Turn 81 - Now It Seems I’m Falling
You are reading a report forwarded to you from General Jenkins that comes from General Bradley’s office. They’ve finally solved the problem of light and medium mechs carrying battle armor troopers
without being quads. Mechs above around 60 tons in mass have robust enough gyros and sufficient area on their ‘tops’, given the design standards in use, to carry the full six man battle armor squad. Smaller mechs, however, are unable to do so without unacceptable operational constraints unless having a quad form factor, hence the prevalence of quadrupedal mechs in those weight classes.
The solution is, however, expensive. A far more capable gyro control computer with significantly more flexible responses and more rapid momentum loading and unloading has been developed for the lighter mechs. In combination with handholds built into the armor, suits of battlearmor can now ‘ride’ the smaller mechs by locking their manipulators onto the hand and foot holds. This does, however, significantly increase the cost of the mech, as the upgraded gyro is not at all cheap.
As a consequence, the 55 ton
Shutze trooper mech,
Raketa missile mech,
Kommenja command mech and
Ritsa artillery mechs were almost as expensive as the 75 ton heavies, while the 25 ton speed demon
Praecursator Scout Mech and
Venator Scout Missile Mech were extremely expensive in their own right given their tiny size.
The new units do, however, give you a flexible option that can fulfill missions that the current ACR and LHR setups cannot, by virtue of having
hands. The new units would also be better suited for city fighting, giving you a third mech based option in that particular battlespace.
Violence on Okusawa has subsided a bit more following Takeda’s little stunt, so you blithely decline to censure the lad and instead quite publicly endorse his statement, while privately ‘recommending’ that he give Siriwan a few months to cool down by taking a nice relaxing vacation at an undisclosed location aboard SS United States. You then accidentally leave a copy of his itinerary where Siriwan can find it… after the ship departs on the six month luxury cruise around Griffin’s Roost. When she confronts you about this you blandly point out that this is six months where she doesn’t have to worry about him doing anything ridiculously heroic, and that as your daughter-in-law, you were wondering when she was going to get around to presenting you with any grandkids? You manage to embarrass both her and your daughter with that one. Win… win…
You get a good chuckle when a Special Branch agent on New Port Royal sends you the course listing for one of the local universities… a major in ‘interpretative lap dance’ is… different. That their chemistry department has more classes devoted to alcohol than anything else is totally expected, that the business school includes specializations in running brothels is equally expected. You can’t wait to peruse your first resume for a position at the Palace and see ‘Masters in Sex Work’ as a qualification and send a quiet note to HR to update the template for ‘required qualifications’ to include ‘in a suitable field of study’ to the ‘qualifications required’ section for all future job listings.
You are getting some complaints about the sorts of advertising being run by the New Port Royal tourism board, but your mother established a firm tradition against prohibitionist policies and you have upheld them, and the tourism board isn’t actually violating any local ordinances against smut in public, so you figure that the complainers have no actual leg to stand on.
And now it is budget time.
General Jenkins is up first. And he’s wearing the most god awful over the top comic opera villain uniform you’d ever imagined, let alone seen. “First, I have an important announcement! Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!” before pressing a button and triggering a ‘sad trombone’ sound. “And in other news, boss, we are in fair to middling shape, enough so that we’re tinkering around to fill in holes in our capabilities rather than frantically building up our capabilities. While our largest focus continues to be our space assets, especially the navy, we still need to keep up our ground forces expansion. That being said, General Bradley?”
She takes over the podium, bringing up the display. “Your Majesty, we will be accomplishing three different goals with this year's procurement requests. First, filling out two divisions, specifically 5th Assault and 4th Pathfinder. Second, another Brigade Combat Team, and finally our first Light Brigade Combat Team. We will also be boosting our training infrastructure by procuring additional training machines for their use. While it isn’t as critical, we are advising boosting our militia program substantially, interest is high and our citizens appear to be quite eager to sign on for such.”
- Imperial Griffon Army
- Production
- 12 Military Logistics Factories
- 4 Nowy Wrocław
- 4 Nowy Slask
- 4 New Phoenix
- Procurement
- Heavy/Assault Mechs
- 2 Assault Regiments
- 6 Standard Mech Regiments
- Light/Medium Mechs
- 3 Armored Cavalry Regiments
- 3 Medium Scout Regiments
- 3 Medium Mech Regiments
- 2 Pathfinder Regiments
- 4 Training Regiments
- LAM
- 1 Raider Regiment
- 2 LAM Training Regiments
- Conventional
- 3 Armored Regiments
- 3 Air Cavalry Regiments
- 25 ‘Increase System Militia Rating’
General Romanov is up next. “Your Majesty, we have no stations completing this year, although next year will see a rather hefty python’s lump coming online. As such we are coordinating with the Navy on procuring air wings for their desired carriers, by getting them ready early we will guarantee that those hangars are filled when the time comes. Production is actually in a good place at the moment.”
