Thors_Alumni
Well-known member
[X] Sculling and Rowing
[X] Sailing
[X] Sailing
Quest Deep Periphery Quest (Battletech Sandbox Empire Builder)
- Thread starter LordSunhawk
- Start date
We should get ice hockey and bobsleding so we can reenact my 2 favorite Olympics movies
Val the Moofia Boss
Well-known member
Those being?
AlphaOmega
Well-known member
[X] Sailing
foolswriter
Well-known member
[X] Sculling and Rowing
[X] Sailing
[X] Sailing
Yacovo
Occasionally spouting nonsense
[X] Sculling and Rowing
[X] Sailing
Update from the Spreadsheet Zone.
Rationalized Law Codes buff expires on turn 99. So expect more pork or loophole in future laws proposed after that.
Champion of the Weak expires on turn 102. If not renewed, we start rolling for official corruption events and lose a reroll for negative or neutral meta rolls or dynasty luck rolls.
The Griffon system will have a Trillion ending GDP this turn.
New Castor is on track to be the next periphery system to go core in time.
[X] Sailing
Update from the Spreadsheet Zone.
Rationalized Law Codes buff expires on turn 99. So expect more pork or loophole in future laws proposed after that.
Champion of the Weak expires on turn 102. If not renewed, we start rolling for official corruption events and lose a reroll for negative or neutral meta rolls or dynasty luck rolls.
The Griffon system will have a Trillion ending GDP this turn.
New Castor is on track to be the next periphery system to go core in time.
Last edited:
[X] Sailing
EDIT: I'm all about focusing on TEAM events.
Last edited:
Joyousmadman
Well-known member
[X] Men's & Women's Ice Hockey
[X] Sailing
[X] Sailing
Winter_Wind45
Well-known member
[X] Sailing
Turn 96 - War of the Roses, Chaucer's Tales
Turn 96 - War of the Roses, Chaucer’s Tales
It takes several minutes, but it finally fully registers that this is not a joke. Your agents found the ‘rulebook’ for the Bourbon-Rouges Noir war. There are complete encyclopedias with fewer pages than this. Your entire legal code has fewer pages than this. You’d have to add the full regulatory code to the legal code to finally exceed the page length, and that’s with it all written in very small type.
Six thousand pages on the precise etiquette and rules involved in attacking areas designated as latrines? Really?
Your palm and your face are soon engaged in a loving, yet forbidden, romance.
You summon the Bourbon ambassador at this point and confront him with this, and the supercilious bastard actually looks incredibly smug.
“Once we convinced those bâtards to accept this we’ve been able to tie up their advances in utter knots, although granted we’ve still not been able to retake Nouvel Aragón from them. Until then their pure numerical advantage allowed them to eventually push us back in every engagement, causing the loss of two systems to them. Now we just keep them tied up in the rulebook, and the idiots meurtriers fall for it every time. We do have to keep the pressure up on them by constantly attacking Nouvel Aragón otherwise they’d be able to threaten Nouveau Breton.”
OK, that’s an explanation you’d not been expecting, but judging by the reports you’ve gotten it seems to be at least a viable one, even if you’re not too sure of how truthful the ambassador is being.
The Olympics are being held in Nova Roma this year, and after much debate within the organizing committee it is decided to add multiple sailing events to the next Olympics, which is scheduled to be held in Nouveau Paris. The Bourbons are rather annoying in that they spend much of the meeting trying to convince the NRI and NRR to eliminate motorsports from the Olympics, whining about how ‘uncivilized’ they are, but thankfully they stand firm with you in that regard. You do send a memo to the team leadership for your motorsports teams to be prepared for dirty tricks in the Nouveau Paris games in four years.
Closer to home there have been continued skirmishes with the Black Steel in the Raj system, so far inconclusive. Your forces have managed to destroy a number of Vincent corvettes engaged in scouting runs, but others have escaped. So far you’ve not taken any damage beyond the capabilities of the Vestal-class ships in the system to repair.
In early February a small flotilla from the Crimson Storm arrives in the Empire, informing you that they are well enough established at this time that they are interested in opening up trade with the Griffon Empire. They’re also negotiating deals with the NRR and NRI, but would like to offer you ‘Most Favored’ status in thanks for the assistance of your great-grandmother. You have no issue with this, free trade has long been a net positive to your economy and your commercial interests cannot wait to have new markets opened up for their goods.
One memo that catches your eye is from the Interior ministry and the IGMP concerning rumors coming out of the Skala system. This system is one of your poorest worlds outside of the two agriworlds, in which the typical measurements break down due to local conditions. Kaiyo is worse off, but is a younger colony and significantly smaller in population. The overall crime rate in the Skala system is roughly the same as elsewhere, but the local crime rate is skewed towards more violent crimes than elsewhere. Moreover, while the local economy has been growing rather quickly, it is from a very low starting base and almost all of the economic growth has been benefiting off-world industrial interests rather than local ones.
It’s something to keep an eye on, there’s nothing really actionable yet.
You also get some wonderful personal news. You are pregnant again, this time with twins. According to the doctors they’re identical as well, a pair of boys. You and Markus are having sons! The girls are wonderful, but it’s nice to have some boys as well on the way.
