Quest Deep Periphery Quest (Battletech Sandbox Empire Builder)

Turn 64 - Winner's Take That Praise

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
Turn 64 - Winner’s Take That Praise

Through heroic efforts the combined work of DoME and local construction contractors manage to not only fully complete the Olympics facilities on time, but they are truly spectacular. Griffin’s Roost has marginally better facilities, overall, but that is mostly a factor of age and variety rather than individual quality. You are rather impressed, not only did they manage to fully complete everything, but they even took into full consideration all of the ‘soft’ factors for facilities of this nature.

For one thing, there are sufficient bathrooms, and they are laid out efficiently enough that the likelihood of lines for either the men’s or women’s bathrooms is exceptionally low.

The opening ceremonies occur on time and are a true spectacle. The entertainment portion is focused around the ‘Pioneer Spirit’, emphasizing the planet's status as a freshly terraformed and transformed place, and DoME is given pride of place within the celebration.

However it appears that ‘home field advantage’ is notably missing, at least in the initial events. In Athletics the NRR and NRI teams split the gold, although Team Griffon manages silver in each. The women’s event is especially close, with the NRI out-pointing Team Griffon in the final events to take the medal.

In gymnastics there is a thrilling Men’s contest, with Team Griffon winning gold by a fraction of a point. Scoring is carefully reviewed, even though the NRI team didn’t contest it, and holds up under scrutiny. In the Women’s event the women’s gymnastics phenom that Team Griffon had been relied on suffers an early injury and is taken out of the competition. As a result Team Griffon gets their first bronze of the games. Shocking everybody, the NRR women dominate the event, even over the NRI team. In the team event, however, the NRI is utterly dominant, crushing the competition in a convincing fashion.

The NRI competitors then go on a tear, dominating the Decathlon to such an extent that Team Griffon and the NRR find themselves competing only for silver, a competition which Team Griffon manages to win. In swimming, the NRI is again dominant, beating a surging NRR team for the Gold, while Team Griffon barely finishes the race. The NRI finally seems mortal again after the women’s swimming event, with Team Griffon managing a solid first place finish for the Gold.

You make a rather Solomonic judgement in the case of the twin brothers and the fungicide patent, ordering that each company be granted equal patents with the right of independent licensure. As far as you are concerned, that solves the problem. Both brother’s can now compete on price and marketing, and move on.

You hadn’t counted on the sheer depths of hostility of the pair. It takes a few weeks for word to come back to you, but both brother’s have directed their companies to neither produce nor license the fungicide to anybody else, on the simple grounds that if they can’t have sole control over it, nobody gets it. Rather than admit that the other brother had developed the same thing as they did, each of them is perfectly willing to stand on pure spite, even at the cost of loss of profits and business.

Agricultural concerns are in a real tizzy and the dispute has spilled out into the general press. In general, your decision is praised as attempting to be fair and even-handed to both brothers, and the two are being roundly condemned for their conduct, but it seems that even public disapproval isn’t enough to penetrate the ferro-carbide armor of the brother’s egos.

On the other hand, the potential economic boon of the new fungicide is currently locked away behind the paywall of two arrogant geniuses' mutual hostility.

Lovely.

There is a bill being advanced through the Parliament that is… interesting in its implications. The representatives from Nowa Warszawa and Calliope IV are the ones who proposed the legislation which would change the basis of representation in the Chamber of Delegates and Imperial Senate from a per-planet basis to a per-system basis. Representatives from Nowy Gdansk, Griffon IV, and both the Inner Asteroid Belt and Griffon II Orbitals are crying foul, insisting that their concerns need to be independently represented in the Imperial Parliament, however this is countered by the observation that they already have their own system parliament and government, so are in essence getting extra representation, plus inflating the Griffon systems representation in Parliament.

There are good arguments on both sides. On the one hand, the Griffon System is the core of the Empire, and as such should have extra influence, plus the needs of multiple settled planets and orbital regions are diverse enough that it would be fair to represent them in Parliament. On the other hand, this risks relegating the peripheral colonies to an increasingly irrelevant status in Parliament as populations continue to grow in the Core. It comes down to where the balance should be, between aggregation of interests and atomization of interests.

The debate is surprisingly civil, however. Unusually so, from your experience, but it seems that Parliament has decided to put on its Statesman Hat for a change. This is a strange and unusual occurrence, and you are wondering if you might need to declare a public holiday over it. Or perhaps investigate alien mind control rays as a possible cause.

