Turn 76 - Brothers Everywhere
The Rasalhaguian and Roman forces who’d joined you on Okusawa did participate in the final pacification campaigns, and gave excellent service. Your commanders in the field were quite complimentary of them both, in fact. The troops were well-disciplined, the commanders were very willing to work within your command structure and caused no real issues, and they accomplished their assignments well.
All that being said, there’s a few problems. According to the quartermasters, a number of spare parts for Artemis guidance systems, active probes, ECM systems, AMS systems, advanced LRM launchers and munitions, and a few spare Enhanced PPCs have, well, decided to take a walk with Jesus. Nothing all that serious, and if they hadn’t been going over the books with a fine toothed comb in preparation for any possible after action reviews the missing equipment might well have fallen under the radar.
There’s no sign of any bribery or anything so gauche as that, rather it seems that the missing gear tended to vanish from the trucks transporting it from the dropships to supply depots, truck convoys that were escorted by your allies. In the course of which it seems the Rasalhaguians and Romans both engaged in a wee bit of creative pilferage.
It’s completely deniable on their part, of course, and nothing truly vital was taken. General Messerschmidt is understandably annoyed with himself. The supply depots themselves are airtight in this regard, but in the scramble to deploy the allied reinforcements and the chaos of combat operations it appears that security on the kit at the drop port and at the depot had failed to coordinate, the drop port security thought that the depot was handling in-transit security, the supply depot people thought the drop port folks were handling it… which thusly meant that nobody was handling it. That the Rasalhaguians and Romans were so restrained in their pilfering is the real wonder of it all.
The ambassadors for both the NRR and NRI have solemnly pledged full investigations into the matter, but you can’t help but notice that neither of them has actually promised to give anything
back. The tacit ‘finders keepers’ combined with ‘we stole it fair and square’. Lovely.
You like that better when you are the one doing it.
You get the reports from the Olympics and it looks like Team Griffon is getting back in form. While you split the wrestling event with the Romans following a truly abysmal performance by the men’s team, the ladies’ win in the event seems to set the tone for the next several days of competitions. The men’s fencing competition is a blowout for Team Griffon, with only the Rasalhaguians offering any sort of challenge. In the women’s fencing the Rasalhaguians manage to barely outpoint the Griffon women in a thrilling match. You actually take the time to watch it and are very impressed by both sides, and even more so by the genuine comradery both teams show at the end of the match.
The archery matches are extremely close as well, although Team Griffon does come away with the victories they are hard fought by all involved.
Then come the two events that seem to be the most popular, although both somewhat annoy you. In the Men’s Naked Volleyball competition, Team Griffon completely dominates, with both the Roman and Rasalhaguian men looking, you have to say it, pale and weak in comparison. You are quite sure that anybody interested in the male anatomy is truly enjoying themselves. The Women’s competition is a bit of a surprise though. The Team Rasalhague women are incredible, utterly dominating the competition both in appearance and skill. Team Griffon isn’t bad, in either category, but even you can’t help but feel a twinge. Damn it. Thou shalt not covet….
The Men’s soccer matches are… interesting. Early on the entire NRI team gets disqualified after they got into a massive fight with the refs and each other, evidently the players were from clubs that hated each other and somebody said something that exploded into a two hour donnybrook that so thoroughly disrupted the tournament that officials simply DQed the entire team. The Griffon men won the ensuing single match that was played 3 to 2. The Women’s match had far less in the way of fighting, and quite honestly put you to sleep. The Rasalhaguians finally won on penalty kicks after the most boring two hours of your life that you’ll never get back.
The two best pitchers for the NRI in the Baseball tournament are expelled after beaning multiple batters, the NRI manager is also ejected, and when the local fans go somewhat berserk the entire NRI team is made to forfeit the tournament. As a result Team Griffon wins by virtue of having defeated the Rasalhaguians in their game earlier in the day. In Softball the Romans redeem themselves with a very high scoring game that went fifteen overtimes before they walked off in a 24 to 23 win over Team Griffon.