Tamara is having a grand old time at the track as she gets better at driving her little hovercraft at the track. She’s been doing rather well for her age, although they don’t really score the races since they are purely for fun at this age. You are continuously having to prevent your cousins from ‘tinkering’ with her racer to make it ‘more fun’, that is, faster and more dangerous.
It takes several minutes, but it finally fully registers that this is not a joke. Your agents found the ‘rulebook’ for the Bourbon-Rouges Noir war. There are complete encyclopedias with fewer pages than this. Your entire legal code has fewer pages than this. You’d have to add the full regulatory code to the legal code to finally exceed the page length, and that’s with it all written in very small type.
Six thousand pages on the precise etiquette and rules involved in attacking areas designated as latrines? Really?
Your palm and your face are soon engaged in a loving, yet forbidden, romance.
You summon the Bourbon ambassador at this point and confront him with this, and the supercilious bastard actually looks incredibly smug.
“Once we convinced those bâtards to accept this we’ve been able to tie up their advances in utter knots, although granted we’ve still not been able to retake Nouvel Aragón from them. Until then their pure numerical advantage allowed them to eventually push us back in every engagement, causing the loss of two systems to them. Now we just keep them tied up in the rulebook, and the idiots meurtriers fall for it every time. We do have to keep the pressure up on them by constantly attacking Nouvel Aragón otherwise they’d be able to threaten Nouveau Breton.”
OK, that’s an explanation you’d not been expecting, but judging by the reports you’ve gotten it seems to be at least a viable one, even if you’re not too sure of how truthful the ambassador is being.
The Olympics are being held in Nova Roma this year, and after much debate within the organizing committee it is decided to add multiple sailing events to the next Olympics, which is scheduled to be held in Nouveau Paris. The Bourbons are rather annoying in that they spend much of the meeting trying to convince the NRI and NRR to eliminate motorsports from the Olympics, whining about how ‘uncivilized’ they are, but thankfully they stand firm with you in that regard. You do send a memo to the team leadership for your motorsports teams to be prepared for dirty tricks in the Nouveau Paris games in four years.
Closer to home there have been continued skirmishes with the Black Steel in the Raj system, so far inconclusive. Your forces have managed to destroy a number of Vincent corvettes engaged in scouting runs, but others have escaped. So far you’ve not taken any damage beyond the capabilities of the Vestal-class ships in the system to repair.
In early February a small flotilla from the Crimson Storm arrives in the Empire, informing you that they are well enough established at this time that they are interested in opening up trade with the Griffon Empire. They’re also negotiating deals with the NRR and NRI, but would like to offer you ‘Most Favored’ status in thanks for the assistance of your great-grandmother. You have no issue with this, free trade has long been a net positive to your economy and your commercial interests cannot wait to have new markets opened up for their goods.
One memo that catches your eye is from the Interior ministry and the IGMP concerning rumors coming out of the Skala system. This system is one of your poorest worlds outside of the two agriworlds, in which the typical measurements break down due to local conditions. Kaiyo is worse off, but is a younger colony and significantly smaller in population. The overall crime rate in the Skala system is roughly the same as elsewhere, but the local crime rate is skewed towards more violent crimes than elsewhere. Moreover, while the local economy has been growing rather quickly, it is from a very low starting base and almost all of the economic growth has been benefiting off-world industrial interests rather than local ones.
It’s something to keep an eye on, there’s nothing really actionable yet.
You also get some wonderful personal news. You are pregnant again, this time with twins. According to the doctors they’re identical as well, a pair of boys. You and Markus are having sons! The girls are wonderful, but it’s nice to have some boys as well on the way.
Tamara is having a grand old time at the track as she gets better at driving her little hovercraft at the track. She’s been doing rather well for her age, although they don’t really score the races since they are purely for fun at this age. You are continuously having to prevent your cousins from ‘tinkering’ with her racer to make it ‘more fun’, that is, faster and more dangerous.
Yacovo
Occasionally spouting nonsense
You know, at this point I say we should just leave well enough alone with the war between the Burbons and the Noir.
This is not like Nya Köpenhamn where two powers are trying to nuke each other and war crime civilians. These are two relatively civilized powers that engaging in ritualistic combat that has way less casualties than a normal war.
We do not have the time, resources, or really patience to deal with this in the short term with things like the Black Steel breathing down our necks. It’s weird, but not really that harmful to us or the populace of the two powers.
This is not like Nya Köpenhamn where two powers are trying to nuke each other and war crime civilians. These are two relatively civilized powers that engaging in ritualistic combat that has way less casualties than a normal war.
We do not have the time, resources, or really patience to deal with this in the short term with things like the Black Steel breathing down our necks. It’s weird, but not really that harmful to us or the populace of the two powers.
mmgaballah
Well-known member
hell after the ares conventions the inner sphere had effectively codified war into a sport and a legitimate way to settle grievances and conduct diplomacy by other means , so what the the Burbons and the Noir are doing is more or less a natural expansion on that taken to the extreme
Yacovo
Occasionally spouting nonsense
What I find hilarious is that unlike the Ares Convention for the IS and Batchall for the Clans, the Rouges and Burbons as far as we can tell actually *gasp* follow the letter and spirit of the rules!
