Quest Deep Periphery Quest (Battletech Sandbox Empire Builder)

Turn 66 - Monopoly, Twenty-One, Checkers and Chess

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
Turn 66 - Monopoly, Twenty-One, Checkers and Chess
QM Note - I apologize for the slower pace, with classes and everything I have far less time

While you wait for the Kilburrough dropship to transit to Griffin’s Roost, you take the time to go over some other matters.

With the recent development of more compact extra-light fusion engines a full raft of upgrade proposals are now sitting on your desk. They’ve all been approved already, as they are straightforward upgrades of the existing platforms, but you’ll need to sign off on the actual refit orders. The DURF will be at full capacity, and the plan is to complete the upgrade cycle by the end of the year. It will mean no Mech procurement this year, however.

Nearly all of your battlemech designs, apart from the assault, training, and garrison designs, are affected by the upgrade process, which is more than simply replacing the engines. The new integrated CASE technology is also added, which has seriously boosted survivability of all of them.

In one case you are actually reducing the cost of the platform. The old Orb Weaver mech has found itself increasingly irrelevant on the battlefield as heavier platforms are able to carry the same sensors that the swift little spider mech can. The great speed is still an advantage, but the thin armor is a serious flaw and many of the speedy little mechs are lost in every engagement due to this. Dropping the sensor suite down to the standard equipment freed up enough tonnage to thicken the mech’s hide, making them more survivable and saving money as well.

Light Mechs
NameCostMaterialsHPA/DSpecials
Orb Weaver II$454.73Endo, DHS1424
  • Swift
  • TAG
Kavallerie II$420.75Endo, DHS1525
  • Swift
  • TAG
  • AMS 1
  • Missile 0
Medium Mechs
NameCostMaterialsHPA/DSpecials
Wolf Spider II$770.35Endo, DHS3232
  • Armored 1
Uhlan II$799.65Endo, DHS2929
  • Armored 1
  • Missile 2
  • AMS 1
Rittmeister III$885.83Endo, DHS2626
  • Armored 1
  • TAG
  • AMS 1
  • Scout
  • ECM
  • Command 1
  • Missile 0
Horse Archer II$852.04Endo, DHS2626
  • Armored 1
  • AMS 1
  • Missile 1
  • Command 1
Heavy Mechs
NameCostMaterialsHPA/DSpecials
Soldatin III$1,054.64Endo, DHS3636
  • Armored 1
  • Missile 1
  • TAG
  • AMS 2
Archer IV$1,098.91Endo, DHS3434
  • Armored 1
  • Missile 2
  • TAG
  • AMS 2
Chevalier III$1,189.74Endo, DHS3434
  • Armored 1
  • ECM
  • Scout
  • TAG
  • AMS 2
  • Missile 1
  • Command 1
Whirlwind III$988.14Endo, DHS2626
  • Armored 1
  • Anti-Aircraft
  • AMS 2
Ballista II$1,019.99Endo, DHS3232
  • Armored 1
  • AMS 2
  • Artillery 3

The overall net benefit is a roughly 10% increase in raw combat power, with significantly more flexible and resilient units due to a rough doubling of anti-missile capacity along with increased long range firepower. Going forward costs actually on average will go down, saving on maintenance costs as well.
[]Authorize the upgrades
  • Cost - 10,000,000
  • Prevents all new battlemech unit procurement this turn
  • +1 Economic Event
[]Not yet
  • No change

Thanks to a number of immigrants from the NRI who had been heavily involved in their battle armor programs, your scientists are able to achieve a significant breakthrough on heavy battle armor. You are now able to design suits up to 1,500 kilograms in mass, although such suits would be unsuitable for swarming tactics. A prototype suit in the mass range has been produced and is in testing, and so far is looking exceptionally dangerous, if rather more ponderous than its lighter counterparts.

The new suits are equipped with a pair of anti-personnel gauss rifles, a pair of anti-personnel mounts fitted with the standard pulse laser rifle of your conventional infantry, and a twin-tube launcher for short-ranged missiles fitted to the shoulders of the suit.