- Imperial Griffon Aerospace Force
Thanh is off overseeing the final working up of the first
Wichita class heavy cruiser, leaving her deputy to handle the briefing. “Your Majesty, the Admiral asked me to inform you that we are getting perilously close to exceeding our refined germanium production capacity and that therefore she strongly advises that we look into building additional refineries as soon as possible.” The young officer then brings up the display.
- Imperial Griffon Navy
- Production
- 1 Germanium Processing Facility - Nowa Warszawa
- 3 Small Warship Yards
- 2 new Lamellar Ferro-Carbide Orbital Factories
- Procurement
- Regular Dropships
- 41 Lancer Parasite FlaK Destroyers
- 40 Trenton Parasite Transports
- Large Dropships
- 32 Saipan Parasite Carriers
- 4 Canopus Parasite Battleships
- Jumpships
- Escorts
- 10 Samuel B. Roberts class Destroyer Escorts
- Small Warships
- 6 Cleveland class Light Cruisers
- 2 Wichita class Heavy Cruisers
- Small Gunboats
Elizabeth is up next, with a desk full of binders and several aides present. “Your Majesty, Interior is in solid shape this year to support all requested production expansion projects proposed by the military. We have prepared a prospectus on Imperial investments, and based on the market data feel that in the long term it would be best to do the following. For our focused investment in a peripheral system we recommend Nowy Slask. The local economy has been struggling as of late and the population of the system is growing faster than the economy, focusing our development funds there would be very useful overall in preventing excessive poverty from developing. For our focused core investment, we recommend investing in the Griffon system, of our three core worlds the Griffon system has been struggling the most of late economically and investment would be highly welcome. For our general investment target we recommend that we invest in Nowy Wroclaw, if Nowy Slask is struggling, Nowy Wroclaw has been in a near recession for years now and has truly lagged behind its potential. Finally we strongly recommend a scouting expedition to GX-I28, we have reports from New Port Royal that that system may be inhabited, or at least once was.”
Your Foreign Minister is attending via an HPG link. “Your Majesty, the Foreign Ministry has no specific budgetary asks this year, although if the budget allows we had 8 Bronze Medals in last year's Olympics, some sports camps might be in order.” Leila doesn’t look particularly concerned about that.
Lien has her hands folded in front of her. “Your Majesty, your political teams are ready to engage in strategic schmoozing with the Chamber and Senate at your say so. We recommend focusing on the Senate, next year there are Chamber elections and our teams will already be exerting influence there without requiring us to make promises and gladhand people.”
“Your Majesty, we have four R&D teams ready to go. Our recommendation is to get three of them started on what we believe is the most advanced form of standard jump cores, maximum sized jumpships. The other we recommend assigning to improving our germanium refining techniques, it’s a long term project with a big payoff in terms of ensuring we can build up our fleet efficiently.” Grace is also remote, although in her case she’s in the Griffon system, at a conference on Griffon IV.
General Messerschmidt is late for the meeting, which is incredibly suspicious since you know he’s right outside, obviously wanting to wait for Justice to go first before dropping yet another bomb on you that will have your face and your palm engage in forbidden romance.
“Your Majesty, the only thing from Justice is that we should consider further expansion of the Imperial Grifftiger Mounted Police, other than that we are monitoring the situation Empire wide and things appear to be on an even keel. Next year we will hopefully begin reviewing the legal codes to keep things rationalized and stable, but there is no need for funding just yet for that project.” Martina grins then. “I’ve taken the liberty of having the Special Branch toss General Messerschmidt out the Window of Defenestration for you, since I have it on good authority that he was planning on informing you of the latest news about your cult from the NRI.”
You get a good laugh at that, as a dripping wet intelligence officer comes in, shaking his fist at Martina and squelching his way to his seat. “There is no news from the NRI about your cult. We do have an opportunity to insert a number of additional agents into the Nya Kopenhamn system, hopefully speeding up the collapse of the nutcases in charge there.” He pauses. “And while there is no news from the NRI, a small temple of your cult has opened on New Port Royal, congratulations Your Majesty!”
Just when you were feeling bad about him getting tossed through the window…