The Clans and the Inner Sphere would happily drop their standards if they could get away with it without suffering their respective societies’ consequences. They would also extract the maximum punishment they could get away with if any of their opponents would dare break their rules.
Both tend to abuse the letter of their laws like the Dragon abuses the Garden after a failed campaign. So having forces obey the rules of war they set out for themselves is a pleasant show of integrity.
IS mech: *knocks over a building with civilians* “Meh, another day on the job, just deduct it from my check if it was on our side and my boss is enough a penny pincher to file a complaint. Back to the battle.”
Burbon or Noir mech: *knocks over a building with civilians* “Oh my gosh! I am so sorry! Timeout! Everybody stop the battle! *battle actually stops* We have to bring the medics and referees in to correct my grievous error!”
Last edited:
Yacovo - Corner Flags
Yacovo
Occasionally spouting nonsense
Omake: Corner Flags
Knight second class Jaquet Gillet was primed and ready to stomp on some Noir dogs. Not stomp upon them literally, as stomping other players violated Rule 34-B on page 1846 of the official War Handbook version 23 (abridged, as the unabridged version could not fit in Jaquet’s cockpit and have the cockpit remain regulation legal).
Still, Jaquet was gripping his controls and anticipated the start of the battle. The Ceremonial Artillery Pieces fired their starting flares, signaling the matches beginning. Certain forms of artillery being declared foul under Poor Form Rule 84-C over twenty years ago. Thus, alternative uses had to be found for the newly banned cannons.
Jaquet was making good time running down his designated lane. He did not want to be given a foul for breaching Rule 69-H for Unnecessary Flanking again. That had cost Jaquet his shot at making Knight first class that season.
It took weeks to repair and repaint his mech to rules legal standards after taking the penalty shots given to the Noir tank. Jaquet still thinks that dastard of a tank pilot tuned his lasers past regulation intensity limits.
“Tweeeet!” Rang through the Referee Radio installed in every cockpit and in the hands of every designated radio carrier in the infantry squads. What had happened? Had someone broken Rule 58-G and fired before the Regulation Firefight Period had started? That carried a serve Mandatory Mech Ejection penalty that cost the Noirs the Top Skirmish Cup eight years ago.
“Delay of game. Violation of Warzone Code 49: Corner Flag not in place at the start of battle.” Oh great, that stupid rule. Why the War Regulation Commission insisted in placing corner flags at the corner of every designated battlefield escaped Jaquet. Why couldn’t they do away with such a pointless and unnecessary rule?
Knight second class Jaquet Gillet was primed and ready to stomp on some Noir dogs. Not stomp upon them literally, as stomping other players violated Rule 34-B on page 1846 of the official War Handbook version 23 (abridged, as the unabridged version could not fit in Jaquet’s cockpit and have the cockpit remain regulation legal).
Still, Jaquet was gripping his controls and anticipated the start of the battle. The Ceremonial Artillery Pieces fired their starting flares, signaling the matches beginning. Certain forms of artillery being declared foul under Poor Form Rule 84-C over twenty years ago. Thus, alternative uses had to be found for the newly banned cannons.
Jaquet was making good time running down his designated lane. He did not want to be given a foul for breaching Rule 69-H for Unnecessary Flanking again. That had cost Jaquet his shot at making Knight first class that season.
It took weeks to repair and repaint his mech to rules legal standards after taking the penalty shots given to the Noir tank. Jaquet still thinks that dastard of a tank pilot tuned his lasers past regulation intensity limits.
“Tweeeet!” Rang through the Referee Radio installed in every cockpit and in the hands of every designated radio carrier in the infantry squads. What had happened? Had someone broken Rule 58-G and fired before the Regulation Firefight Period had started? That carried a serve Mandatory Mech Ejection penalty that cost the Noirs the Top Skirmish Cup eight years ago.
“Delay of game. Violation of Warzone Code 49: Corner Flag not in place at the start of battle.” Oh great, that stupid rule. Why the War Regulation Commission insisted in placing corner flags at the corner of every designated battlefield escaped Jaquet. Why couldn’t they do away with such a pointless and unnecessary rule?
Last edited:
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
So basically the commies have a lot of numbers but not much else going for them and the space french aren't much better
Turn 96 - Holy Crusades, Bubonic Plague
Turn 96 - Holy Crusades, Bubonic Plague
Martina and Tiberius come in together to discuss the Skala situation, and things are far more complicated than you’d anticipated. It is clearly a result of many good intentions and well laid plans colliding together into a slow moving trip to hell in a handbasket, to completely mash together multiple metaphors into one.
The roots of the issue were laid almost a century ago in your great-grandmother’s time when automation started expanding rapidly. The solution to the unemployment crisis caused by this was to expand educational opportunities and provide a generous social safety net, which worked quite well in general. However one of the ongoing challenges was with people who previously had highly valuable and important skills that they’d spent years and even decades honing to the point of near art who suddenly found themselves replaced by robots. These people almost invariably find themselves in far poorer circumstances even after retraining due to how well off they’d been beforehand.
