Turn 38 - With Parts Made In Japan
The Free Folk return once more to the Zenith point, now that Griffin’s Roost is a known ‘safe harbor’ they seem to be coming far more often.
And they are in rough shape, leaking atmosphere and with obvious battle damage. You receive a transmission urgently requesting assistance. They had been attacked by Drac ASFs in a previously empty system and had suffered serious damage and needed to completely SCRAM their reactors before they suffered overloads, plus they were surviving in emergency pressure suits due to the extensive damage suffered. In addition there were Drac marines holed up in one of the sections of the vessel and intermittent fighting was continuing.
You barely even hesitate to think about it and send your flotilla of
Defiants along with a HMS Argus transporting a group of power armor infantry wielding anti-boarding weaponry. They’re having to somewhat improvise the carriage of the power armor, setting up the field charging systems in one of the ASF bays and leaving that
Eagle behind.
The small formation makes excellent time out to the drop point by boosting as hard as possible for long duration flight, and the Power Armor forces make… a strong impression on the Dracs. You have a few prisoners, but not too many.
The Free Folk jumpship is in very bad shape, HMS Argus had gone up without any of her flight crews on board and with most of her bays cleared, so she was able to take aboard most of the Folk until HMS Haskell arrived a day later. Several small craft ferry the prisoners to the Black Site for interrogation.
Engineers from both the Free Folk and your own survey the jumpship, the core itself is intact, along with all ancillary systems, but the reactors are badly damaged, the life support system is nearly completely shot, and very little of the vessel is capable of holding atmosphere. For the time being the Free Folk are likely to be your guests until repairs can be completed.
They share with you some of their charts, showing that the Drac expedition has occupied six nearby systems, although only three of them have fully habitable planets. The others simply have outposts constructed and appear to be mainly used for resource collection. All but two of them are to the galactic ‘east’ of you, with the medieval world and the apparent new outpost being to the galactic north and south respectively. Based on the charts, it looks like the Dracs are seeking to englobe you.
You do learn more about the history and background of the Free Folk. They were originally Jarnfolk, however political conflicts and an escalating series of feuds and assassinations led the ancestors of the Free Folk to leave Jarnfolk space, the original three Jumpships that they’d brought with them had slowly been cannibalized down to this one and they’d developed the heavy lasers they used to deter attacks from various pirate groups.
You do discover something else that is very worrying. The ‘pirates’ that you had faced several years earlier were a known threat in the region. According to the Free Folk, they are descendents of Amaris Empire forces who had broken contact with the SLDF and now occupied a region well to the Galactic South of you.
And they had multiple functional Warships. If it weren’t for the fact that they fought each other so much they’d have already started pushing towards the Inner Sphere to take revenge upon the Great Houses for failing to submit to Stefan Amaris.
And the incredibly suicidal tactics you’d seen? According to the Free Folk, the Amaris Remnant had brought with them advanced drone technology, which they used extensively.
Somehow you keep from peeing your panties at that news. The only good thing is that this group is about two dozen jumps away at their closest and only on extremely rare occasions do one or more of the ‘Brigades’ venture this far away from their central fastness.
With that in mind, it’s budget time. Which somehow seems a wee bit more important. Jeremy is again at the meeting with you.
General Jackson kicks off proceedings. “Your Majesty, we need 2 lances each of
Shortbow and
Ambush II mechs to finish converting 1st Mech Battalion, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade of 1st Armored to all Light Fire Companies. In addition, the Aerie would like a second battalion of
Cadet mechs for the Nowy Gdansk annex’s training unit for winter training and training local recruits. We recommend holding off on worrying about the various heavier options, several weaknesses have been identified in simulated wargames and we will soon be issuing requirements for at least one and possibly a pair of specialist mech designs to fill those weaknesses. For conventional forces, we would recommend procuring the first elements of 2nd Brigade, 2nd Armored with a full Standard Armored Regiment.”
Jeremy pipes up, after getting a nod from the General. “The issue is specialist artillery and anti-air assets. With the development of Arrow IV missiles it is possible to potentially build an artillery mech, and a mech formation would be well served to have something to truly counter enemy ASFs in the event of our aerospace forces failing to maintain complete air supremacy.” He pauses. “Don’t tell Thanh I said that, she’ll kick my shins.” he mock whines with a grin.
General Reyes chuckles at that. “We’ll do our best, Colonel.” she says, eyes sparkling a little. “Meanwhile, Your Majesty, we have several Dropships commissioning next year that will require their air wings. We recommend equipping HMS Black Prince with interceptors to back up HMS Warrior’s
Roc wing. We recommend equipping HMS Eagle with, well,
Eagles, and HMS Havock with a flight of
Rocs. If we begin construction of
Star Fort defense stations I would recommend building out mixed ASF groups of
Goshawk IIG,
Eagle and
Gyrfalcon wings. I would honestly recommend that for the first
Star Fort that we simply assign the existing 1st Interceptor, 1st Dogfighting, and 1st Attack Wings to the station.”
