Turn 36 -
Yoo-hoo. I'll make you famous
January is rather quiet for a change.
The racing season starts, and your grandson is actually taking up go-karting. The family of one of the stock car racers you’d met has partnered with your son and daughter-in-law to sponsor and teach John how to drive a kart at decently high speed around a dirt track.
Granted, these little things have far less power than even the Pee-Wee hovercraft racers, but unlike the hovercraft they have full roll cages and the young drivers are properly strapped in with kid-sized variations of the adult racing fire suits. According to the organizers this is even safer than the Pee-Wee league, with the little karts topping out at around 45 kph. They just look like they are going far faster because of how short the tracks are and how small the karts are.
Your grandson absolutely loves it, and you make a point of attending as many of his races as you can. Besides, Alita needs a babysitter for the rest of your grandkids while she is helping her oldest, which gives you more grandbabies time.
February, on the other hand, is not all that quiet at all.
Sarahs lack of surveillance data on the outer gas and ice giants comes around to lightly nip at your backside. She picks up drive plumes from five
Leopard-CVs incoming from somewhere near Griffin VII. None of the drives match up with anything seen from the Kuritans, and
Sarah is able to discern with long range optics that none of them have any Kurita markings.
You are able to deploy the
Defiants alongside the
Goshawk IIG and the
Gyrfalcon squadrons to intercept. You are somewhat nervous, the numbers seem to be in your favor but still…
You probably wasted some good proper nerves. The incoming craft, tentatively identified as a pirate band calling itself ‘Brann’s Bloodthirsters’, are annihilated during the initial merge. The pilots show a great deal of skill, but the sheer disparity of force on display is mind-boggling. Not a single ASF or dropship survived the initial exchange and the worst damage any of your units took was a single hit on HMS Defiant that did nothing more than scorch the paint.
Unfortunately you have no living pirates to interrogate, and by the time USS Endeavor, escorted by the
Defiants, is able to reach Griffin VII and start searching for the jumpship they are just in time to see it jumping out from a pirate point.
That part is very frustrating indeed.
Exploration of the cavern found while tunneling on Nowy Gdansk finds that it is very stable, geologically speaking, and possesses spectacular crystal formations lit by softly glowing bioluminescent mosses. Faint sunlight is channeled into the cave via the crystalline formations that evidently reach to the surface. The beauty is awe inspiring.
There is a proposal to build a resort within the cave to take maximum advantage of the sheer beauty, and investors have approached the crown to see if you’d be interested in investing in your personal capacity.
[] | Yes | Nowy Gdansk Rating Change +1, consumes the next dividend roll, 1 time +25% GDP Nowy Gdansk |
[] | No | Nowy Gdansk Rating Change +1, 1 time +10% GDP Nowy Gdansk |
The investigation into the Castor runway disaster is complete, with primary fault being assigned to the pilots involved. The pilot of one of the craft had initiated his takeoff roll without proper clearance from the tower, while the pilot of the other failed to stop when told to by the tower. The controller had properly informed the first pilot to line up and wait and had gotten a readback, then authorized the second to cross the runway. Two seconds after getting the readback on the runway crossing, the first pilot completed lining up and, instead of waiting, initiated the takeoff roll. The controller immediately cancelled the clearance for the second pilot and instructed him to hold short immediately, the second pilot never acknowledged the call and continued. Then disaster.
The controller was actually commended for how quickly they reacted when they saw what was happening, if the second pilot had complied there would have been no disaster, and if the first pilot had followed controller orders the whole thing would have never been an issue in the first place. The controller properly followed all safety procedures properly.
Didn’t stop the poor man from killing himself three months later, though.
There is an extensive list of recommendations resulting from the disaster. Some of which have the air transit companies a bit… peeved. Others have the controller’s unions peeved. All of them have the pilots somewhat peeved.
But everybody involved fully understands just why they are needed, and all had been able to provide input into the recommendations during the drafting process. The planetary government is implementing them, but has requested that the Throne provide some economic support to the industry to cushion the expenses of adding the additional new safety equipment to all airfields and transport aerospacecraft.
[] | Provide Support | While important, these new rules will incur a massive disruption in air traffic while the new equipment mandated by them is installed and tested.
1 time cost of 500,000
1 time +15% GDP on Griffin’s Roost and Nowy Gdansk |
[] | Don’t Provide Support | This is purely the job of the planetary government, and the industry needs to stand up on their own two feet.
-5% GDP on Griffin’s Roost |
Investigation of the crashed K-1 reveals that it is completely trashed, it hit the ground at very high speed and it’s a minor miracle that the hull survived as well as it did. The drive itself is completely fried and the resulting power surges destroyed the on board computers. The markings, however, are legible,
SLS Morristown, which
Sarah is able to identify from records as having been a
Potemkin-class troop cruiser which evidently was part of the original expedition that created Griffin’s Roost.
There is also a fragmentary log contained on a personal data device. Only about a quarter of the device physically survived, and so only a tiny bit of data is recoverable. The body is evidently that of Commander Allen Barnes, the Chief Engineer of
SLS Morristown. The log entries that survive indicate that Barnes was evidently highly disgruntled about the entire ‘Griffin Project’. Any reasons why are not indicated. Based on the bit of index that survives, evidently he’d been keeping this log for a very long time, and some of the titles refer to ‘disgrace’ and ‘plan’.