Fast forward to the foundation of the Skala colony. The colonial administrators and planners had looked at this and saw an opportunity. They’d structured the colony to make use of legacy artisanal skills for industrial production, intending to exploit the niche of providing high quality goods made using more traditional methods.
Initially this went quite well, although there was the typical colonial start-up period and initial expansion issues. The Skala system was poor in general, so nobody expected miracles, but the attraction of seeing hard-earned skills be viable once more drew large numbers of the urban lower classes who’d been hit hard by automation to the system. It was expected, however, that within a few decades the market niche would be profitable enough for small artisanal shops to fully support themselves. Probably not getting rich in the process, but the artisans in question were quite happy with the situation and future outlooks, if rather poor financially.
But then a different problem reared its head. The laws concerning industrial expansion and such mandate that Imperial regulations regarding automation and production override lower levels of government. This was done primarily to prevent abuses which were occuring where industrial concerns would shop around to various system governments to get sweetheart deals and lax regulations to boost their short-term profits without regard for long-term consequences. Both your great-grandmother and your grandfather had stepped on that hard and ensured that there were uniform standards that companies couldn’t tap dance around.
Enter Skala, where the regulations were more severe than Imperial standards in order to preserve traditional artisanal crafts. Several major industrial companies filed suit in the courts challenging these regulations, pointing to the black letter law and precedent of Imperial supremacy in these matters. The courts had ruled in those companies' favor, and they’d moved in, completely crashing the artisanal economy in the process.
Now add in the environmental regulations limiting the amount of real estate zoned for industrial use in order to preserve the planetary ecosystems in question. On Skala, this meant that while the major industrial concerns now had the right to operate fully in the system, for them to establish factories would displace the artisanal shops.
Enter other Imperial regulations and laws intended to combat corruption. System governments are not allowed to give preferential treatment in regards to property, sales, or income taxes to any company. In addition, land valuation is done according to a set of Imperial standards intended to prevent shenanigans and corruption. The industrial concerns were able to successfully argue that land valuations on Skala were artificially deflated, forcing the Skala system government to adjust them up significantly. The corresponding increases in property taxes caused many artisanal shops to fail, as they’d been operating on thin margins even before the increases.
These companies were now buying up the bankrupt artisanal shops, tearing them down and replacing them with fully automated factories, leaving high unemployment in their wake since the Skala system had not built up a large commercial sector divorced from the artisanal industries. Over time this would correct itself, but right now poverty is extremely high in the system and the locals are extremely angry. Attacks on the new factories are common, and those few employees that they have find themselves regularly under attack with a number having been murdered in the last year or so by angry mobs of displaced artisans. Law enforcement on Skala are remarkably unsympathetic to the corporation's issues, with extremely slow response times and an abysmal case solution rate.
Tiberius makes a point that within a decade at the outside the forces causing this situation would dissipate as the increase in prosperity would lift the system as a whole out of the current impoverished situation, with the increased economic activity allowing for the sort of vibrant commercial sector which elsewhere in the Empire has successfully worked to ameliorate poverty and ensure that the population is gainfully employed in meaningful jobs. However this is ten years or so down the road, the local populace is more focused on today.
Martina points out that you could deploy the IGMP and local garrison to… supplement local law enforcement and ensure law and order are maintained, keeping a lid on the situation until it naturally resolves itself. However this entire mess is a collision of edge-cases and unanticipated interactions between laws meant for good and proper purposes. Simply hoping it will go away and resolve itself could well lead to future issues.
There’s another issue at play here as well. The artisans in question don’t want to be prosperous in a typical Imperial economy, working office jobs managing automated production systems or doing other office work. They want to work with their hands, using old fashioned tools and techniques to produce goods the old-fashioned way. These are the sorts of people who want to get their hands dirty, to rivet and weld and bend metal, to carve and plane and join, to mold and build with skills that were ancient before mankind first left Earth. They take pride in their skills, and there is indeed a market niche for products made that way. While they’d been ‘poor’, they’d been supporting themselves and not a drain on the overall economy. Sure, they’d not been an economic engine driving growth and revenue to Imperial coffers, but they’d not been a net cost either.
On the other hand, the major manufacturing firms are making excellent profits off of Skala, they are getting the land cheap at bankruptcy auctions, labor costs on construction are very low, and since the new factories are being built from the ground up with the latest in automation they aren’t stuck having to pay transition costs to downsized workers. As far as they are concerned the artisans are just obstacles in the path of progress and need to get out of the way.
On the gripping hand, the system government of Skala had pointed out in court that the reason they’d assigned such low land values for the purposes of taxation and such was due to the consideration that unlike other planets in the Empire the mineral rights to said properties were essentially worthless, due to Skala’s exceptionally poor mineral content. The official formulas and calculations assumed that mineral rights had a certain minimum value, but the Skala system government showed that that was completely not the case there. Nevertheless, the regulations had no leeway for such an edge case and the courts had ruled against the system government on the grounds of essential fairness across the entire Empire. Thus the corporation's arguments about artificially low property values were sustained and a near 50% increase in valuation was mandated by the courts in accordance with the accepted formula used in all non-agricultural worlds (those worlds have a substantially different formula much more similar to the one used by the Skala authorities, but Skala is not an agricultural world.).
