Turn 77 - Let Me Sail
Your surviving family is back together, and you couldn’t be more relieved. Not much of anything gets done in the palace for a few days, you are in no shape for it and would much rather spend time with your wife and daughters.
Unfortunately you can’t take more than a few days for your family, much as you wish you could take more. Heavy lies the crown and all that, and there is work that needs to be done. Your wife does put her foot down on your schedule, though, insisting that you spend a few hours each day with family.
Insurgent activity on Okusawa is a continuing bleeding sore. Those locals who might have been inclined to assist you are living in terror of their neighbors who most certainly are not, with a few cases of locals who were insufficiently obvious about their opposition to you being murdered with nobody seeing anything at all. Videos of little kids being coached in throwing rocks at your troops and security forces, scattered roadside bombs targeting your patrols, mortar and rocket attacks on your bases. It makes the pacification of Nowa Warszawa seem like a pleasant stroll in the park.
You are very proud of your men there, who are sticking to the ROE faithfully despite the harsh conditions. Looking at the high level picture, there is a definite downward trend line in the attacks, but it is gradual and interrupted by occasional spikes. But at the ground level all they are seeing is unrelenting hostility, their buddies and themselves constantly being attacked, having no real safe space except in orbit… and they are still following the ROE and not striking back indiscriminately.
Your analysts are convinced that with time and continued restraint the insurgency will collapse, as your continued refusal to engage in the sort of repression that the Dragon would have undermines the very premise of the opposition. They point out that the violent actions are in a slow decline, as non-violent protests and rallies are on the uptick. Your forces restraint with the latter is encouraging their growth, and people who are busy shouting slogans and making signs aren’t spending their time making bombs. As they realize that they can shout, scream, march around, and make nuisances of themselves without getting hauled off to be tortured to death, then that will start to cast into doubt the very reasons they are so riled up. If the Dragon lied to them about this, what
else did he lie to them about.
You receive a number of reports from the shipyards where the
Fletcher class vessels are under construction. The managers are all reporting just how difficult the construction of these ships is, thanks to the complexity of the compact cores combined with the ten drop collars and HPG system. They hope to still finish the 30 ships that are on order on time, but they are warning that they do not think the smaller yards are suitable for sustained production of the type. As it is they are going to strongly recommend that the ship’s get run through the Refit yards immediately to double check for any issues, because they are unwilling to guarantee that there won’t be any.
As a consequence, future
Fletcher orders will be handled by the small warship yards, not the more compact escort/jumpship yards. However, the
Dagger, while analysts still believe it to be an effective small warship in its own right, is rather expensive for the capability it provides, mostly due to the 5 drop collars and extensive avionics.
A new design, ironically not from Majeure Electrique but rather straight from the Imperial Griffon Naval Yard, has been developed. Called the
Stiletto, this vessel is larger than the
Dagger while being smaller than the
Fletcher at 390,000 tons. It only has a single drop collar, and is optimized for long range combat with a brace of 8 Heavy Naval PPCs in the nose. It is actually cheaper to build than the
Dagger.
The smaller corvette is still more suitable as a true ‘escort’ for larger vessels, given that it can carry five times as many parasites into the field and is a tougher vessel in and of itself, but the
Stiletto has a substantial advantage in terms of long range capital firepower.
There is a brewing scandal involving the colonization of New Castor. Somebody managed to gain access to the servers used by the Department of Colonial Affairs and subtly altered the address link for applications for the initial property purchase allotment by which prospective colonists would purchase plots of land or equivalent colonization rights on the new world. People who made their purchases through third party applications, or directly to the URL, were fine, as they went through the normal process and all was well. Those who made their purchase through the official site? Well, their money was going to organized crime, the deeds for their allotments were forgeries that were all but identical to the official deeds, and those people showed up on New Castor only to discover that they’d been cheated out of tens of thousands of credits, in some cases over a million credits were lost.
The lack of an HPG on New Castor allowed this scam to go undetected for an unfortunately extended period, and now over a million people have been victimized by it directly, and more indirectly. The system government is handling the situation on that end, although they are having to open up new allotments well ahead of schedule. The problem is that in most cases the victims of this scam have spent their life savings and are unable to simply purchase another allotment or pay for transport off of New Castor.
Law enforcement is hunting the criminals behind the scam, so far with limited results. The servers have been properly secured and internal screening is under way to hunt down anybody who might have helped the criminals pull this off. But there is still the problem of what to do with the victims.
| [] | Action | Argument For | Argument Against | Effect |
| [] | Allow the victims of the scam to trade the worthless deeds for deeds in the second-tier allotments | This was an extremely sophisticated scheme with inside help. Every step of the process of the scam looked completely legitimate to anybody looking at it from the outside. We owe it to these people not to ruin their lives over something outside their control.
The second-tier allotments were scheduled to be opened this year anyways, by giving them to the victims we ensure that we don’t create an instant underclass problem on New Castor while treating the victims generously. | Yes, these people were scammed. Yes, this was an inside job. Yes it is bad. It’s still not our responsibility. Liability rests solely on the scammers and as soon as law enforcement finds them the victims are welcome to recover their funds via civil actions.
The proposal on the table effectively offloads the restitution to the victims from the criminals to the state, and thus in a way penalizes the innocent rather than the guilty. And while it is quite likely that the criminals in question will be able to evade paying restitution on grounds of being indigent, that is not the state’s problem. |
- -5% GDP growth on New Castor for the next 3 turns
- -1% Interest Rate
- +2 Politics
- +2 Approval Change
- -1 Economic Event
- Prevent certain events
|
| [] | Caveat Emptor, it sucks, and they may have done what due diligence they could, but still the liability is on the criminals, not the government. | Being victimized by a scam sucks, we get it. But the responsible party is the scammer, not the state. Any recovery of assets should be from the scammers, not from the state.
Sure, people may not like it, they may think we are being hard-hearted towards the victims, but while they may say they did due diligence, if they’d actually visited the Department of Colonial Affairs offices in person they would have found out that they were being scammed before it was too late. | Requiring physical visits to a government office as a minimum for ‘due diligence’ is madness. The reason that they trusted the scam was because the scam had inside assistance making what they trusted to be their government be something else.
It is on us not detecting the alterations to the site. It is on us not realizing that we had corrupt employees in the ministry helping the scammers. It is on us that they people were duped by what appeared to be us. |
- -2 Politics
- -2 Approval Change
- -1 Approval
- +1 Economic Event
|