And then it was BUDGET TIME! Say it together! BUDGET TIME!
You hate budget time. It’s long, boring meetings. But it gets your mind off of your wife, so that’s good.
General Stewart is up first. “Your Majesty, we are in decent shape in terms of strategic materials production, but more is always better than less. We especially need to continue to expand our mech and ASF production capacity along with dropship and warship production. On that note, we have transferred most of the Cadre units to front line status, apart from those using training mechs. This has allowed us to nearly fully recover our losses, but we’ll be wanting to rebuild the Cadre units over time.”
General Jenkins is up next, glances at you, and out comes the sly grin. He’s BACK. “OK, boss, here’s the deal. The training academies are howling and moaning and peeing their panties, but we took away their conventional assets and turned ‘em into front line units for the moment. Then they started crying some more, and shockingly they actually had a point, so we’ve put together some proposals for dedicated training units for them. They’re still crying about losing so many armored cavalry units, but they were mostly being used as a different set of garrison forces for those worlds with Academies on them. Going forward, the Academies will have purely training assets. Now, boss, I know how much you love powerpoints…” he grins wickedly and you try, and fail, to glare him into submission. “So, as I am an evil and terrible person, I’m not using any. Please try and contain your disappointment.” An unwitting ripple of laughter fills the conference room at that. “Using tools that even us Mechwarriors can understand…” he pulls out a set of honest-to-god crayons and a large flip board of paper. You can’t help it. You start laughing.
- Heavy/Assault Mechs (6 factories)
- 6 Standard Mech Regiments
- Assigned to the 10th, 11th, and 12th Assault Regiments as well as the 10th, 11th, and 12th RCT
- Medium Mechs (11 factories)
- 8 Light Horse Regiments
- Assigned to the 8th, 9th, 19th, and 20th Cavalry Regiments
- 3 Light Training Regiments
- Replacement training brigade
- LAM (2 factories)
- Assigned to the 7th and 8th Rapid Reaction Brigade
- Conventional Vehicles (19 regiments worth)
- 4 Rapid Response Regiments
- Assigned to the 7th and 8th Rapid Reaction Brigade
- 3 Armored Regiments
- Assigned to the 10th, 11th, and 12th RCT
- 10 Mechanized Regiments
- Assigned to the 34th, 35th, 36th, 37th and 38th Infantry Brigades
- 2 Mechanized Training Regiments
- Replacement training assets
General Romanov is up next. “How do I follow that, Your Majesty.” She says that with a smile, easing any sting. “We have a number of
Oasis II and
Silver Towers coming online this year, plus however many
White Towers we decide to build. In addition we need to provide an aerial garrison for Okusawa. The baseline is 12 wings total of birds that we’ll need as a minimal baseline. Each
White Tower that we build will require one more.” Unlike General Jenkins she does have a slide showing the procurement request.
- 8 Fighter Wings
- 2 Planetary Defense Wings
- +1 Fighter Wing for each White Towerbuilt, there are 20 free assembly lines
- For the purposes of PPG-001 estimates, we are assuming 4 White Towers will be built, 2 for Okusawa and 2 for New Castor.
Thanh is back for the Navy, still on crutches but mobile enough for this. “Your Majesty, our review boards are finalizing their work for future considerations, but they aren’t quite done yet. Early indications are that, at least until we can build more optimized light cruisers, large numbers of destroyers will be the most effective answer to the Black Steel. Unless we are willing to sustain atrocious casualties among the [i[Dagger[/i]s, the old mix of
Dart and
Dagger is untenable. If we did want to go the jeune ecole route, then we’d need at least 20
Daggers per
Dart leader. And we couldn’t spread them out, they’d need to stay concentrated, which would increase the required numbers exponentially.”