Now that you are aware of the broad parameters of the issue you call in representatives of the various sides in the dispute. The CEO of Arthur & Simonson Industries, old man Paul Arthur himself, represents the corporate interests, the artisans by a grizzled older man with heavily scarred hands from a lifetime of bending metal by the name of Ivan Petravich, and the Skala system government by the current governor, who’d been serving since the establishment of the colony in the system, Isabella Cordileone.
A&S Industries has a very positive reputation as an ethical company who seeks to exceed the requirements placed upon them and has been rated as among the best places to work by employees at all levels for the last five years. Mr Arthur informs you that A&S had not been in the Skala market from the beginning due to their then focus on the Kainga system, where he points out his company was among those who assisted that system in becoming a Core world in near record time thanks to their diligent efforts on behalf of the system economy. He states that this was exceptionally profitable for the company, as well as beneficial to their workers and the broader economy, and that A&S is hoping to replicate that success in the Skala system.
Ivan is fairly gruff and blunt, reminding you of some of the rougher edged infantry troopers under your command when you started out as a Mechwarrior. He’s actually the oldest man there by over a decade, and he’s been around. He started out in the Griffon system, working in the shipyards there as a welder and shipfitter, before moving to Nowa Warszawa as part of the reconstruction teams, where he’d spent a number of years repairing pipeworks and industrial hardware before he’d moved on to Okusawa following the conquest of that planet, being among the first wave of industrial workers to come to the planet to work on the repairs and reconstruction there. He’d decided to retire to Skala, starting a small family machine shop specializing in hand-forged hand tools such as hammers, wrenches and the like for those who preferred old style craftsmanship over mass produced versions. His business was clinging to life solely on the basis of his pension, and he’d had to let go most of his workers, fellow artisans who now found themselves out on the streets.
Isabella explains the reasoning for the system government’s initial policies. Skala is mineral poor at best, having only trace amounts of industrial metals in the local lithosphere and very poor deposits in the local asteroid fields. Unfortunately the soil is not rich enough to support intensive agriculture. The system is poorly placed in regards to becoming a trade hub, with it being faster and easier for traffic to go through the Pieklo system to the galactic south due to the faster recharge rates offered by the slightly brighter star and the way the systems were laid out. Artisanal manufacturing seemed to be an unserved market niche in the Empire valuable enough to support at least one planet, so Skala would be that planet. Their reading of the applicable regulations was that due to local conditions they would have the flexibility to do what they’d done, with the precedent of the agricultural worlds as the basis, but unfortunately the courts disagreed.
Both Isabella and Ivan are quite disgruntled that A&S had waited until millions of artisans had invested their life savings into starting small low-margin artisan works before moving in with their lawsuits, not quite accusing the massive corporation of doing so deliberately in the hopes of scooping up industrial zoned property at fire sale prices. Mr Arthur is very indignant at that not-quite accusation, reiterating that A&S had, at the time of the founding of Skala, been fully focused on the Kainga system and had not even considered expanding to Skala until recently.
Nobody seems all that willing to budge. A&S is insisting on their rights as vindicated by the courts and has no interest whatsoever in compromising with the artisans or system government, merely reiterating that they hope to be instrumental in building Skala into a Core World with all of the attendant benefits and professing nothing but baffled annoyance with the resistance to such beneficence. Ivan and the artisans view A&S as nothing more than a predatory megacorporation seeking to force Skala into the same soulless mold that they’d risked everything to go to Skala to escape, with the unspoken subtext that yes, they are perfectly willing to resort to sabotage and destruction to destroy A&S’s hopes for profit in the system. Isabella is very reluctantly obeying the court orders in this matter which force her to publicly side with A&S, but it is very clear that nothing less than direct Imperial intervention will convince her to give A&S anything more than the absolute minimum cooperation, and that if she encountered Mr Arthur on fire at the side of the road she’d happily toss gasoline on him rather than water.
It’s even more of a shitshow than you’d expected from the initial briefing.
After consulting with your advisors you come up with two potential plans for this situation. Sadly, doing nothing is not a real option, because this situation is incredibly volatile.
In much less fraught news, the Olympics have begun! You are quite avidly following the reporting, hoping that the utter humiliation of four years ago will be avenged.
Things do not start out all that well for the Men’s Athletics team, although they do manage to limp and claw their way into a bronze medal barely a point ahead of the NRR team. Things turn around, thankfully, when the Griffon women take the field, handily trouncing the competition and sending the Bourbons pouting back to the locker room without a medal while they themselves take gold.
The NRI dominates gymnastics, but Team Griffon is surprisingly competitive, taking silver in all three gymnastics events and at no point looking like they didn’t belong in a competition against the masters from the NRI. From all reports the locals are extremely impressed with those performances and the Griffon gymnasts are treated as minor celebrities in Nova Roma.
