Turn 68 - Johnson County Sheriff
You are not very happy to have to choose between reform measures, and you are quite certain that the Chamber is aware of your disgust. All proceedings of Parliament are televised and open to the public, so the voters are quite aware of what has been going on. The Delegates have been spinning their conduct as looking out for the interests of their constituents, that they were demanding the extra spending and projects purely out of a desire to look after the well being of those who directly vote for them, as, they insist, is their job as Delegates.
Well, the elections are in two years, barring any scandal serious enough to force snap elections, and the public mood is not sufficiently against the Delegates to give you a justification to do so at this time. You are rather unwilling to work with them at the moment, however, and doubly so due to their attitude towards Jake.
You receive reports from Intelligence. The agents assigned to infiltrate the NRR are finally in positions with sufficient access that you are getting material that isn’t in the daily newspapers of the Rasalhaguians. Looking over the initial tranches of data shows that the Rasalhaguian economy is in even worse shape than your analysts had expected, as the sheer expenses being spent on uplifting the population of Gotland combined with a prolonged economic slump have the Rasalhague government operating right on the razor’s edge of solvency. On the positive side of the ledger, the average life expectancy on Gotland has more than tripled and the poverty rate of the planet has plunged to under 25%, considering the numbers you are looking at that is a very spectacular achievement, as initially Gotland was a medieval hellhole with over 96% poverty rate and an average life expectancy well under 30. The planet is still a net loss for the NRR, but is expected to finally break even in under a decade.
You are still better off reading the papers about the NRI than relying on agents, as none have enough access to really tell you anything special, at least not yet.
The NRI’s dominance at the Olympics finally comes to an end, at least for now, as they take bronze in six straight events. Team Griffon and the NRR evenly split the gold medals. Your softball team defeated the Rasalhaguians in the gold medal game, while the Rasalhagians dominated in soccer and baseball. The first run of naked volleyball is a surprising success, although this seems to be for rather prurient reasons. The crowds were several orders of magnitude larger than those for the event that was replaced, and Team Griffon wins both the men’s and women’s contests.
A few satirists and late night comics put together a joke petition to require all government officials to be naked while engaged in official business, in order to show that they have nothing to hide, of course. This is received to general laughter and a dry comment that nobody wants to see what the Delegates have to hide in that regard, and the Eldest blandly stating that the first person to approach him with a razor will be made to kitty-sit his youngest descendents. Of course one of the comedians immediately shows up at the Imperial Senate with a great big honking razor, and the next scene on his show has him sitting in a Griffkitten nursery with several dozen newborn Griffkittens crawling over him with the comic stating that he’s not sure if this is a punishment or a reward.
An attempted pirate raid on New Capricorn is defeated handily at the jump point. A single
Jolly Roger is no threat against one of your
White Towers. The NRI is able to fight off a raid on Tarentum by a small pirate raiding party without any of your forces getting involved.
And now it is your favorite time of year, budget time!
General Stewart is up first. “Your Majesty, in regards to the situation in the Nya Köpenhamn system, we would like to establish a joint incident response team with the Rasalhaguians in order to best coordinate our actions. Likewise with NRR support we can rapidly construct and deploy a full suite of defensive installations to the system in order to lock things down rapidly. We would also recommend continuing to expand our production capabilities across the board. Most importantly we would like additional ASF and Capital Shipyards, as well as expansion of our existing orbital yards. We would also like to build new Orbital Shipyards in New Capricorn and Nowy Śląsk. I will now turn it over to Colonel Pyle.”
A crisply uniformed woman steps up to the podium. “Your Majesty, we will be starting with ground forces.” She brings up a chart on the display.
- 1 Raider Regiment
- Assigned to 1st Raider Brigade
- 4 Assault Regiments
- 1 Assigned to 3rd Imperial Guard Brigade
- 1 Assigned to 5th Assault Brigade
- 2 Assigned to 6th Assault Brigade
- 1 Garrison Mech Regiment
- Assigned to Calliope IV’s garrison
- 4 Light Horse Regiments
- 2 Assigned to 7th Cavalry Brigade
- 2 Assigned to 8th Cavalry Brigade
- 2 Armored Cavalry Regiments
- 1 Assigned to 7th Cavalry Brigade
- 1 Assigned to 8th Cavalry Brigade
- 3 Armored Regiments
- 1 each assigned to 15th, 16th, and 17th Infantry Brigades
- 6 Mechanized Regiments
- 2 each assigned to 15th, 16th, and 17th Infantry Brigades
“For Aerospace fighters we will have a pair of
Oasis II stations potentially coming online this year, along with 5
Independence class carriers, as such we are requesting 8 Fighter Wings and 5 Carrier Wings in order to fill those bays. Please note that the NRR has pledged to provide ASF garrisons for any installations we build in Nya Köpenhamn.”
