Val the Moofia Boss
Well-known member
[X] Go out to the jump point yourself on HMS Renown and talk there
Quest Deep Periphery Quest (Battletech Sandbox Empire Builder)
- Thread starter LordSunhawk
- Start date
Thanks for the map. That helped a lot.
So, that means that we are the closest, of the great nations, to the Taurian Concordat. If we get that far then they should be good trading partners. Right? They are my favorite nation in Battletech.
But now I wonder why the Dracks are here.
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AlphaOmega
Well-known member
[X] Accept, talk is good
Jarow
Well-known member
Which worlds? Our core worlds (Nowy Gdansk and Griffon's Roost) are both at the highest we can do (level 2), Calliope, Griffon IV (we probably need a name for that sometime soon), and Nowa Warzsawa are all at the first level, and I don't think the TTP wants defenses (though I might be wrong). Not saying we shouldn't, just trying to get an idea of what to prioritize whenever I start working on my plan for the turn.
Turn 63 - Mystre
Turn 63 - Mystre
The ancient Dart takes about a week to transit in towards Griffin’s Roost after you give clearance to approach under diplomatic conditions. She makes no hostile moves the entire way, and even refrains from active scanning which is rather courteous of them.
Rather than spend the time fretting, you get other work done.
Jeremy has already written up his own analysis of the campaign in the NRI. The force structure that he’d proposed in the past had worked well enough in exercises, but in the field he reports that there were significant issues. Large portions of the force structure were idle for much of the campaign, yet still consumed logistical resources. In addition, at times the 5 brigade ‘pentagon’ structure of the divisions proved excessively unwieldy to command. 1st Brigade spent 90% of the campaign completely idle, as the Pathfinder regiment was not well configured for conventional warfare, the Special Operations regiment had little to do thanks to the fragility of their equipment in a conventional battle, and the Mechanized regiment served exclusively as a bodyguard unit for the command staff.
He has already worked out a more flexible alternative organization chart, switching back to an exclusively triangular force structure. The highest organizational level goes from the Division to the Corps, with three brigade Divisions and three divisions to a Corps. Specialist forces, like Special Operations and Pathfinder units, would be reorganized as divisions in their own right, and would be attached to the Corps as required for the mission while retaining independent command staff. Likewise, CAS assets would become a Corps level asset, independent of the maneuver divisions.
The Corps, apart from its organic assets such as CAS and HQ troops, would be flexible in makeup, with divisions assigned as needed. If more than one Corps is required for an operation, they would be organized as Armies of 3 Corps each.
The final organization is as follows.
Based on the new organization, you’d have 2 Armored Divisions, 1 Assault Division, 4 Infantry Divisions, 1 Cavalry Division, 1 HQ Brigade, and 1 CAS Brigade fully manned. You’d have one brigade of SpecOps troops and 1 brigade of Pathfinders. The Imperial Guard Division would have one of its Imperial Guard Regiments and one Assault Regiment. You’d have 2 Armored Regiments as the nucleus for a pair of Infantry Brigades, along with 1 Light Horse Regiment as the nucleus for a Cavalry Brigade.
He is also proposing the establishment of a dedicated Corps Artillery Brigade, composed of a mix of Abbot and Chaparral artillery tanks. The Abbot’s would be the Corps Commander’s personal shotgun, allowing the application of the massed firepower of almost 250 Long Tom tubes against any target in range, with over a hundred Arrow IV platforms equipped with a mix of standard and SAM variant Arrow IV missiles covering the long range artillery platforms.
There is some growsing in high command about the reorganization plans, but in general the Army is proceeding to shuffle units along those lines. In the future, once you have additional Corps’ stood up and ready, you will have far more flexibility in operational use.
This at least keeps you occupied while waiting for the negotiations to begin. Commodore Rein has proven to be a quite polite interlocutor in the meantime, albeit one who is staying utterly and totally vague as to what she wants to talk about beyond it involving peaceful relations. She looks young enough to be your granddaughter, but you get the sense that she is far more than she appears.