The Team Griffon Men’s Swimming Team suffers a rather unfortunate injury right before the competition is supposed to begin when the top swimmer on the team slips and falls on the pool deck, cracking his head and having to be admitted to the hospital under concussion protocols. The Griffon Women make up for this, taking a dominant gold medal in the pool in a truly impressive performance.
The men’s decathlon sees the NRI, NRR and Team Griffon separated by fractions of a point, with Team Griffon settling for a bronze by a hundredth. Once again the Griffon women step up and put on a truly dominant performance, taking home the gold medal with a near record score in the discipline.
Finally at the firing range Team Griffon proves totally dominant, crushing the competition to the point where the interesting competition was to see who came in second, a feat split by the Bourbons and the NRR. The NRI team didn’t show up, and you get a private communique from the NRI ambassador that the NRI’s shooting coach had been discovered to be a secret member of the Pugnus Deorum back in the day, and had recruited several of the shooters into what he’d hoped to be a new instance of the terrorist group. Luckily NRI security had discovered the situation, unfortunately not before it was too late to find a replacement team.
Martina and Tiberius come in together to discuss the Skala situation, and things are far more complicated than you’d anticipated. It is clearly a result of many good intentions and well laid plans colliding together into a slow moving trip to hell in a handbasket, to completely mash together multiple metaphors into one.
The roots of the issue were laid almost a century ago in your great-grandmother’s time when automation started expanding rapidly. The solution to the unemployment crisis caused by this was to expand educational opportunities and provide a generous social safety net, which worked quite well in general. However one of the ongoing challenges was with people who previously had highly valuable and important skills that they’d spent years and even decades honing to the point of near art who suddenly found themselves replaced by robots. These people almost invariably find themselves in far poorer circumstances even after retraining due to how well off they’d been beforehand.
Fast forward to the foundation of the Skala colony. The colonial administrators and planners had looked at this and saw an opportunity. They’d structured the colony to make use of legacy artisanal skills for industrial production, intending to exploit the niche of providing high quality goods made using more traditional methods.
Initially this went quite well, although there was the typical colonial start-up period and initial expansion issues. The Skala system was poor in general, so nobody expected miracles, but the attraction of seeing hard-earned skills be viable once more drew large numbers of the urban lower classes who’d been hit hard by automation to the system. It was expected, however, that within a few decades the market niche would be profitable enough for small artisanal shops to fully support themselves. Probably not getting rich in the process, but the artisans in question were quite happy with the situation and future outlooks, if rather poor financially.
But then a different problem reared its head. The laws concerning industrial expansion and such mandate that Imperial regulations regarding automation and production override lower levels of government. This was done primarily to prevent abuses which were occuring where industrial concerns would shop around to various system governments to get sweetheart deals and lax regulations to boost their short-term profits without regard for long-term consequences. Both your great-grandmother and your grandfather had stepped on that hard and ensured that there were uniform standards that companies couldn’t tap dance around.
Enter Skala, where the regulations were more severe than Imperial standards in order to preserve traditional artisanal crafts. Several major industrial companies filed suit in the courts challenging these regulations, pointing to the black letter law and precedent of Imperial supremacy in these matters. The courts had ruled in those companies' favor, and they’d moved in, completely crashing the artisanal economy in the process.
Now add in the environmental regulations limiting the amount of real estate zoned for industrial use in order to preserve the planetary ecosystems in question. On Skala, this meant that while the major industrial concerns now had the right to operate fully in the system, for them to establish factories would displace the artisanal shops.
Enter other Imperial regulations and laws intended to combat corruption. System governments are not allowed to give preferential treatment in regards to property, sales, or income taxes to any company. In addition, land valuation is done according to a set of Imperial standards intended to prevent shenanigans and corruption. The industrial concerns were able to successfully argue that land valuations on Skala were artificially deflated, forcing the Skala system government to adjust them up significantly. The corresponding increases in property taxes caused many artisanal shops to fail, as they’d been operating on thin margins even before the increases.
These companies were now buying up the bankrupt artisanal shops, tearing them down and replacing them with fully automated factories, leaving high unemployment in their wake since the Skala system had not built up a large commercial sector divorced from the artisanal industries. Over time this would correct itself, but right now poverty is extremely high in the system and the locals are extremely angry. Attacks on the new factories are common, and those few employees that they have find themselves regularly under attack with a number having been murdered in the last year or so by angry mobs of displaced artisans. Law enforcement on Skala are remarkably unsympathetic to the corporation's issues, with extremely slow response times and an abysmal case solution rate.
Tiberius makes a point that within a decade at the outside the forces causing this situation would dissipate as the increase in prosperity would lift the system as a whole out of the current impoverished situation, with the increased economic activity allowing for the sort of vibrant commercial sector which elsewhere in the Empire has successfully worked to ameliorate poverty and ensure that the population is gainfully employed in meaningful jobs. However this is ten years or so down the road, the local populace is more focused on today.