New Capricorn and Nowa Warszawa split the gold medals in the shooting events. In general performances are solid across the board with the contests quite close and competitive. In men’s fencing the Nowa Warszawa team utterly dominates, sweeping the podium in foil, saber, and epee. In the women’s event the tiny Nowy Śląsk team likewise sweeps the event… with a single fencer in each of the three classes who at 16 was only barely old enough to compete and yet outpointed women twice her age with over a decade of top level competitive experience.

In the two wrestling events the TTP and Calliope IV split the medals, showing a high standard of competitive ability and giving commentators hope that Team Griffon might finally reverse the long string of defeats on the mat. Likewise in the Archery events the same two teams once more split the gold medals.

The delegation from Kilburrough arrives on Griffin’s Roost, cutting into your sports watching time.

When the Monarch class liner lands the first group out are a sextet of rather… daunting guards. They are black, not the dark skin tones of somebody descended from African people, but pure, unalloyed, light-drinking black. They’re wearing mirrored sunglasses, so it is impossible to tell the color of their eyes, but the only thing that isn’t black about them is the white dress shirt they wear under their perfectly fitted and tailored black formal jackets. The suits are carbon-black… and you are absolutely certain that their skin is even darker than that.

The emissary is… flamboyant beyond the limits of flamboyance. You honestly cannot tell if the figure is male or female, and the outfit they are wearing looks like somebody took 18th century court dress, decided it was far too plain and boring, added more jewels, crystals, LEDs, and metallic wires to the ensemble, painted it in the most extreme day-glo colors, a mix of neon strip lighting and blacklights make it even more outre. And somehow it manages to actually be a coherent whole, much to your enormous surprise.

Even when the emissary speaks it is still utterly impossible to get a read on if it is a very effeminate man or a very masculine woman, the tones utterly and totally androgynous. The standard greetings are… stilted, however the emissary doesn’t seem to notice just how hostile everybody is towards… them?

The entire discussion is disquieting, the Kilburroughans have this twisted black and grey morality, they are merely businessmen, after all. They simply provide products to sovereign governments to the requirements and standards specified by said government. When you take the bull by the horns and confront them with the inhumane treatment of those slaves rescued from the Dracs the emissary simply sighs and informs you that they had warned the Dracs that their proposed training and conditioning regimen would be ineffective and inefficient, and that by engaging in such they had voided the usual warranties on the purchased products. You realize that the point had sailed right over the emissaries head.

When you press them on it they seem to continue to completely miss the point, agreeing with you; after all, the Dracs had violated the terms of service and end-user licensing agreement and thus Kilburrough had terminated product support, there being no other lawful remedy.

When you try to press them on that point the emissary then drops a bombshell, blandly stating that, in contrast to the Dracs immoral violations of the terms of service and EULA, your grandfather had adhered to them with the genetic treatments for his son, that is your father, that enabled him to sire children.

You freeze at that.

What.

There are no records whatsoever of any such thing, but a traitorous voice in your head whispers that most of the records from that period have been lost. Meanwhile he is continuing, not seeming to notice your reaction as he extols the virtues of the augmented fertility treatments that are among their most popular and profitable business services.

You end talks at this point, at least for now. There is absolutely no way, at this late date, to confirm anything that the emissary is saying. You certainly don’t remember anything from your childhood that would even hint at that, there are no records of dropships coming to the planet prior to the big Drac attack, but again, records are unreliable, and if they’d used a shuttle they might have been able to slip in and out.
 

Knowledgeispower

Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
Well they're still slaver scum even if they're telling the truth and let us exist. Commander commence base Delta zero on the continent the elites live on. Three Executor class Star Dreadnoughts commence firing
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
Well they're still slaver scum even if they're telling the truth and let us exist. Commander commence base Delta zero on the continent the elites live on. Three Executor class Star Dreadnoughts commence firing

Given that they have multiple doomstack-class space stations, it's going to be a very long time before we can conceivably engage them.
 

Val the Moofia Boss

Well-known member
Also, reminder that occupation of their system would be logistically impossible. Remember the slaves we rescued decades earlier? We were able to save a few, but there is no way we can do that one a mass scale. Society on that scale would completely fall apart without the Killborough elites to administrate it. Hundreds of millions to billions of innocent people would starve to death, and the surviving society would be totally screwed and you definitely wouldn't want them to have voting power. The situation is abysmal but getting entangled there does not help Griffin at all, would be a massive resource drain, would be a huge liability, and would be utterly demoralizing.