The Dart smoothly enters orbit and a single small shuttle is launched. It is much smaller than you’d expected, the size of some of a Gyrfalcon. And the visuals of it are intriguing. There are no transparencies, no canopy at all. No sign of any airlock either.
And when it lands it becomes even more intriguing, once the shuttle finishes taxiing to the parking stand a segment of the underside starts to lower, then rotates a coffin-like assembly vertical, which then splits open revealing Commodore Rein. Alone, and the cables retracting from attachment points back into the ‘coffin’ are… interesting. You realize very quickly that Commodore Rein is a full cyborg, for all that she looks like an ordinary human. The security sensors are showing a near total lack of any exposed biological material, her ‘skin’ is an advanced composite that mimics ‘real’ skin nearly perfectly… too perfectly, in fact.
After the preliminaries are done you learn several things. The Amaris Remnant evidently is massively into cybernetics, to a degree well beyond your own achievements in the area. They’ve been so for an incredibly long time, and, much like you had your Mad Science Moment in your own history with the KF experiments gone horribly wrong, they did as well, centuries ago they suffered a collective Homer Simpson-esque Mad Science obsession that resulted in nearly their entire population at the time going full cyborg… and only then thinking ‘wait, how do we have kids if we’re only brains in fully cybernetic bodies?’. With this realization coming just a few years too late, as any sperm and ova samples that may have been preserved in cryogenic storage had aged past their use-by dates.
Oops.
According to Commodore Rein, most of the factions in the Amaris Remnant were heavily constrained by their lack of numbers, although this was more of an economic than military constraint when a half dozen cyborgs could plug into a suitably modified McKenna class battleship and operate it at a higher efficiency than a flesh-and-blood crew. The problem is that there is a very hard limit on how much they can expand, and one of the factions, which was now the dominant one, had managed to break the paradigm.
By contracting with Kilburrough for more population. According to Commodore Reign, the Black Steel faction had purchased a large shipment of non-sterilized slaves from Kilburrough just over two hundred years ago, then used them as the basis to produce a non-cybernetic ‘under class’ to operate their mines, factories, and such. The most promising children of this population are selected by the Black Steel as full members and are provided with the full cyborg package. As such, the Black Steel are now a threat to all of the other factions.
The faction that she represents, the Crimson Storm, had gotten control over a cache of mothballed museum ships that had been part of what she describes as ‘Freedom Flights’ from the Amaris Empire and Rim Worlds Republic, and had decided to partially replicate what the Black Steel had done.
They’d gotten in contact with Kilburrough to do some business. Unlike the Black Steel, however, the Crimson Storm had no interest in creating their own slave population, Commodore Rein is rather adamant on that point. Her faction is descended from some of the earliest groups that formed the Amaris Remnant and their ancestors had formed a major part of the Naval component of the Rim Republican Army.
What they had done is contracted with Kilburrough for genetically engineered infants, free of harmful recessives. The total package that they’d contracted for specified peak human physical characteristics. Their plan is to raise the children as their own, forming proper families with them, and recreating ordinary population growth through them. They’ve researched far less invasive and complete cybernetic enhancements that would avoid all of the mistakes that they made, in that human reproduction would still be possible, and any of the children, upon reaching adulthood, who themselves choose to undergo the procedures will receive the new generation of implants and upgrades.
As for why they did business with Kilburrough for this instead of, say, approaching you? Simple, until the flotilla that Commodore Rein is in command of reached Kilburrough and hacked into the Kilburroughan data networks, they’d not known you were even here. If any other faction of the Amaris Remnant had known of you, that information had never been placed on their public nets, nor conveyed to the Crimson Storm.
Oh, and the contract with Kilburrough? Looks like Kilburrough is now in possession of an original flight Cameron class Battlecruiser and an original flight Pinto Corvette. Commodore Rein rather wryly pointed out that they weren’t about to give them any good WarShips. That had been payment for 120,000 genetically engineered infants, and the Commodore, even after learning of you, had not been willing to leave any of them behind to the non-existent mercies of Kilburrough and lacked the ability to simply smash the slavers herself. Instead, she decided to make a deal with you, in the hopes that you will be able to make use of what they’re willing to trade to you to eventually be able to slay the Kilburrough dragon yourself.
