Turn 90 - May The Good Lord Be With You
You decide to take the bull by the horns and inform Kilburrough and the Bourbons about your decision to limit sales of the
Lancers to the NRI and NRR.
The Bourbon ambassador is outrageously outraged, although you can tell his heart’s really not in it. According to him this is proof of Griffon perfidy, that you obviously have fell designs against his nation, and as a consequence yadda yadda yadda. You catch him consulting a notecard a few times for the rant, and if you are any judge he’s finding it almost amusing, as if he’s putting on a show for the cameras but really couldn’t care less.
The Kilburrough representative is rather cheerful about the whole thing, and promptly turns around and makes an open offer on the marketplace for 150 unarmed ‘racing’ dropships to form the core of a new Dropship Racing League that somebody in Kilburrough has decided would be a wonderful idea with absolutely no down sides.
You find out that had been the plan all along for the genetic tinkerers, they were bored, and wanted a new thrill, dropship racing seemed thrilling, so they were going to buy the
Lancers, disarm them, soup them up even further, and race them around at absurdly unsafe speeds.
A few days later you get your initial report from within the Bourbon empire. They still don’t have anything definite on the incident in Nouveau Breton. However the Marine Royale has placed orders for a massive number of combat dropships from every yard in their empire. The new Duc de Nouvelle Picardie is back in favor in court, after donating elements of the Ducal fleet to the Marine Royale, and evidently wished to replace those units with the
Lancers, and is quite butt hurt about things not happening as he decreed.
You also get economic numbers which make very little sense to you, if you go by these numbers the Bourbons are far wealthier on a per-planet and even overall basis than you are, yet nothing seems to balance quite right. Your economists are going over the data, but suspect that it might be a case of everybody lying to everybody else and nobody really caring about reality over there. And you do have the ‘official’ numbers, so who knows.
The scientists studying the odd HPG interference suspect that it has a discrete source, probably fairly close to your northern frontiers. They haven’t narrowed it down any further than that, though.
Pregnancy is not in your top ten list of things to enjoy, childbirth doesn’t make the top ten million. But holding your newborn baby in your arms for the first time… that tops the list. Tamara Thanh Marie Griffith, crown princess of the Griffon Empire, welcome to the world little one.
Congratulations come pouring in, even from the Bourbons. You manage not to giggle when you see the personal gift from the young Duc de Nouveau Paris though… a truly over the top mobile to hang over the crib, probably worth more than a full up warship considering the volume of gems and jewels encrusting it, and with the little note sincerely congratulating you and Markus that is far more endearing. The young Duc has finally been forced to marry himself for reasons of state. Reading between the lines, you have a funny feeling that he and his bride do not have a single thing in common and he’s not well pleased to be forced to marry her and suspects she feels the same way. But then again, she’s the eldest daughter of the Duc de Nouvelle Picardie… and only barely legal age in Griffon space.
General Messerschmidt comes sauntering into your office, twinging every single alarm bell in your head, before cheerfully tossing a holo on your desk.
Showing a nude statue of yourself wearing a neurohelmet and a gun belt. It’s in the same sort of heroic nude bronze style as you’d seen the NRI use before, and before he can even open his mouth you inquire if this means that they’ve decided to come up with a cult for you as well, and ask if he had anything to do with it.
Yes it is, and no he swears he had nothing to do with it. Evidently the same cult that worshiped your grandfather has decided that you are obviously an avatar of Pallas Athena and have added you to their cultus.
Lovely.
An organized crime ring on New Port Royal had gone beyond the locally agreed upon limits to such things and has been cracked down on hard by the local authorities with assistance from the Imperial Grifftiger Mounted Police. Unfortunately the criminals decided to shoot it out, as a consequence there are a dozen dead criminals and one mildly irritated tiger.
Apparently pistol bullets itch.
A traveling animal show from the Calliope system is in Griffsport, centered around a mated pair of Rexes and their offspring. Your cousins all want to go, so you decide to make a day of it. The mated pair are very impressive, and it is pretty obvious that if they didn’t want to be there that they wouldn’t be, but they seem to enjoy showing off in front of the audience. The pack of pet raptors from the Palace, on the other hand, seem to rather dislike the pack of raptors that are with the show, or at least they decided to be extra competitive, resulting in impromptu raptor races around the show grounds that were not on the schedule, not as planned, and result in many raptors being dunked in the palace fountains by amused Grifftigers who did not appreciate their tails being ‘nibble’ targets as much as the raptors probably thought they would.
You come home that evening to find your own personal pet raptor curled up in the crib crooning a raptor lullaby to your daughter. Sekhmet is in the room as well, keeping an eye on things, and you make it a point to take pictures of the scene.
There’s a tragedy in the news from Nowy Wroclaw, as a junior racing league event erupted in chaos following a horrific accident. Five cars came together in a massive wreck that nearly brought down the safety netting protecting the audience. Despite all of the safety equipment, a freak one in a trillion event leads to the death of one of the young racers. A full safety review has already concluded, there were no deficiencies, in over a hundred million simulation runs they were never able to fully replicate the accident, a safety bolt had sheared off as designed, but the head of the restraining pin had shot off at a bizarre angle, striking a racer right through the less than 2 millimeter gap between the helmet and HANS device, ricocheting off the HANS device and severing the poor boys spine.
Despite the tragedy it appears that the locals have accepted the investigation's results, racing continues to be just as popular as before.
Late in February you receive a report of a small skirmish involving a Black Steel
Vincent in the New Eden system. The enemy corvette was destroyed by the local garrison with minor losses. Reinforcements have been dispatched, but no follow on attacks have occurred as of yet.
The population boom that had been hitting New Pollux so hard has spread to Edelsteine as people flock to the extremely wealthy systems in hopes of cashing in. Luckily the increased construction of commercial dropships from last year continues to this year, with the newly hired inspectors receiving an enormous amount of on-the-job training. There have been minor issues, although thankfully so far nobody has been killed, due to the inexperience of the inspectors, but the curve has already flattened out and reversed as the newbies gain experience. The merchant marine academies are reporting that they are starting to get overwhelmed, however, simply providing crews for all of the new construction. Pay rates have risen, and all of their classes are full, the bottleneck isn’t the pay or benefits, it’s simply having enough training capacity.
The industry association that represents the merchant marine academies has requested Imperial assistance. There are twelve major academies, each with at least two training vessels, and the association is asking for Imperial funds to double the number of training vessels in service from 30 to 60.
| [] | Just Do It |
- Costs $12,658,632
- +1 Economic Event
- -1 Approval Change
|
| [] | Don’t Do It |
- Subtracts .1 from trade efficiency modifier
- +1 Politics
|
