowly build Project Masada up. Is that long enough a time to slowly trickle men and material to a hidden location no one would know about using funds earmarked for other things? I mean a 1 star league dollar tax a year on every adult in the Inner sphere would net you a budget of several hundred billion to find and terraform a location. No one would be wiser to it.

 

[Morphic Tide]

Even just a 50-year project of quietly building up a fortress with the SLDF black budget and/or Cameron house funds could easily get a Castle Brian'd planet with how many random officers could authorize the things for caches.

Something like the son or daughter of a sibling of Johnathan Cameron (to my understanding a first cousin once removed to Richard) sour about trying to set things up for a lasting branch house out from under Terra's thumb, then doubling down hard when Richard's regency hits because they could actually land the succession if he croaks.

 

[Typhonis]

This could also butterfly away the Clans or Kerensky simply never learns of it because as soon as Fatboy pops Richard the emergency signal is sent. Terra's HPG is ordered to transmit a message to a chain of HPGS, destination unknown. All they do know is the message has priority 1 and supersedes even SLDF traffic. All it is is a message of less than ten words. No one knows where it goes as the data tapes self-erase after transmission and the words themselves are meaningless.

Of course, sometime later, say 3020, the Far-Lookers made a teeny tiny mistake and jumped where they should not have. Winding up staring down the guns of a pair of warships that quite politely asked them what the hell they were doing there? New build warships with more jump traffic than the Lookers had ever seen.

 

[Battlegrinder]

One, Kerensky did exactly that, relative to Inner Sphere population numbers, and the Clans are still rather extreme about pulling off shit they really should not have the demographics for.

I would point out it turned out really, really bad when he tried that, and that it was largely luck/narrative fiat that when the dust settled the result was the clans and not a bunch of smoking rubble.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

One, Kerensky did exactly that, relative to Inner Sphere population numbers, and the Clans are still rather extreme about pulling off shit they really should not have the demographics for. Two, a longer-term "out of the way" bolthole setup trickling in said troops as available to gradually build up the hidden fort still meets the parameters. Three, the SLDF's scale makes finding the intersect of ex-spec-ops/blacksite-qualified women and useful civilian trades not that big a deal.

Kerensky did that by pure Act of Plot; it REALLY should not have worked at any level.

 

[Typhonis]

So how would something like MASADA look? Top secret funded by House Cameron directly. The best and brightest of the SLDF and associated groups offered a place to retire too as long as they swear loyalty to House Cameron itself.
Say they spend 50 to 100 years building and staffing it. Would it still be viable 300 years later if one aim was self sufficiency?

 

[PsihoKekec]

You filled it with retirees, it has no long term viability once the flow of retirees stops.

 

[Morphic Tide]

I would point out it turned out really, really bad when he tried that, and that it was largely luck/narrative fiat that when the dust settled the result was the clans and not a bunch of smoking rubble.

Kerensky did that by pure Act of Plot; it REALLY should not have worked at any level.

It's still an example of the technical ability, for all it was a ludicrous improbability. Him appropriating exceptionally low-personnel farming equipment "off screen" that was quietly essential to the Exodus by keeping it from starving while they worked out the food supply would not be remotely out of place with the "black box" 'Mech factories and cache-looting spree.

You filled it with retirees, it has no long term viability once the flow of retirees stops.

Not if the retirees have kids, which is very far from unreasonable, and the near-certain discrepancy of female intake could be handled in a wide variety of unethical-but-impossible-to-trace ways. Genetically engineered waifus for your low-level officers nobody would mind dropping out of contact in their early 40s, for example.

Field personnel over 30 tend not to work out too well (hence the Clan's Solahma, for all the lost value of elderly REMF officers), and approaching veterans to offer a thoroughly out of the way community instead of a desk job when they get too old for front-line service would give you a far more than sufficient recruitment base for raw manpower needs.

Pretty much the only thing you might need to go out of your way for for would be farming, given Kerensky's issues with it, and that's still in "minor tweak to SLDF recruitment" territory. When you're headhunting across the entire SLDF, let alone further Star League personnel, it's not hard to find the staff and only slightly harder to find ones willing to cut ties with the rest of the Inner Sphere.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

The Star League certainly has a history of doing wildly unethical things while preaching the greater good, but honestly, just shipping female prisoners from the Periphery as Japanese-style comfort women is more their speed than "genetically engineered waifus".

 

[Spartan303]

The Star League certainly has a history of doing wildly unethical things while preaching the greater good, but honestly, just shipping female prisoners from the Periphery as Japanese-style comfort women is more their speed than "genetically engineered waifus".

Wait, they did that shit?

 

[Typhonis]

Wait, they did that shit?

Given what they did to the Periphery?

 

[Spartan303]

Given what they did to the Periphery?

Yes. I have to ask, yes.

 

[Spartan303]

I mean, there are lines that should not be crossed. And for all the Star League's douchebaggery I never heard of them doing something like that. The Combine and the Capellans certainly. But not the Star League.

 

[Culsu]

I mean, there are lines that should not be crossed. And for all the Star League's douchebaggery I never heard of them doing something like that. The Combine and the Capellans certainly. But not the Star League.

Maybe Forlough allowed it to happen during the height of the campaign, but I can't see the SLDF or the First Lord to actually have sanctioned anything like it.

Now, for the Massada planet in the Periphery, it's certainly possible if you set it up over a time of a couple of decades. We have to remember that at the height of the Star League the BTech universe was a vastly different place. The Hegemony alone probably had in excess of a hundred billion people, and significant numbers regularly moved from planet A to B, often just to vacation, so ubiquitous was interstellar transportation. Simply 'loosing track' of a few thousand loyalists a year, especially if forging numbers on the side of the SLDF/Hegemony was involved, would have been a cake walk, and with industrial production soaring and megaprojects being everywhere the expenses would have been easy to mask.