As for what they are wanting here? They have a proposal for you. An indefinite duration non-aggression pact between the Griffon Empire and the Crimson Storm plus their allies. They would give you recognition codes that any unit under their control will recognize and respect, and ask that you do likewise. Additionally, they are willing to trade you TAS Plumbata, as is, plus two of the Mammoths she is carrying with a total of 20,000 of the infants, in exchange for one of your shiny new Caravels. They will also include complete production specifications for the final Terran Hegemony iteration of the Dart class. They will request that you commit to not scrapping TAS Plumbata, instead preserving the ancient ship as a museum. And as a final incentive, they will include data on ship-mobile HPG systems, which should reduce the difficulty of researching them for yourself.
The ancient Dart takes about a week to transit in towards Griffin’s Roost after you give clearance to approach under diplomatic conditions. She makes no hostile moves the entire way, and even refrains from active scanning which is rather courteous of them.
Rather than spend the time fretting, you get other work done.
Jeremy has already written up his own analysis of the campaign in the NRI. The force structure that he’d proposed in the past had worked well enough in exercises, but in the field he reports that there were significant issues. Large portions of the force structure were idle for much of the campaign, yet still consumed logistical resources. In addition, at times the 5 brigade ‘pentagon’ structure of the divisions proved excessively unwieldy to command. 1st Brigade spent 90% of the campaign completely idle, as the Pathfinder regiment was not well configured for conventional warfare, the Special Operations regiment had little to do thanks to the fragility of their equipment in a conventional battle, and the Mechanized regiment served exclusively as a bodyguard unit for the command staff.
He has already worked out a more flexible alternative organization chart, switching back to an exclusively triangular force structure. The highest organizational level goes from the Division to the Corps, with three brigade Divisions and three divisions to a Corps. Specialist forces, like Special Operations and Pathfinder units, would be reorganized as divisions in their own right, and would be attached to the Corps as required for the mission while retaining independent command staff. Likewise, CAS assets would become a Corps level asset, independent of the maneuver divisions.
The Corps, apart from its organic assets such as CAS and HQ troops, would be flexible in makeup, with divisions assigned as needed. If more than one Corps is required for an operation, they would be organized as Armies of 3 Corps each.
The final organization is as follows.
- Armored Division
- First Brigade
- Standard Mech Regiment
- Standard Mech Regiment
- Armored Cavalry Regiment
- Second Brigade
- Standard Mech Regiment
- Standard Mech Regiment
- Armored Cavalry Regiment
- Third Brigade
- Standard Mech Regiment
- Standard Mech Regiment
- Armored Cavalry Regiment
- First Brigade
- Assault Division
- First Brigade
- Standard Mech Regiment
- Assault Regiment
- Assault Regiment
- Second Brigade
- Standard Mech Regiment
- Assault Regiment
- Assault Regiment
- Third Brigade
- Standard Mech Regiment
- Assault Regiment
- Assault Regiment
- First Brigade
- Infantry Division
- First Brigade
- Armored Regiment
- Mechanized Regiment
- Mechanized Regiment
- Second Brigade
- Armored Regiment
- Mechanized Regiment
- Mechanized Regiment
- Third Brigade
- Armored Regiment
- Mechanized Regiment
- Mechanized Regiment
- First Brigade
- Cavalry Division
- First Brigade
- Light Horse Regiment
- Light Horse Regiment
- Armored Cavalry Regiment
- Second Brigade
- Light Horse Regiment
- Light Horse Regiment
- Armored Cavalry Regiment
- Third Brigade
- Light Horse Regiment
- Light Horse Regiment
- Armored Cavalry Regiment
- First Brigade
- Headquarters Brigade (organic to Corps)
- Mechanized Regiment
- Mechanized Regiment
- Assault Regiment
- CAS Brigade (organic to Corps)
- CAS Regiment
- CAS Regiment
- CAS Regiment