Martina points out that you could deploy the IGMP and local garrison to… supplement local law enforcement and ensure law and order are maintained, keeping a lid on the situation until it naturally resolves itself. However this entire mess is a collision of edge-cases and unanticipated interactions between laws meant for good and proper purposes. Simply hoping it will go away and resolve itself could well lead to future issues.
There’s another issue at play here as well. The artisans in question don’t want to be prosperous in a typical Imperial economy, working office jobs managing automated production systems or doing other office work. They want to work with their hands, using old fashioned tools and techniques to produce goods the old-fashioned way. These are the sorts of people who want to get their hands dirty, to rivet and weld and bend metal, to carve and plane and join, to mold and build with skills that were ancient before mankind first left Earth. They take pride in their skills, and there is indeed a market niche for products made that way. While they’d been ‘poor’, they’d been supporting themselves and not a drain on the overall economy. Sure, they’d not been an economic engine driving growth and revenue to Imperial coffers, but they’d not been a net cost either.
On the other hand, the major manufacturing firms are making excellent profits off of Skala, they are getting the land cheap at bankruptcy auctions, labor costs on construction are very low, and since the new factories are being built from the ground up with the latest in automation they aren’t stuck having to pay transition costs to downsized workers. As far as they are concerned the artisans are just obstacles in the path of progress and need to get out of the way.
On the gripping hand, the system government of Skala had pointed out in court that the reason they’d assigned such low land values for the purposes of taxation and such was due to the consideration that unlike other planets in the Empire the mineral rights to said properties were essentially worthless, due to Skala’s exceptionally poor mineral content. The official formulas and calculations assumed that mineral rights had a certain minimum value, but the Skala system government showed that that was completely not the case there. Nevertheless, the regulations had no leeway for such an edge case and the courts had ruled against the system government on the grounds of essential fairness across the entire Empire. Thus the corporation's arguments about artificially low property values were sustained and a near 50% increase in valuation was mandated by the courts in accordance with the accepted formula used in all non-agricultural worlds (those worlds have a substantially different formula much more similar to the one used by the Skala authorities, but Skala is not an agricultural world.).
Now that you are aware of the broad parameters of the issue you call in representatives of the various sides in the dispute. The CEO of Arthur & Simonson Industries, old man Paul Arthur himself, represents the corporate interests, the artisans by a grizzled older man with heavily scarred hands from a lifetime of bending metal by the name of Ivan Petravich, and the Skala system government by the current governor, who’d been serving since the establishment of the colony in the system, Isabella Cordileone.
A&S Industries has a very positive reputation as an ethical company who seeks to exceed the requirements placed upon them and has been rated as among the best places to work by employees at all levels for the last five years. Mr Arthur informs you that A&S had not been in the Skala market from the beginning due to their then focus on the Kainga system, where he points out his company was among those who assisted that system in becoming a Core world in near record time thanks to their diligent efforts on behalf of the system economy. He states that this was exceptionally profitable for the company, as well as beneficial to their workers and the broader economy, and that A&S is hoping to replicate that success in the Skala system.
Ivan is fairly gruff and blunt, reminding you of some of the rougher edged infantry troopers under your command when you started out as a Mechwarrior. He’s actually the oldest man there by over a decade, and he’s been around. He started out in the Griffon system, working in the shipyards there as a welder and shipfitter, before moving to Nowa Warszawa as part of the reconstruction teams, where he’d spent a number of years repairing pipeworks and industrial hardware before he’d moved on to Okusawa following the conquest of that planet, being among the first wave of industrial workers to come to the planet to work on the repairs and reconstruction there. He’d decided to retire to Skala, starting a small family machine shop specializing in hand-forged hand tools such as hammers, wrenches and the like for those who preferred old style craftsmanship over mass produced versions. His business was clinging to life solely on the basis of his pension, and he’d had to let go most of his workers, fellow artisans who now found themselves out on the streets.
Isabella explains the reasoning for the system government’s initial policies. Skala is mineral poor at best, having only trace amounts of industrial metals in the local lithosphere and very poor deposits in the local asteroid fields. Unfortunately the soil is not rich enough to support intensive agriculture. The system is poorly placed in regards to becoming a trade hub, with it being faster and easier for traffic to go through the Pieklo system to the galactic south due to the faster recharge rates offered by the slightly brighter star and the way the systems were laid out. Artisanal manufacturing seemed to be an unserved market niche in the Empire valuable enough to support at least one planet, so Skala would be that planet. Their reading of the applicable regulations was that due to local conditions they would have the flexibility to do what they’d done, with the precedent of the agricultural worlds as the basis, but unfortunately the courts disagreed.
Both Isabella and Ivan are quite disgruntled that A&S had waited until millions of artisans had invested their life savings into starting small low-margin artisan works before moving in with their lawsuits, not quite accusing the massive corporation of doing so deliberately in the hopes of scooping up industrial zoned property at fire sale prices. Mr Arthur is very indignant at that not-quite accusation, reiterating that A&S had, at the time of the founding of Skala, been fully focused on the Kainga system and had not even considered expanding to Skala until recently.