[X] Ask the emissary to provide all records they have on their dealings with Griffin.

We can say that some of our data banks were damaged in a raid with the Dracs and we just want to make sure we're up to date.
 

VicSage

Carpenter, Cobbler, Chirugeon, Dataminer.
I do believe the legions of Praes said it best. "Kill them all, take their stuff." We're glad to be alive, we're glad to be fertile, but that does not excuse the generations of slaves and slavers that continue to this day. Despite my previous post talking about how we might not have the economy and personnel for undoing all this people programming, we should start buildup in order to stop this.
 

Jarow

Well-known member
[X] Authorize the upgrades

Fortunately, unlike last turn, we do have money this turn. So this is affordable and almost certainly very helpful (I'm not doing the math for how much of an effect this has on each mech)
 

Knowledgeispower

Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
[X] Authorize the upgrades

Praise the DURF and for that matter the dedicated repair and refit shipyard my two big contributions to the quest in terms of ideas
 
Turn 66 - Let's Play Twister, Let's Play Risk

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
Turn 66 - Let’s Play Twister, Let’s Play Risk

You have polled your current advisors to see who would be willing to remain on the job after the transition. General Stewart and Dr Anna Bryant are certainly remaining, although General Stewart did indicate that she intends to have Thanh as her chief deputy, replacing Jeremy when he takes the throne. Of the remaining advisors, Janet is most assuredly retiring and is threatening legal action if you try and make her stay. The others are willing to remain on board, but are all looking forward to retiring in the next ten years at most.
[]NameMinistry
[]Bridget DoyleInterior
[]Isoroku NikishinaForeign
[]Jake MroczkiewiczPolitical
[]Harry OwensIntelligence
QM Note - A vote for a particular minister is a vote to RETAIN them, you may vote for however many you decide. Any minister that gets at least 5 votes will be retained, any with less than 5 votes will retire when Jeremy takes the throne and a new decision on replacements will come in the next update.

The discussions with the Kilburroughan emissary continue, when you challenge them on the veracity of their claims about your grandfather, they rather too calmly for your peace of mind promise to have them forwarded with the next delegation or, if you prefer, they would be available within a day of the return of the delegation if you wish to send a courier to pick them up.

And then, to your annoyance, rather blandly point out that if your own records of the transaction are missing that, since you obviously completely distrust them for some unfathomable reason, they feel it important to point out that their terms of service and licence agreements do forbid the fabrication of bills of sale.

When you again confront them about the labor slaves and the trainee assassins, not to mention the ‘special order’ from the Admiral General, they remain utterly unruffled. The customer in all three cases had placed specific orders, were from sovereign states in which such were legal and in accordance with their own laws, and in the case of the labor slaves and trainee assassins the Kilburroughans had provided the base product, but the customer had handled all training, indoctrination, and conditioning as the customer’s desired methods were against Kilburroughan terms of service. They bring up the Crimson Storm and point out that such an order is far more illustrative of their preferred business practices.

They seem to believe that as their business is, well, ‘human resources’, rather than something as crude and crass as ‘slavery’ that your objections on the grounds of, well, opposing slavery are quite misguided. Indeed, they claim that they themselves are the product of the exact same techniques and methods as any of their products, and they certainly do not consider themselves a slave.

You just cannot seem to crack the concept through to them. In their eyes, they are simply businessmen providing a specialty product, namely genetic engineering for hire, either for medical purposes or producing ‘people’ to order. Everything that they do is, apparently, simply business, with no moral element to the equation whatsoever. Fulfilling contractual terms and conditions is a matter of ethics and morality, not what products they offer.

You very nearly erupt when they offer a 25% customer loyalty discount on the first order of one million or more ‘units’. It was all you could do to not order the Imperial Guard to vaporize the delegation on the spot. You are pretty certain that you are moments away from cracking your own teeth when they provide you with a ‘product catalogue’.

Granted, there is not a single mention of ‘slavery’ or any similar concept anywhere in the material. But it still leaves an incredibly sour taste in your mouth. They also provide you with the boilerplate ‘standard’ EULA and TOS, as well as a copy of a generic purchase contract to review. That also leaves a sour taste in your mouth, but you do realize that your own research is opening up the possibility of doing similar feats of genetic enhancement and engineering, so perhaps this could be a ‘horrible example of what not to do’.