- Pathfinder Division
- First Brigade
- Pathfinder Regiment
- Pathfinder Regiment
- Pathfinder Regiment
- Second Brigade
- Pathfinder Regiment
- Pathfinder Regiment
- Pathfinder Regiment
- Third Brigade
- Raider Regiment
- Raider Regiment
- Raider Regiment
- First Brigade
- SpecOps Division
- First Brigade
- Special Operations Regiment
- Special Operations Regiment
- Special Operations Regiment
- Second Brigade
- Special Operations Regiment
- Special Operations Regiment
- Special Operations Regiment
- Third Brigade
- Raider Regiment
- Raider Regiment
- Raider Regiment
- First Brigade
- Imperial Guard Division
- First Brigade
- Imperial Guard Regiment
- Imperial Guard Regiment
- Assault Regiment
- Second Brigade
- Imperial Guard Regiment
- Imperial Guard Regiment
- Assault Regiment
- Third Brigade
- Imperial Guard Regiment
- Imperial Guard Regiment
- Assault Regiment
- First Brigade
Based on the new organization, you’d have 2 Armored Divisions, 1 Assault Division, 4 Infantry Divisions, 1 Cavalry Division, 1 HQ Brigade, and 1 CAS Brigade fully manned. You’d have one brigade of SpecOps troops and 1 brigade of Pathfinders. The Imperial Guard Division would have one of its Imperial Guard Regiments and one Assault Regiment. You’d have 2 Armored Regiments as the nucleus for a pair of Infantry Brigades, along with 1 Light Horse Regiment as the nucleus for a Cavalry Brigade.
He is also proposing the establishment of a dedicated Corps Artillery Brigade, composed of a mix of Abbot and Chaparral artillery tanks. The Abbot’s would be the Corps Commander’s personal shotgun, allowing the application of the massed firepower of almost 250 Long Tom tubes against any target in range, with over a hundred Arrow IV platforms equipped with a mix of standard and SAM variant Arrow IV missiles covering the long range artillery platforms.
There is some growsing in high command about the reorganization plans, but in general the Army is proceeding to shuffle units along those lines. In the future, once you have additional Corps’ stood up and ready, you will have far more flexibility in operational use.
This at least keeps you occupied while waiting for the negotiations to begin. Commodore Rein has proven to be a quite polite interlocutor in the meantime, albeit one who is staying utterly and totally vague as to what she wants to talk about beyond it involving peaceful relations. She looks young enough to be your granddaughter, but you get the sense that she is far more than she appears.
The Dart smoothly enters orbit and a single small shuttle is launched. It is much smaller than you’d expected, the size of some of a Gyrfalcon. And the visuals of it are intriguing. There are no transparencies, no canopy at all. No sign of any airlock either.
And when it lands it becomes even more intriguing, once the shuttle finishes taxiing to the parking stand a segment of the underside starts to lower, then rotates a coffin-like assembly vertical, which then splits open revealing Commodore Rein. Alone, and the cables retracting from attachment points back into the ‘coffin’ are… interesting. You realize very quickly that Commodore Rein is a full cyborg, for all that she looks like an ordinary human. The security sensors are showing a near total lack of any exposed biological material, her ‘skin’ is an advanced composite that mimics ‘real’ skin nearly perfectly… too perfectly, in fact.
After the preliminaries are done you learn several things. The Amaris Remnant evidently is massively into cybernetics, to a degree well beyond your own achievements in the area. They’ve been so for an incredibly long time, and, much like you had your Mad Science Moment in your own history with the KF experiments gone horribly wrong, they did as well, centuries ago they suffered a collective Homer Simpson-esque Mad Science obsession that resulted in nearly their entire population at the time going full cyborg… and only then thinking ‘wait, how do we have kids if we’re only brains in fully cybernetic bodies?’. With this realization coming just a few years too late, as any sperm and ova samples that may have been preserved in cryogenic storage had aged past their use-by dates.