She pauses, frowning. “For now, we would like to avoid that, so we are recommending laying down 18
Fletcher class alongside 2 more
Wolverine class training vessels. For the rest…” she gestures to the display, which switches to showing a chart for naval procurement. “We need more transport capacity, the quartermaster’s corp is tearing their collective hair out and we, quite honestly, ran the entire operation far too close to the edge in regards to our logistics. So we are focusing on that for standard dropships, while building a large tranche of
Majestics to anchor system defense flotillas.”
- Standard Dropships (64 slips)
- Large Dropships (38 slips)
- Jumpships
- Warships
- 18 Fletcher-class
- 2 Wolverine-class
- PPG-001
- Estimated to be able to build 228 of them, limited by Ferro-Aluminium production
General Stewart comes back up “Your Majesty, in addition we are in a position to impose an occupational authority on Okusawa. As the previous rulers are all dead and there is no functional civilian government left in the system, we’d need to make it, at least for now, a military government until a new civilian one can be formed.”
Bridget is looking somewhat closer to normal, but is still a pale reminder of what everybody has lost. She’s started talking about retiring in a few years to spend time with her remaining family, but hasn’t made a decision yet in that regard.
“Your Majesty, we are ready to build anything required of us, however we do recommend getting started on fixing the horrific mess that the Dracs left of Okusawa’s environment. The place is a poisonous hell hole at the moment and the infrastructure is shattered. For now, with all of our DoME teams committed, we can’t do anything truly useful about the root problems, but we can at least get started on the problems. We do have one piece of bad news, however.” She grimaces, then meets your eyes. “We won’t be able to expand our capital shipyards this year, Your Majesty. The suppliers for many of the structural elements needed for them are currently overwhelmed with civilian sector orders now that the civilian dropship yards are back in business. On the plus side this is resulting in some nice revenues, on the minus side the materials for the new yards are simply not available. This will also affect expanding the orbital yards and refit facilities. We can set up some commercial stations in New Eden and Okusawa, if you want.”
Isoroku is off at the Olympics with Bastet, leaving his deputy to handle things in his absence. “Your Majesty, the Foreign Ministry has nothing specific for you this year, what with the Olympics.”
Lien is up next, looking far more comfortable by now in the big seat for your political advisor. “Your Majesty, we stand ready to support the establishment of a system government in New Castor if desired. We also are ready to start work on developing a framework for the future civil government on Okusawa, although that will be challenging given the situation on the planet.”
Dr Bryant is up next. “Your Majesty, I have a single R&D team available. We also are starting to see issues with food production being outpaced by population growth, especially in the Griffon system. As such, we strongly recommend investigating improving our agricultural techniques for now, and in the future as New Eden develops it should be possible to begin shipping basic staple foods from there throughout the Empire, reducing the local burden.”
General Messerschmidt is still looking distinctly grumpy. “Your Majesty, I accept full responsibility for the failures that allowed anything, even some spare parts, to fall into the hands of our allies. Beyond that we really have nothing to report, ongoing operations in the Nya Kopenhamn system are proceeding as expected, we’ve had no real issues with COINTEL, and none of our agents are reporting anything troubling beyond one minor thing out of the NRI.”
Minor… you feel a shiver of fear.
“It seems, Your Majesty, that the cult devoted to you as the living avatar of Jupiter Invictus and, of course, of Thanh as Minerva Volatalis, has reached sufficient size that they have successfully petitioned to have a parade and consecration in your honor made part of the closing ceremonies of the Olympics this year. I understand that it is expected to be quite spectacular.”
He’s smirking at you. Everybody but Thanh is smirking at you. And she’s just grinning like a lunatic at you.
You barely hear Martina speaking through the pounding in your ears as she explains about the Justice Ministry starting work on implementing the Griffon legal code and system on Okusawa being something her people are ready to do. Now about implementing a legal system on New Castor. You are too busy staring into space in horror at terrible visions of just how over the top this ‘parade and consecration’ is going to be, and just how people here will react to it.
