Quest Deep Periphery Quest (Battletech Sandbox Empire Builder)

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
That's done naturally, the refits will be over the next several years with each ship cycling through the refit yard during normal maintenance periods. However for ease of bookkeeping on my end (and for my sanity) I'm handwaving that part.
 

Yacovo

Occasionally spouting nonsense
That's done naturally, the refits will be over the next several years with each ship cycling through the refit yard during normal maintenance periods. However for ease of bookkeeping on my end (and for my sanity) I'm handwaving that part.
Gasp! How dare you not individually track the name, location, condition, crew numbers, refit progress, number of rations, each damaged system, each crew member’s zodiac sign, time until next shore leave, number of medical beds, and amount of toilet paper in each individual ship.

Just kidding, you keep track of whatever you feel you can handle. The amount of detail and stuff to keep track of in this quest always impresses me. Thanks for updating this so frequently.
 
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Jarow

Well-known member
[X] Both

We've always been quality-focused, no reason not to continue that by upgrading our current ships
 
Turn 79 - I'm A Killer

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
Turn 79 - I’m a Killer

It’s amazing just how dedicated the people who bought and the company behind those damn Eggs are about their worthless pieces of excrement and, more relevantly, annoying everybody else in the Empire.

They actually organized a protest ‘ride’ in Griffsport, with thousands of them clogging up the entirety of downtown, blocking all of the major freeways in the city, and generally making themselves an incredible nuisance. They try to get regular cyclists involved, although that meets with almost no success since actual cyclists are well aware that immense accommodations have already been made for them. Every single road with more than 1 lane total has dedicated, segregated, bicycle lanes dedicated solely to bicycle use. On the busiest roads there are dedicated bicycle viaducts that have been carefully designed and implemented to maximize convenience for cyclists without impinging on regular vehicular traffic.

The Eggs are, simply put, too large to fit in those lanes without disrupting other cyclists, being as wide as a regular vehicle and thus completely filling the entire cycle lane leaving absolutely no space for anybody else to use it. And once the Egg enthusiasts realize that the regular cyclists want nothing to do with them the bastards start doing just that.

At least this is a sorting mechanism for the sort of self-centered jackass that you want far away from the levers of power.

A couple comm calls and the Imperial Guard is deployed, the tanks towing trailers with what can only be described as giant foam egg crates to deposit the damn things in, and the mech jockeys and power armor troops with orders to pick up the damn Eggs and dump them in the crates. It takes several hours, but the very low performance of the Eggs works against them, and eventually you have just over a hundred such crates fully packed with a dozen Eggs and their riders each.

And since you are feeling very annoyed, the general populace of the city is very angry, and you are fed up with these jackasses, you have all the crates brought to the big park in front of the palace, where large foam crash mats are laid out. The mechs then pick up each Egg, shake them until the rider falls out on the crash mat, where said rider is promptly arrested, then ‘break the egg’ and toss it into some giant dumpsters. The riders, indignant as they are, are then informed quite calmly that the bill for the disposal of their Eggs will be assessed to them as fines and that failure to pay them would be treated as a criminal offense. Said bill will include the cost of cleanup, the wages of all the members of law enforcement and the Imperial Guard who had to deal with this bullshit in the first place, maintenance cost for all of their equipment, oh, and those wages? Overtime.

You then dispatch the Special Branch and the IGMP and have all of the executives of the company that made the damn things arrested and charged with 30+ counts of negligent homicide, just like you had threatened when they first started whining about your ban of their product.

The saga of the Solo Egg is finally over, as far as you are aware not a single one of the pesky things remains. Good riddance.

Your various agents report that the Rasalhaguians have begun low-rate initial production of the various ASF designs that you provided them as part of the tech transfer agreement. In addition repairs are underway on the Tramp line in New Rasalhague itself, as well as conversion of several dropship lines to begin production of the Saginaw class.