The inaugural ‘Naked Volleyball’ tournaments are held. You attend, although you barely watch the event itself as you are very busy dealing with paperwork. You do notice that it is far more heavily attended than the military pentathlon events had been. Of course, the Department of Periphery Studies somehow managed to get tickets to the event, showing up wearing burqas, even the male tenured faculty, and carrying signs declaring that they’re naked underneath them. Many palms engage in forbidden love with many faces at that.

The New Capricorn Men’s Soccer Team completely dominates their event, shutting out every one of their opponents behind a truly dominant performance from their goalie. The Griffon women likewise are victorious in the women’s event, although in their case it was consistent play rather than any one player's brilliance.

In baseball and softball the standard of play is average at best, with Nowa Warszawa and Calliope IV both walking away with gold medals, and Griffon with bronze in each event.

And then it is time for the budget. It’s better than dealing with the Kilburroughan representative at least!

General Stewart is up first. “Your Majesty, due to the ongoing upgrades to our Mech forces we will not be able to expand our ground forces as much as we’d envisioned last year, but overall this will increase our net combat power significantly while reducing maintenance costs, so it is a welcome trade off. While we still need to increase our production capacity, apart from that our only procurement request for ground forces is for a new Colonial Infantry Division to be based on Nowy Śląsk, thus three each of Colonial Mechanized Regiments, Colonial Infantry Regiments, and Colonial Cavalry Regiments, plus three CAS Regiments. We are also requesting the construction of a Mech Factory complex on Nowy Śląsk to both boost the local economy and to further diversify our mech production capacity.”

She checks her notes before turning the briefing over to a nattily uniformed Colonel. “Your Majesty, as General Stewart handled the ground forces section personally I shall be handling the ASF and Naval sections. In terms of ASF procurement, we have a pair of Oasis II recharge stations, a pair of Silver Towers, and 4 Independence class vessels commissioning, in addition we are requesting the construction of a pair of White Towers at GX-B10 in hopes of permanently denying the system to pirates. Overall, this will require 12 Fighter Wings and a quartet of Carrier Wings. This very nearly maxes out our ASF production capacity, as such we are requesting the construction of an ASF Factory Complex on Calliope IV.”

The Colonel then checks his notes. “For the Navy, we recommend laying down the first of our own Dart class Light Cruisers, as well as a substantial investment in dropship construction. We also have a pair of Caravel slips open which we recommend filling. For smaller dropships we are requesting a total purchase order of 30 vessels. We are requesting a mix of Bainbridge, Colchester and Lancer designs, although our analysts are hesitant to recommend any firm numbers of the latter in light of the complete lack of combat data on the type as of yet. Tentatively we would recommend a minimum of 15 Bainbridges, and a mix of Colchester and Lancer class vessels totalling 15.”

“While we would like to continue to boost our large dropship numbers, instead we are recommending the purchase of 136 PPG-01 class light attack craft to back up our customs units on our border systems. We have seen a small uptick of smuggling and trafficking in those systems, and the Space Guard is somewhat overwhelmed and is requesting support.” The Colonel shows a graph showing the uptick in incidents as well as hands you the memo requesting the increased support.

“Finally, Your Majesty,” he continued. “With the growth of our fleet, and the prospect of boosting Warship production in the next several years, we are requesting a second Refit and Repair Yard be built in Nowa Warszawa as well as one in New Capricorn.” He then takes a deep breath. “For the rest, I will turn this over to the Interior Ministry.”

Bridget bounces to her feet and seems to almost teleport to the podium. “Your Majesty! I have some really exciting news! Our engineers and production specialists have come up with something new for us to build! A Capital Yard! It’s like an Orbital Shipyard, but purely optimized for Warships! It can’t build anything else, but it can build Warships and new slips for Warships can be had in as little as five years! They’re expensive, but more Warships! Plus building them will give a seriously nice boost to the local economies, and expanding them will do the same! We recommend building as many of these as we can, across the Empire, to spread out our production capacity! That’s not to mention all the other wonderful things we can build, like more strategic material production and more factories and boosting economies and investing! With our economic situation this year I really recommend investing in Nowa Warszawa’s economy in hopes of getting the economy into a good solid shape to contribute financially every year.”

