Turn 20 Fluff
The hits keep coming in. The economy is in recession, industrial output is dropping, there is growing unrest and turmoil. Everything that had been going so incredibly well had seemingly hit a wall.
You were spending long hours in the office grappling with these issues. In many ways you are surprised it took this long for things to derail, the economy had been growing like a dropship accelerating to orbit, and while for a dropship that was the expected behavior, economies tend not to do that.
In a sense this is a needed correction, a popping of an unsustainable bubble, but you are quite bitterly aware that some of your own decisions contributed to just how bad the recession actually is.
You do reject General Potter’s offer to resign, scapegoats might be ‘easy’ and cathartic in the short term, but in the long term it was a horrid precedent to set.
Instead you add instructions to the working group already revising training and organizational questions for the military to look into also restructuring high command in order to prevent single point source failures in the future.
There is some good news amongst all the turmoil. The mines on Capricorn ran into a previously unsuspected iridium deposit that has proven to be commercially valuable. It gave the economy a small shot in the arm that is helping your budget numbers for the year, but in and of itself it does little to nothing to alleviate the structural issues plaguing the economy.
Your kids have picked up the grim mood, but bless them they are responding like champions. Jeremy is spending more time with his younger siblings outside of school in an obvious effort to reduce your own workload.
In lighter moments you attend a number of your kids races in the Pee-Wee and Junior Leagues. Jeremy is in solid contention for the championship in the middle division of the Junior League, the twins are utterly dominating the lowest division with the usual contest in any given race being between the two of them, and Quan is the uncontested mistress of the Pee Wee Unlimited League.
She has yet to lose a race, she has yet to even spin out once except in practice runs when she does it deliberately. In the exact same hardware Jeremy would use for a 51.28 second lap time she consistently turns in sub 50 second times, and other teams with ludicrously more expensive hardware still lose to her.
You’ve already had recruiters from the top Junior League and Pro Teams calling you asking your permission to recruit your daughter as a development racer for the pro leagues.
You spoke about it with Quan, and are torn between immense pride and a desire to throttle your husband. She doesn’t want to be a professional hovercraft racer, she wants to be a fighter pilot like daddy.
Then you want to hug your husband when Quan grumps that daddy won’t let her start learning how to fly until she’s at least 13 and only if you agree to allow it.
Jeremy doesn’t seem to mind at all that his records in the Pee-Wee League are falling left and right to his sister. When you asked him about it all he said was he always knew that Quan would ‘do right by the old sled’.
Of course, he’s also spending much of his spare time with Alita, and the two are so cute together as they tinker on each other's hovercraft. You have caught (and photographed for posterity) them engaging in such lewd behaviors as hand-holding and sitting next to each other on a bench with (gasp gasp) their shoulders almost touching.
Willis, the man, doesn’t seem to quite get why you are so moved to tears at the sight of your little man growing up.
You are very glad for the regulations you’d put in place for the commercial aerospace industry when there are a few close-calls that could have been outright disasters if it hadn’t been for the strict enforcement of safety standards you’d had written into the regulations.
The most significant had been when a passenger shuttle in Griffsport spectacularly screwed up by the numbers and almost landed on an active taxiway, clearing waiting commercial traffic by mere meters.
If it hadn’t been for the automated collision detection and avoidance equipment mandated for commercial aerospace flight you’d have had a massive fireball consuming four fully loaded passenger shuttles. The system picked up the incredibly unsafe condition and forced a go-around.
As it was, you merely had a pilot-in-command who’d been grounded, prosecuted, convicted, and jailed for being chemically incapacitated in the cockpit due to a cocktail of drugs in his system, and an aerospace transport company facing massive fines for violating multiple workplace safety regulations. Not to mention the enormous class-action lawsuit filed by passengers on the flight.
You’d considered pushing through legislation to tighten up regulation further on the aerospace companies, but Parliament beat you to it with a rather well thought out bill that was more comprehensive than what you had planned.
Parliament's plan would place firm caps on non-ticket ‘fees’ for things like luggage, food, and other amenities while also reducing excise taxes on tickets. Moreover it created an incentive plan whereby aerospace transport firms could earn tax rebates for meeting certain goals in terms of staffing hours, maintenance levels, on-time performance, safety metrics, and customer satisfaction metrics. Finally it would create a new agency under the Ministry of the Interior to more tightly regulate flight routes and spaceport operations which would have the authority to shut down and break up companies that failed to meet certain standards in a range of safety and performance metrics.
[] Support the plan. A good idea is a good idea, no matter where it came from (that it came from your supporters in Parliament is a definite plus in this regard). Prevent certain events from happening, raise Commons and Lords support by 5, raise Commons, Lords influence by 1, add 5000 to Interior upkeep to fund the massively expanded inspection and licensing regime, however consumer confidence in the industry increases Economy Rating by 5.
[] Reject the plan. Parliament is made up of fools only barely avoiding relegation to the Department of Periphery Studies. Come up with something of your own. Reduces support in Commons and Lords by 10, reduces Commons and Lords influence by 1, increases Crown influence by 1.
And then the alarms wail.
You find yourself being bustled aboard one of the subs along with your family while the entire AeroForce soars into the sky.
The force composition strikes you as… odd… and then horrifying. A single aerodyne dropship tentatively identified as identical to one of the ASF launching dropships from the original raid that Dagny had stated was a Leopard-CV. And only 4 ASFs, all ‘Sabres’ according to the identification chart provided by the Magistracy agent who was working for you.
But their flight profiles were completely wrong.
They were clearly coming in from a pirate point of some sort, but were making absolutely no attempt to decelerate even into orbital insertion, instead they were continuing to accelerate.
The horror comes when their courses are plotted out… intersecting on Griffsport itself. It’s a kinetic impact strike, not a mere ‘raid’ or reconnaissance. This is a pure terror attack.
With the enormous velocities that the enemy had already built up your defending birds only have an incredibly brief window to intercept. And they perform wonderfully.
The Gyrfalcon’s chop the Sabres out of the sky with merciless precision, while the Rocs hunt their natural prey in the incoming dropship. A coordinated series of AC/20 strikes later and the Leopard-CV is a loosely associated set of wreckage and debris.
Unfortunately, it all is still coming on incredibly fast, and while most of it burns up on reentry enough survives to cause significant issues on the ground. Luckily, 90% of the debris hits the newly completed Dropship factory line, the rest peppers the Battlemech factory.
QM Note - No Dropship or Mech production possible this turn, however no repair costs will be assessed due to the nature of the damage (it’s pretty much an extended ‘sweepers man your brooms’ situation.