You have reports that the prison settlements on GX-O26 have been completed and that the system is now dubbed ‘New Doggerland’. The reports are that the approximately 110,000 prisoners sentenced there for their involvement in the chaos that you’d helped put down have been dropped off with a months supply of rations and water and absolutely nothing else, no buildings, no guards, no tools, no buildings, not even any clothes. The rations are wrapped in flimsy plastic, the water is in similarly flimsy bottles, and the idea is that the prisoners are dropped off. Once a month a dropship will drop a pallet with the next month's supplies, and otherwise the prisoners are left completely to their own devices. They’ve built some orbital defenses, but otherwise they are leaving the system alone.

Your spies have also informed you that the NRR is expanding again, this time to GX-P26, a world with, reportedly, the most variable and severe weather so far encountered. The axial tilt is almost 50 degrees, resulting in enormous variation through the year. There is also a significant and irregular planetary wobble, swinging the axis of rotation around to a far greater extent than can be explained by anything other than a recent massive impact, and to be fair there is a massive crater in the northern hemisphere and a great deal of orbiting ejecta forming a ring around the wobbling planet.

It is, however, rather habitable, and in fact boasts some rather pretty birds native to the system. The weather is awful, but the cheerful birds seem quite capable of simply migrating ahead of the major swings in temperature and such.

It is reported that the system has been named New Lapland by the NRR and full colonization is already underway.

Your ambassador to the NRI is invited to the keel laying ceremony for the first Corvus class corvette and is even asked to drive the ceremonial first ‘bolt’ that commences the construction. The bracket that he bolted will, eventually, be used to hold the commissioning plaque on the bridge of the ship.

The NRI is not expanding, rather development continues on Nova Jupitereum and Nova Atheneum, both of which are expanding quite quickly. The downside of this is, of course, that both planets seem to be quite devoted to your ‘cult’, and Thanh is having far too much fun answering fan mail and actually encouraging them. She has even posed for statues and is constantly pestering you to do the same. Then cheerfully informs you that she’s sent them photos of you in ‘full contemplation of navel’ mode and that is working well enough for now.

In vengeance for this perfidy you make sure to secretly provide all of her grandkids with massive amounts of candy right before they get dropped off by your nieces and nephews to spend the weekend with her. As well as making a few arrangements with Grandpa Lee’s favorite lingerie shop for Sweet 16 presents for the oldest when they reach that age. You look forward to the reactions.

Oh, and you also toss her out the Tyler Lee Memorial Window Of Defenestration. But that’s Tuesday in your family.

Domestically, you feel a pang of dread as you open a report from New Pollux, worried that Pollux Man was about to strike once more. Instead it is actually very good news, the original surveys had actually understated how easy to access some of the valuable ores and minerals actually were, plus the system government has been very effective in building up a transport infrastructure, helped by the massive rivers that seem to be everywhere important on the planet. Moreover the discovery of a spectacular series of cave complexes in the mountains has provided the planet with a superb tourist attraction that they are quickly capitalizing on.

There’s some bad news from Nowy Wroclaw however, a commercial freight dropship suffered a serious engine failure at low altitude and the pilot was unable to correct in time, the entire crew died in the crash and, catastrophically, the crash was right into a major residential neighborhood right around dinner time. Emergency services are still assessing the aftermath of the situation and investigators are on the scene. Preliminary reports indicate a mechanical failure with no sign of crew error, maintenance issues, or design faults. If the dropship had been at higher altitude or still in orbit backup systems would have had time to engage and correct the situation, and the early analysis of the flight data recorder shows that the pilot almost pulled off a miracle recovery, if he’d had just a hundred feet more of altitude to work with he might have been able to convert the fiery crash into a crash landing in an empty park, which he was aiming for but didn’t quite make.

New Eden is having a bumper crop this year across the board, and has introduced the ancient Blue Java variety of bananas to the market. Supposedly they taste like vanilla ice cream, so you make a point of having some shipped to the palace and find that they A) are indeed blue and B) indeed tastes like vanilla bean ice cream.