You have sufficient influence to tilt the debate whichever way you desire, or you can simply let them hash it out on their own.
[]ActionResult
[]Support
  • +1 Influence Imperial Senate
  • +1 Influence Chamber of Delegates
  • +1% base GDP peripheral planets
[]Oppose
  • +1 Influence Imperial Senate
  • +1 Influence Chamber of Delegates
  • +5 Imperial Economy Rating
[]Let them decide
  • +2 Influence Imperial Senate
  • +2 Influence Chamber of Delegates
  • +1% base GDP peripheral planets
  • +5 Imperial Economy Rating
QM Reminder - at 7 influence Parliament will be devoting most of their efforts to gaining supremacy over the throne

You get the news of a massive pirate attack on New Capricorn. The pirates themselves are wiped out, however in the process they manage to destroy a pair of Colchester class vessels and cripple a Majestic while also inflicting damage on the White Tower at the jump point. This was the largest and most aggressive attack yet and for the first time the pirates were making use of nuclear munitions. The lost dropships had been making a run for the pirate’s primitive jumpships when said vessels erupted with nuclear-tipped missiles, obliterating the two dropships despite their excellent point defense.
 
Last edited:

Orangeduke38

Well-known member
I'm surprised that the pirates keep attacking us when we consistently wipe out entire pirate flotillas, they're pirates to make money and you can't make money if you're dead.
 

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
The pirates who are attacking you have other motivations than money.

I'll leave it at that.
 

Brogatar

Well-known member
Thats not how pirates really work if they have motivation other then piracy then should be under a different name. Privateers etc...
 

Thors_Alumni

Well-known member
The pirates who are attacking you have other motivations than money.

I'll leave it at that.
basically the pirates are patsies of another hostile group. Maybe drac's, Maybe Slavers, Maybe Hostile Roman's, Maybe some power that we have yet to meet.

As for those two geniuses, they need a reality check badly. so its time to break out the big guns and buy both companies.
 

VicSage

Carpenter, Cobbler, Chirugeon, Dataminer.
Damn. I was hoping their greed and need to outdo the other would cause the prisoner's dilemma to break in our favor. Maybe should have made it "whoever sells the license keeps the license fees".

[X] Oppose
I agree with the overall undercurrent here. We are such a small polity that it is better to have representation per inhabited body at this time.
 

Tel Janin Aman

Well-known member
Comrade
I think we need to get rid of the last drac holdout soon, while they might not have the pop to take the fight to us they can sell shit to the scum surrounding us.
 

Jarow

Well-known member
[X] Oppose

Honestly, I think the best solution would be partial modifiers for multiple same-system planets (so say you get 2 senators per planet normally - it'd be 2 per system, and 1 per additional planet. Or perhaps 2 per system, and 1 per planet period. All numbers are arbitrary, just using 2 due to familiarity with US senate) Slightly reduces Griffon influence, while not completely eliminating the difference. And perhaps something like that is what "let them work it out" would lead to. But we can't really afford +2 influence, especially while they hate us. Though, admittedly I'm now planning on doing the "investigate potential members" project for each chamber regardless of what wins, so it might be doable.
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
You make a rather Solomonic judgement in the case of the twin brothers and the fungicide patent, ordering that each company be granted equal patents with the right of independent licensure. As far as you are concerned, that solves the problem. Both brother’s can now compete on price and marketing, and move on.

You hadn’t counted on the sheer depths of hostility of the pair. It takes a few weeks for word to come back to you, but both brother’s have directed their companies to neither produce nor license the fungicide to anybody else, on the simple grounds that if they can’t have sole control over it, nobody gets it. Rather than admit that the other brother had developed the same thing as they did, each of them is perfectly willing to stand on pure spite, even at the cost of loss of profits and business.

Agricultural concerns are in a real tizzy and the dispute has spilled out into the general press. In general, your decision is praised as attempting to be fair and even-handed to both brothers, and the two are being roundly condemned for their conduct, but it seems that even public disapproval isn’t enough to penetrate the ferro-carbide armor of the brother’s egos.

This would fall under, "I told you so." I proposed a better solution that would have totally avoided this, but nooooooo.

[X] Oppose
- [X] In the short term, at least. In the long term, this issue should be revisited because a permanent "core/colonies" split is not a good idea.
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
We haven't made contact with the IS or the Clans yet so we don't know what they're carrying around in the modern day. Apparently FASAnomics have been retconned away to make the setting more believable (as well as to provide an actual challenge, hopefully. With our current numbers and tech we'd pretty easily roll over the canon IS). That isn't to say that the IS might be magically bigger and better than us, I just wouldn't bet on us having all of the advantages we think we have just because canon IS didn't have them.

The Inner Sphere is "de-FASAnomicized" and behaves with fewer act-of-plot idiot balls, but they're still irrationally Battlemech-obsessed, technologically regressed, and unwilling to give up their wars over the corpse of the Star League.

It is definitely ironic that we and the other "frontier hick" factions out here on the ass end of the Periphery are pretty much *all* more technologically advanced than the Great Houses, simply because we're outside their crab bucket.
 

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