Oops.
According to Commodore Rein, most of the factions in the Amaris Remnant were heavily constrained by their lack of numbers, although this was more of an economic than military constraint when a half dozen cyborgs could plug into a suitably modified McKenna class battleship and operate it at a higher efficiency than a flesh-and-blood crew. The problem is that there is a very hard limit on how much they can expand, and one of the factions, which was now the dominant one, had managed to break the paradigm.
By contracting with Kilburrough for more population. According to Commodore Reign, the Black Steel faction had purchased a large shipment of non-sterilized slaves from Kilburrough just over two hundred years ago, then used them as the basis to produce a non-cybernetic ‘under class’ to operate their mines, factories, and such. The most promising children of this population are selected by the Black Steel as full members and are provided with the full cyborg package. As such, the Black Steel are now a threat to all of the other factions.
The faction that she represents, the Crimson Storm, had gotten control over a cache of mothballed museum ships that had been part of what she describes as ‘Freedom Flights’ from the Amaris Empire and Rim Worlds Republic, and had decided to partially replicate what the Black Steel had done.
They’d gotten in contact with Kilburrough to do some business. Unlike the Black Steel, however, the Crimson Storm had no interest in creating their own slave population, Commodore Rein is rather adamant on that point. Her faction is descended from some of the earliest groups that formed the Amaris Remnant and their ancestors had formed a major part of the Naval component of the Rim Republican Army.
What they had done is contracted with Kilburrough for genetically engineered infants, free of harmful recessives. The total package that they’d contracted for specified peak human physical characteristics. Their plan is to raise the children as their own, forming proper families with them, and recreating ordinary population growth through them. They’ve researched far less invasive and complete cybernetic enhancements that would avoid all of the mistakes that they made, in that human reproduction would still be possible, and any of the children, upon reaching adulthood, who themselves choose to undergo the procedures will receive the new generation of implants and upgrades.
As for why they did business with Kilburrough for this instead of, say, approaching you? Simple, until the flotilla that Commodore Rein is in command of reached Kilburrough and hacked into the Kilburroughan data networks, they’d not known you were even here. If any other faction of the Amaris Remnant had known of you, that information had never been placed on their public nets, nor conveyed to the Crimson Storm.
Oh, and the contract with Kilburrough? Looks like Kilburrough is now in possession of an original flight Cameron class Battlecruiser and an original flight Pinto Corvette. Commodore Rein rather wryly pointed out that they weren’t about to give them any good WarShips. That had been payment for 120,000 genetically engineered infants, and the Commodore, even after learning of you, had not been willing to leave any of them behind to the non-existent mercies of Kilburrough and lacked the ability to simply smash the slavers herself. Instead, she decided to make a deal with you, in the hopes that you will be able to make use of what they’re willing to trade to you to eventually be able to slay the Kilburrough dragon yourself.
As for what they are wanting here? They have a proposal for you. An indefinite duration non-aggression pact between the Griffon Empire and the Crimson Storm plus their allies. They would give you recognition codes that any unit under their control will recognize and respect, and ask that you do likewise. Additionally, they are willing to trade you TAS Plumbata, as is, plus two of the Mammoths she is carrying with a total of 20,000 of the infants, in exchange for one of your shiny new Caravels. They will also include complete production specifications for the final Terran Hegemony iteration of the Dart class. They will request that you commit to not scrapping TAS Plumbata, instead preserving the ancient ship as a museum. And as a final incentive, they will include data on ship-mobile HPG systems, which should reduce the difficulty of researching them for yourself.
| [] | Accept the deal |
|
| [] | Reject the deal |
|
| [] | Write-in (please specify in your write-in the deal you propose.) |
|
Trippy man, though we might need to end the other faction soon before they go CABAL on us.