Your granddaughter really wants to see the dinosaurs on Calliope III, not the small ones in the zoos, or the raptors who are rapidly becoming the third most popular pet, behind cats and dogs, in the Empire, or even the roly-poly lystrosaurus. You do your best to dissuade her, but eventually she and your wife wear you down. You do ensure that she has a heavy escort, consisting of no less than six Fletcher class warships.

Thankfully you are being unreasonably paranoid, nothing happens beyond her giving you a heart attack when she sends you video of her getting a ride on the back of a Rex. For giant apex predators, the Rexes seem quite friendly. You are guessing because they see humans as too small to eat and too useful to attack, after all, we make the best back scratching posts and our mechs are much in demand for belly rubs and scritchies.

Speaking of Calliope III, it seems that the Allosaurus analogues are finally learning the concept of ‘fear’, as the packs of those ultra-aggressive predators are starting to avoid areas where humans are operating. You really are in awe of just how many megatons of inferno gel it took to teach them that lesson. Even Dracs would learn faster.

And that completely subtle transition brings you to the situation on Okusawa. The slow rebuilding of the cities has revealed a number of caches and facilities used by the resistance, slowly weakening their grip on the population. Intelligence analysts estimate that the current level of resistance will only be sustainable by the locals for at most three more years, but that it is highly likely that the resistance will transition to a more low-level intensity before then.

With the recent introduction of Lamellar Ferro-Carbide you have a bit of a quandary, the new armor compound is significantly more capable than plain Ferro-Carbide, enough so that your planners want to upgrade all existing platforms to using it if possible, but you only have the single foundry making it. Plus, if you did that… wait, reading the reports, apparently a Lamellar Ferro-Carbide foundry is perfectly capable of making regular Ferro-Carbide if needed, as all the Lamellar does is add an additional layer to the armor matrix. So upgrading your existing foundries should be possible, if somewhat expensive.
[]Upgrade all Ferro-Carbide orbital foundries to Lamellar Ferro-Carbide
  • Costs $2,000,000,000
  • Converts all existing Ferro-Carbide foundries to Lamellar Ferro-Carbide
    • Total Lamellar Ferro-Carbide production of 91
[]Don’t
  • No effect
 

Artifex

Well-known member
[x] Upgrade all Ferro-Carbide orbital foundries to Lamellar Ferro-Carbide

Considering we have 12 10 Billion Creds sitting in the bank, this is a no-brainer.
 

Yacovo

Occasionally spouting nonsense
[x] Upgrade all Ferro-Carbide orbital foundries to Lamellar Ferro-Carbide

I think Tyler would be proud to have his memorial be a defenestration window.
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
And since you are feeling very annoyed, the general populace of the city is very angry, and you are fed up with these jackasses, you have all the crates brought to the big park in front of the palace, where large foam crash mats are laid out. The mechs then pick up each Egg, shake them until the rider falls out on the crash mat, where said rider is promptly arrested, then ‘break the egg’ and toss it into some giant dumpsters. The riders, indignant as they are, are then informed quite calmly that the bill for the disposal of their Eggs will be assessed to them as fines and that failure to pay them would be treated as a criminal offense. Said bill will include the cost of cleanup, the wages of all the members of law enforcement and the Imperial Guard who had to deal with this bullshit in the first place, maintenance cost for all of their equipment, oh, and those wages? Overtime.

Needless to say, the political cartoonists have an absolute field day with, "The Emperor's Grand Omelette", one way or another.

You then dispatch the Special Branch and the IGMP and have all of the executives of the company that made the damn things arrested and charged with 30+ counts of negligent homicide, just like you had threatened when they first started whining about your ban of their product.

Needless to say, the company executives put up the finest defense money can buy, which drags out the case by every possible motion being made and appealed and counter-motioned and counter-appealed. . .

The saga of the Solo Egg is finally over, as far as you are aware not a single one of the pesky things remains. Good riddance.

Attempts by individual Solo Egg owners (or ex-owners) to sue the Crown are categorically unsuccessful. Quite simply, the Crown's executive authority explicitly isn't limited by ex post facto as long as it is not imposing criminal punishment, and the courts simply declare that they have no standing to challenge the Emperor on such matters.
 

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