Nobody seems all that willing to budge. A&S is insisting on their rights as vindicated by the courts and has no interest whatsoever in compromising with the artisans or system government, merely reiterating that they hope to be instrumental in building Skala into a Core World with all of the attendant benefits and professing nothing but baffled annoyance with the resistance to such beneficence. Ivan and the artisans view A&S as nothing more than a predatory megacorporation seeking to force Skala into the same soulless mold that they’d risked everything to go to Skala to escape, with the unspoken subtext that yes, they are perfectly willing to resort to sabotage and destruction to destroy A&S’s hopes for profit in the system. Isabella is very reluctantly obeying the court orders in this matter which force her to publicly side with A&S, but it is very clear that nothing less than direct Imperial intervention will convince her to give A&S anything more than the absolute minimum cooperation, and that if she encountered Mr Arthur on fire at the side of the road she’d happily toss gasoline on him rather than water.
It’s even more of a shitshow than you’d expected from the initial briefing.
After consulting with your advisors you come up with two potential plans for this situation. Sadly, doing nothing is not a real option, because this situation is incredibly volatile.
| [] | Action | Argument | Effect |
| [] | Side with A&S | While the situation is shitty all around, A&S has a solid reputation for ethical dealings, has already been fundamental in developing the economy in the Kainga system into the Core World it is today, and has the most solid legal standing in this case. They have been the ones following all of the rules in question, they have a history of taking care of not only their own employees but also of building broad self-sustaining economic networks on the planet that they are operating on that bring broad prosperity to the system in question, benefiting everybody not merely themselves. Yes, this will result in substantial upheaval and economic distress for those who decided to throw the dice, but the blame there lies on the system government for trying to effectively game the system. While they didn’t have any corrupt motives for doing so, the effects were the same, and now the artisans they lured to Skala will be the ones paying the price in bankruptcy and failed dreams. It is unfortunate, but the law is the law, and there is absolutely nothing unjust about the laws in question. |
|
| [] | Side with the Artisans & System Government | Arguing whether or not the Skala system government should have made the decisions they did is pointless, the fact is that they made them in good faith, and hundreds of millions of people risked their life’s savings in good faith. While the law may be on A&S’s side, equity isn’t. These people do not deserve to find themselves penniless and in the social welfare system just for the sake of a few more percentage points of GDP growth and the corporate profits of a megacorporation. This is a situation where the cold demands of law must yield to justice and grace. Economics should not and must not be the sole consideration in the public life of the Empire. People are people, with hopes and dreams, and ignoring this in favor of spreadsheets and databases is the path to ultimate ruin. In the end, people are more important than machines, and surely in an Empire as large as ours there is room for a world which focuses not on profit and growth, but rather on artisanal quality and artistic expression. |
|
In much less fraught news, the Olympics have begun! You are quite avidly following the reporting, hoping that the utter humiliation of four years ago will be avenged.
Things do not start out all that well for the Men’s Athletics team, although they do manage to limp and claw their way into a bronze medal barely a point ahead of the NRR team. Things turn around, thankfully, when the Griffon women take the field, handily trouncing the competition and sending the Bourbons pouting back to the locker room without a medal while they themselves take gold.
The NRI dominates gymnastics, but Team Griffon is surprisingly competitive, taking silver in all three gymnastics events and at no point looking like they didn’t belong in a competition against the masters from the NRI. From all reports the locals are extremely impressed with those performances and the Griffon gymnasts are treated as minor celebrities in Nova Roma.
The Team Griffon Men’s Swimming Team suffers a rather unfortunate injury right before the competition is supposed to begin when the top swimmer on the team slips and falls on the pool deck, cracking his head and having to be admitted to the hospital under concussion protocols. The Griffon Women make up for this, taking a dominant gold medal in the pool in a truly impressive performance.
The men’s decathlon sees the NRI, NRR and Team Griffon separated by fractions of a point, with Team Griffon settling for a bronze by a hundredth. Once again the Griffon women step up and put on a truly dominant performance, taking home the gold medal with a near record score in the discipline.
Finally at the firing range Team Griffon proves totally dominant, crushing the competition to the point where the interesting competition was to see who came in second, a feat split by the Bourbons and the NRR. The NRI team didn’t show up, and you get a private communique from the NRI ambassador that the NRI’s shooting coach had been discovered to be a secret member of the Pugnus Deorum back in the day, and had recruited several of the shooters into what he’d hoped to be a new instance of the terrorist group. Luckily NRI security had discovered the situation, unfortunately not before it was too late to find a replacement team.
Joyousmadman
Well-known member
Overall I’m initially inclined towards siding with the artisans but, will hold off on voting until we hear from our financial advisor, Mr. Jarrow, on just how much that many zeros will hurt.
That being said, I would like an option to send some additional law enforcement anyway on the basis that, cool motive or not, murder is still murder and should be prosecuted as such. That the local police is looking the other way or at least intentionally slow rolling investigation for such serious crimes is an institutional problem in of itself.
That being said, I would like an option to send some additional law enforcement anyway on the basis that, cool motive or not, murder is still murder and should be prosecuted as such. That the local police is looking the other way or at least intentionally slow rolling investigation for such serious crimes is an institutional problem in of itself.