Isoroku is absent, having been saddled with babysitting the Kilburroughan emissary while you take a vacation in a budget meeting. Lucky you. His deputy is filling in, however. “Your Majesty, there’s little from us at this time apart from a proposal that has been received from the Culture sub ministry to promote an ‘Empire Day’ yearly celebration as a means of hopefully keeping all of our diverse peoples on the same general page, or at least reading from the same book.”

Jake is also absent, joining Isoroku on emissary babysitting duty. Your heart bleeds for him. Really, his heroic self-sacrifice will be remembered. His deputy is also present. “Your Majesty, we have two things. First, the Colonial Office is getting somewhat overwhelmed by the growth of the Empire and is having some efficiency issues. Expansion should help them be more effective as well as providing more responsive assistance to Colonial governments. In addition, as we grow we will need to further federalize power structures, simply to maintain efficient and responsive governance. We therefore would like to start long term planning for this.”

Dr Bryant is up next. “Your Majesty, we have four labs ready and available for work, and several projects that we recommend commencing. We also have several new options to choose to focus on this year.” She fires up the custom presentation software.
  • New Projects
    • Military
      • Naval Autocannon/25
        • An intermediate sized naval autocannon, may be useful for smaller vessels or as secondaries on larger ones
      • Naval Autocannon/35
        • A larger naval autocannon than our current largest, a stepping stone to the class 40 weapon system but quite efficient in its own right
      • Medium Naval PPC
        • A smaller version of the Heavy Naval PPC which features on both HMS Morristown and the Dart class.
      • White Shark Capital Missile
        • A capital missile intermediate between the Killer Whale and Barracuda systems. There is a known and very dangerous nuclear shipkiller based on this missile that could be very valuable.
    • Non-Military
      • Improved Shipbuilding Techniques
        • We have limited files on Star League shipbuilding, but we know that they managed to complete Warships far faster than our current techniques allow. Research may show methods of speeding up production.
“Our recommendations, Your Majesty, is that we focus on the following projects.”
  • Improved Shipbuilding Techniques
  • Thermal Dissipation (advanced) Tier 4
  • Structural Materials (advanced) Tier 4
  • Power Transfer (advanced) Tier 4

Harry is off monitoring the Kilburroughan delegation personally. His deputy, however, has a proposal. “Your Majesty, we’ve been keeping a diplomatic hands-off of the Kilburroughans, perhaps we should attempt more active measures to draw out useful intelligence.”

Janet has the documents you got from the emissary with her. “Your Majesty, I’d need a few months to go over this garbage with a fine toothed comb, just to extract anything useful from it both from an intelligence and a legal perspective.”
 

Val the Moofia Boss

Well-known member
Of the names on the list, Isoroku and Jake are really the only vaguely important guys. They've been important for smoothing over tensions with our Japanese and Polish populations. Jake is slightly more relevant due to his connection to Clan Wolverine but IIRC he doesn't know much lore so he's unlikely to be that useful if we pick up the trail again anyway. We might want to keep Isoroku around because we might wind up having to deal with more tensions surrounding the Japanese soon depending on whether we conquer some of the Dragon's planets and/or the Dragon manages to deploy his bioweapon.

[X] Isoroku Nikishina

As for Kilburrough's records, there is no need to rush. Let them bring the records back with their next delegation. If we send a ship to their system to pick them up, then we allow all of the sensors in their system to get a nice, long look at our tech. Not that I think we might fight them any time soon, but it's best not to just give away any advantages we might have for no reason. If they can detect our tech they might start up their own programs trying to replicate it or trying how to defeat it, which could complicate things later down the line once if it becomes practical for us to do something about Kilburrough.

I wouldn't try any "active intelligence gathering" for the Kilburrough delegation. Again, we can't do anything about them soon, so risking tipping them off and giving them decades to prepare to defend against us does us no favors.
 

Rukatin

Malfunctioning NPC at Best.
Could we research better AMS? Because I don't like the fact that most of the ships we lost have been through nukes getting past our defenses.
 

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