Admiral Benjamin nods. “Your Majesty, we will have five dropships commissioning next year and one this year. HMS Destiny is the sixth
Defiant-class vessel in commission. Next year we’ll have HMS Black Prince of the
Warrior class, HMS Lightning of the
Lightning class, HMS Eagle of the
Microraptor class, and HMS Havock of the
Velociraptor class, as well as USS Discovery of the
Enterprise class.” he checks his notes. “Once HMS Argus and HMS Havock commission, I’d recommend filling both of those lines with
Velociraptors to fill out the proposed squadron organization. I’d also recommend that HMS Warrior, HMS Black Prince, and HMS Lightning be squadroned together. For the former, I’d recommend that they be posted to primarily patrol the Zenith jump point, and the latter the Nadir jump point.”
General Potter then speaks up. “Your Majesty, a major focus for us will need to be increasing our strategic resource production capacity as well as building out
Star Forts. However, and I believe Jake will be bringing this up later, there has been a proposal to significantly increase the size of the central staff of the AFGE, which would allow us to both do more, and also be more proactive in industrial affairs if related to military areas. I would urge you to consider that, although I do dread the increase in paperwork.”
Bridget is bouncy bouncy bouncy… and forgot to wear a bra again so it is very noticeable. “Your Majesty! We can build stuff, I mean stuff like bigger orbital factories and more orbital factories and better orbital factories, we should build as many as we can, and then maybe try and build some more. I put in a request with your politics people to authorize an expansion of my staff so we can build even more stuff to speed up our growth, but Jake’ll tell you about that, right, Jakey?” she grins at the Polish Political advisor, who rolls his eyes at her antics. “And if we’re not building things, we should focus some on the Asteroid Belts economy, get even more money coming in for building stuff!”
Isoroku isn’t present, as he’s working on the Olympics which is fully occupying his cultural affairs staff. He has arranged invitations to the Free Folk to attend in quarantined seats to ensure against any possible disease vectors (at Mary’s advice), which they’ve accepted.
Jake is sitting next to Bridget, and you’ve heard from a little birdie (named Jane) that he and Bridget have been seen going out to dinner together, could there be wedding bells in the future?
Wait, that would mean that Bridget would have babies… hrmmmm, there might be something to this, it may even calm her down a bit.
But back to the meeting. “Your Majesty, as both General Potter and Bridget have already spoiled for you, we’ve been working on proposals to increase the staff sizes for the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of the Interior. Doing so would be expensive up front as well as adding to ongoing upkeep expenses, but would allow us to accomplish more in a given unit time.”
Mary is there, smirking just a little, and fires up her ubiquitous presentation.
- New Technologies
- Military
- Assault Bipedal Battlemechs
- Between 80 and 100 tons
- Simulations show that these monsters are the deadliest and most capable platforms on the battlefield.
- Thanks to the realities of limited transport bays, the most efficient means of packing the most potential combat power in the fewest transports is via assault-class mechs.
- Subcapital Missile - Piranha
- Building upon work with Arrow-IV and Alamo, the Piranha is a theoretical design for a missile capable of easily tracking enemy ASFs while also being a threat to dropships.
- Unfortunately the targeting and tracking systems required for this weapon system are incompatible with those we are currently using for subcapital lasers and cannons, meaning that designs which mount those systems are not able to be refit to mount these missiles
- Non-Military
- Iron Womb
- This is an umbrella term for a family of medical equipment related to fertility and gestation
- This includes the ability to combine genetic material to create viable embryos which can either be brought to term in artificial wombs or ‘naturally’ in the genetic donors own womb.
- Genetic Engineering Lvl 1
- Builds upon the knowledge gained via Genetic Editing to move beyond simple edits to more complex challenges.
- Recommendations
- Military
- ER Medium and Small Lasers
- Extended Range 3cm and 5cm laser weapons show promise in simulations. The 5cm laser especially is a very common weapon in our service, an extended range variant of it may well prove decisive
- Spheroid Dropships (Heavy)
- Larger and more powerful dropships could be a serious benefit, especially with the revelation of the Amaris Empire remnants in our stellar neighborhood.
- Power Armor (Light) - Improved
- With experience with the basic suits, improvements would be welcome. Leaving aside ECM and stealth systems, the addition of jump jets to the design would open up multiple avenues of deployment and use
- Non-Military
- Improved Automation Lvl 5
- This will bring us to the pinnacle of Star League automation technology, with significant benefits to our economy
Harry is looking positively enthusiastic “Your Majesty, we have prisoners in the Black Site.” he grins, a rather disturbing grin. “May we play with them?”
Janet gives her colleague a… look. “Your Majesty, our review of regulations and laws is on track, and we hope to have a full after-action review of the Bratva situation very soon.”