Turn 98 - There Lived A Certain Man
You get one piece of very welcome news in early January as the New Castor system is officially declared to have attained core world status, raising the number of core worlds in the empire to an even dozen. At the very least this will allow for even more naval construction, which is quite welcome.
The Department of Periphery Studies is suspiciously quiet right now, you are rather worried over what this may foretell. Like little children, the tenured professors of that department are at their most dangerous when quiet.
Speaking of children, your eldest daughter is now racing in the next highest league of the junior racing leagues, and has started in small ‘midgets’ on dirt tracks as well. You are getting to spend quite a bit of time out in public with the ‘common’ folk, and are enjoying yourself immensely.
A motorcycle company based on Nowa Warszawa has released their latest model which has caught the public’s imagination Empire wide. The sleek design looks like something out of an action-adventure thriller with aggressive styling and all of the techie toys built in, including a fully holographic HUD for the rider. The best part is that, despite how aggressive and sleek the bike is, the built in safety systems massively exceed all requirements and include a highly adaptive stability assistance system to prevent loss of control across all speed ranges and surfaces. In one of the advertisements for the company a test rider attempts to crash the thing and is unable to do so despite his best efforts, claims which have been substantiated in official testing by Imperial Health & Safety experts.
All in all it is very impressive, and you most certainly do not have one of the early production models in the Palace garage and definitely haven’t ridden it around at absurd speeds both on the road and on the track. You are a proper monarch who would never do such silly things. The one in the garage is clearly your loving husband’s property, not yours. Or maybe Tiberius’, but definitely not yours. And, most importantly, your driving record is the best since your great-grandmother’s, so you couldn’t possibly be the one driving it around like that.
That’s your story and you are sticking to it.
No, you are not channeling your great-grandmother, stop it.
Seriously. Stop it.
OK, you may
occasionally borrow your husband’s bike to drive in a safe, sensible, and sedate manner as befits a lady. And you will point out that you have never once received a single traffic citation concerning the manner of your driving, thank you very much.
And no, this is not because you are the Empress and thus immune to such things, that would be silly.
The crippled and damaged units from the Battle of Feurstem have been recovered and repaired, allowing you to once more field the Grand Fleet, even though Admiral von Falkenrick, your most successful combat commander, is still on medical leave this year.
Admiral Fisher has sent you a memo that, pending testing of the
Hosho-class Light Carrier, that two additional designs, the
White Plains-class Escort Carrier based on a destroyer hull and the
Saratoga-class Fleet Carrier, based on a battlecruiser hull, will be placed in production. The design work has been completed, but the Navy is waiting for the results of operational testing before authorizing construction in hopes of minimizing risk as much as possible. He also informs you that they have tentative designs for the future battleships, but those are mostly paper studies at this point.
General Bradley also sends you a memo, informing you that the reorganization of the Army is nearly complete and that next year they will begin requesting procurement of additional formations. Initially this will primarily be defensive in nature, according to the memo, as the Army wishes to have at least one Infantry Division in each system, however you currently only have 24 of them compared to 36 inhabited systems. She points out that at current production levels this will take a minimum of 12 years assuming no further growth, as you can only procure a single such division each year due to limitations in Ferro Fibrous armor production.
You ponder the issue for a while, then summon Elizabeth Lee and Grace Rivas, your Interior and Research Ministers respectively, for a brainstorming session to see if there might be some way around this. Partway through the meeting Tiberius is summoned, and since he’d not known he was about to be called in he didn’t have the chance to do something outrageously silly.
The four of you spend several days working on this situation. It’s a rather thorny one, as any solution would very likely be very expensive indeed, if it is even viable in the first place. Some of the thoughts include a massive construction program of new orbital factories across the Empire, or licensing strategic material production to the private sector at the increased risk of outside elements being able to steal the technologies for their own use. Every proposal has upsides and downsides, balancing these to find something usable is the real challenge.
The upshot is a solution that appears to be acceptably viable, if expensive in terms of manpower and money. It would require all four of the available R&D teams to focus on it, and be rather expensive, but the end result should be effective. In the decades since the orbital factories were first designed there have been many advances in materials sciences and knowledge of orbital infrastructure. While the orbital factories make some use of these advances, there are certain greater efficiencies that can be found. The challenge is that it would be expensive to both research and implement the changes across the Empire, but the benefit would be significantly increased production numbers for strategic materials across the board.
| [] | Action | Result |
| [] | Implement Orbital Factory Upgrades |
- Cost - $198,000,000,000.00
- NOTE - available funds after existing projects is currently great than $415 billion
- Increases Industrial Efficiency modifier to 4 from 3
- Slightly increases Orbital upkeep (note, you are currently benefiting from double dipping certain cost reductions, that will continue)
- Uses 4 R&D teams, making them unavailable this turn, but they will be available next turn
|
| [] | Patience is a virtue |
- +1 Politics
- +1 Research Event
|