She consults her notes and brings up a new slide. “A number of subsystems used by the
Tarawa,
Osumi,
Albion and
Sosumi designs are no longer in production, we have been able to source sufficient spare parts and manufacturing capacity to keep the existing units of these classes in service indefinitely, but new production for them is no longer economically feasible without significant redesign. That being said, we are recommending that we procure the following dropships.”
- Standard Dropships
- 40 total to be laid down this year
- 20 Victory AKM
- Enhances our ability to deploy our Infantry Divisions
- 10 Colchester
- Our primary patrol dropship asset at this time
- 10 Bainbridge
- Large Dropships
- 20 total to be laid down this year
- 2 Puller
- 4 Vandergrift
- 4 Newport-C
- 5 Majestic
- 5 Independence
- Jumpships
- Warships
- 6 total this year
- 2 Miranda class Exploration Corvettes
- 4 Dagger class Corvette
“As you see, we have received an unsolicited proposal for an exploration vessel based roughly on the hull of the
Dagger class, intended for higher risk exploration work. It is planned to equip each
Miranda with a single
Enterprise-A, an
Independence and a
Bainbridge.”
By the time the Colonel sat down the most excitable Interior Minister ever (™) had hopped to her feet and was beyond the podium.
“Your Majesty! We got a ton of stuff we can do! We can build new shipyards! New capital slips! New jumpship slips! We can also do some exploring, I mean, we know GX-E12 has a habitable planet but that’s just about it! What do we need to do to colonize it so Griffon can grow larger! We can build five more commercial space stations scattered throughout the Empire, giving us a better economy, and we can build more HPGs where we already HAVE HPGs to enable more bandwidth via HPGs so we can make more money off of HPGs and we can do some serious investment, like totally focus some development funds on say Calliope IV to really speed up development there over and above what they are doing themselves or heck do some direct investing! We need to build more orbital factories for all the good stuff, and maybe expand them as well since even if we don’t get more efficient ones out of it we do get investment money and that’s always useful and then we should also build those new ASF factories that the General wants!”
She’s not out of breath, and she’s a grandmother now, just what is in her coffee.
Correction, you do not want to know.
Isoroku is off on Nova Roma with Jeremy, but his deputy has a few minor things for you. “Your Majesty, we’ve not been looking as strong as we hoped in the Olympics, with six bronze medals so far. We’ll likely still top the gold medal count, but that is purely because all of the motorsports events are still to come and we should sweep them. Whenever we take gold we’ve noticed a significant bump in memorabilia sales and general interest in said sport, so finding ways to boost sports we are doing poorly in can pay off in the long run.”
Jake is looking… very much like an irritated bear. “Your Majesty, I appreciate the support against the Delegate’s demands for my head. On the basis that I doubt I’ll be able to effectively court their favor for you, I recommend against seeking to directly increase the Chambers willingness to work with us, but rather that we establish direct campaign offices in every single constituency in the Empire, allowing us to bring our cases for various actions directly to the grassroots voters in a way that even general media coverage cannot do.”
He checks his notes. “And, if the budget allows it, I would like to propose that we conduct a campaign to encourage employers to hire more workers across the board, in the hopes of boosting employment numbers. It is expensive, but long term it could pay for itself.”
Dr Bryant is up next. “We have several new projects that we can undertake, Your Majesty, and a number of recommendations.” She brings up the display.
- New Projects
- Develop Pilot Exosuit
- Not quite a suit of powered armor, the proposed Exosuit is a combination G Suit and Coolant Suit contained within a lightweight myomer sheathe to support the bulk and prevent loss of agility and reaction speed. It would make vehicle crews, Mechwarriors, and ASF pilots more survivable in the event of combat damage or ejection.
- Improve Space Stations with Orbital Laboratories
- The earliest use of commercial space stations was to support R&D efforts, however the latest generation of stations no longer is used for this. Adding lab modules to the current station would be helpful for multiple fields of research
- Recommendations
- 4 Project Teams are ready
- Advanced Communications (Advanced) Tier 4
- R&D believes that this may be helpful for the actual engineering of mobile HPGs
- Advanced Compact Core Theory II
- Advanced Compact Core Design II
- Advanced Compact Core Construction II
- Together this will enable us to design and build Warships in the ‘Destroyer’ category
Harry is up next. “Your Majesty, we have an opportunity to infiltrate some agents into Nya Köpenhamn, although this will be a very high risk operation for the agents due to the nature of the two sides. It may, however, yield critical inside information, as well as give us potential agents of influence on the ground.”
Janet, however, is shaking her head. “Not so fast, Harry, Your Majesty, we should first make certain of the legalities surrounding this situation, just to make sure we don’t have any surprises rear up and bite us on the backside.”