Thors_Alumni
Well-known member
[X] Accept the deal
Val the Moofia Boss
Well-known member
"Oops" indeed. Their world must've had... what? How many tens of millions of people at least? And not one single couple declined or dodged the cyborgification? What, did they hunt down every last person and forcibly turn them into one? Kinda sad for them, though. Kinda sad that the original race will eventually cease to exist.
We're a long, long way away from doing anything about Kilburrough. Conquering Killburough would be a humongous operation (fortified system spanning multiple planets, massive occupation forces required, going to be a huge logistics strain) we currently aren't capable of, and they are passive so dealing with them isn't urgent. Also, they are allies with the Dracs, who are more aggressive, more manageable, and are a higher threat level due to their bioweapon. Dealing with the Dracs comes first.
[X] Accept the deal
Literally no reason not to accept.
It sounds like - like Kilburough - we're not really in a position to fight the Black Steel right now. The Crimson Storm have warships. The Black Steel seem to be more powerful (are willing to take moral shortcuts to achieve luxury and power) so presumably they are even more military powerful (or else the Crimson Storm wouldn't be building relations with us). We're currently not at war with them and there is no indication we will be any time soon, unless there is some Kilburrough-Drac-Black Steel coalition that is being built up in secret. Fighting the Black Steel is something that might happen way later.
We're a long, long way away from doing anything about Kilburrough. Conquering Killburough would be a humongous operation (fortified system spanning multiple planets, massive occupation forces required, going to be a huge logistics strain) we currently aren't capable of, and they are passive so dealing with them isn't urgent. Also, they are allies with the Dracs, who are more aggressive, more manageable, and are a higher threat level due to their bioweapon. Dealing with the Dracs comes first.
[X] Accept the deal
Literally no reason not to accept.
It sounds like - like Kilburough - we're not really in a position to fight the Black Steel right now. The Crimson Storm have warships. The Black Steel seem to be more powerful (are willing to take moral shortcuts to achieve luxury and power) so presumably they are even more military powerful (or else the Crimson Storm wouldn't be building relations with us). We're currently not at war with them and there is no indication we will be any time soon, unless there is some Kilburrough-Drac-Black Steel coalition that is being built up in secret. Fighting the Black Steel is something that might happen way later.
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AlphaOmega
Well-known member
[X] Accept the deal
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
Welp we're going to need more warship yards building as soon as possible
IceWing_mk1
Well-known member
[X] Accept the deal
Orangeduke38
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.
-- 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.
Last edited:
Jarow
Well-known member
[X] Accept the deal
Okay, it sounds like, morally, the Crimson Storm is not significantly worse than our allies, so beyond general anti-Amaris sentiment (which isn't something we've had cause to develop) not much reason not to accept some degree of relations. So, for reach part of the deal:
Edit: Just highlighting a few things mentioned in the text but not the option selection:
-We give them one (new) Caravel jumpship
-We get 20,000 genetically engineered infants
Okay, it sounds like, morally, the Crimson Storm is not significantly worse than our allies, so beyond general anti-Amaris sentiment (which isn't something we've had cause to develop) not much reason not to accept some degree of relations. So, for reach part of the deal:
- Indefinite non-aggression pact with the Crimson Storm
- Receive TAS Plumbata
- Completely original Dart-class light cruiser
- Very primitive equipment compared to modern equipment
- Incredibly high historical value
- Receive 2 Mammoth dropships optimized for personnel transport
- Receive full production specifications for the Dart-class Light Cruiser (specifics pending)
- A Research project will be available to parse the plans for production. Once complete you can either produce as is or make minor modifications to armament
- Receive data on ship-mobile HPG systems
- Increases target of HPG Theory Lvl 2 to 80, decreases cost to 100,000,000
Edit: Just highlighting a few things mentioned in the text but not the option selection:
-We give them one (new) Caravel jumpship
-We get 20,000 genetically engineered infants
Last edited:
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
[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.
-- 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.
Trashman.exe
Well-known member
[X] Accept the deal
Would building warships be the best move or is making potemkins and loading them up with our dropships a more effective route?