Turn 64 - You Can Stake The Claim
The year so far has been quite… quiet. Unexpectedly so, no crisis erupting anywhere, no disasters, even the Department of Periphery Studies was behaving itself.
Didn’t mean the paperwork ever stopped, and with the Olympics starting soon there are plenty of things to deal with. Supplemental authorizations for facilities on Griffon IV for the Games, to start with.
Oh wait, this counts as a crisis, by a certain stretch of the term. Hurrah!
Construction on the new venues is running slightly behind, enough so that the organizers are not confident that they’ll have everything 100% tested and ready in time for the Games themselves. This is mostly due to the mad scramble in transferring the Games from the NRI here, but also because Griffon IV is having to build everything from scratch.
An infusion of capital and manpower could help bring Griffon IV over the hump and ensure a successful Games, but it would be expensive and potentially delay other projects you could have teams working on.
You have several options in front of you. First of all, you could just let it be, the Games would be delayed by a few weeks, you’d lose some prestige, the organizers would have massive egg on their face, but it would cost you little but some bad press on Griffon IV, which could well be counterbalanced by positive press for prudent financial management.
You could do the minimum to get the organizing committee over the hump, allocate funds and a currently idle DoME team to rapidly complete all the facilities just in time for the games. Would cost you a chunk of change and the services of the team for the year, but everything would proceed as normal.
Or you could go big, dedicate more funding as well as all three idle DoME teams to the project, and turn the facilities from utilitarian and functional to masterpieces. Make the Games this year an absolute spectacle, with the most beautiful and functional venues ever. Long term, this would make Griffon IV a magnet for sporting events, boosting the local economy immensely.
[] | Sink or Swim, not the Empress’s problem |
- -5 Politics
- +1 Economy
- -1% GDP Griffon IV
|
[] | We made a commitment, follow through on it |
- Cost - 5,000,000
- Uses 1 DoME team
- Griffon IV
- +1% GDP
- +1% POP growth
- +5 Infrastructure
- +1 POP Limit
|
[] | Go big or go home |
- Cost - 10,000,000
- Uses 3 DoME teams
- +5 Approval Change
- Griffon IV
- +10% GDP
- +2% POP growth
- +5 Infrastructure
- +2 POP Limit
|
And just when you thought this would be the only crisis point this year, another one erupts. This time two small biotech firms, one on Griffin’s Roost and the other on Nowa Warszawa, are embroiled in a bitter patent dispute over a new low-environmental impact fungicide intended to help protect crops from certain harmful fungal infestations. Both companies claim that they patented the new chemical first, records show that they somehow both managed, as far as anybody including
SARAH can calculate, to file the patent applications at the exact same time down to the second. Both companies are now crying foul. The local governments aren’t able to resolve the dispute without Imperial attention.
What makes this case extra infuriating is that the Nowa Warszawan firm was founded by the twin brother of the man who runs the Griffin’s Roost firm. You check, and yes the Griffin’s Roost firm is indeed based in Pollux. Which, in some ways, makes this the resurrection of Pollux Man.
Lovely, you’d thought you’d left dealing with Pollux Man behind when you became Empress, allowing the planetary authorities to deal with the insanities of Pollux.
There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any wrongdoing by either firm. The brother who left for Nowa Warszawa did so a year before development had even been mooted for the fungicide by either company, and there is absolutely no sign of any communication between them since. Special Branch has already investigated and found no trace whatsoever of any industrial espionage by either firm. They’ve also verified that the legal teams for both companies had no contacts, there was no shenanigans between them, no malfeasance on the part of the Patent office, no signs of any collusion, coordination, or corruption.
Both companies are sole proprietorships with the brothers in control, and the twins refuse to even speak to each other directly, let alone share the patent. You took the time to check with their parents, and the parents are both utterly exhausted dealing with sons who have been bitter enemies since early childhood, were always fighting each other, and had to be forced to pretend to be civil to each other even at the dinner table. The boys refused to share birthday parties, and no amount of parental intervention had ever shifted the needle of utter hostility between the two. The rest of their kids, and they have three more, are fine, and just as exasperated with their siblings. None of them have any consistent contact with either brother.
The fungicide itself would be incredibly useful on both Nowa Warszawa and Griffin’s Roost, as both planets have similar fungal problems in regards to certain feed crops for livestock. After every rain ranchers and farmers need to spray their fields with fungicides to beat back the similar fungal infestations, which if left unchecked would cause fatal respiratory illnesses in any mammal which ingested the spores. The new fungicide would cost less than half as much as the current standard, meets or exceeds every single safety and environmental requirement for that class of chemicals, and even acts as a mild fertilizer as it breaks down in the soil where, incidentally, it provides lingering protection against the fungi even between applications.
To add the cherry to the top of this crap sundae, the two brothers have also proven to be excellent at PR and have the local media on both Nowa Warszawa and Griffin’s Roost framing the dispute in terms favorable to their own claims, with the entire dispute turning into an ‘us versus them’ situation. So far it’s only in the specialist press, not the general media as a whole, but…
[] | <Write-In> | Results To Be Determined |
QM Note - the progress of this event will be determined solely by player decisions, the QM will adjudicate the results of any proposed action.
Thanh also has a decision for you to make. Jeremy had requested a transport capable of carrying an entire regiment of Mechs, tanks, and two regiments worth of infantry in the same dropship. The idea being that three of these, plus a single logistics vessel, would make an ideal transport for an entire Division of forces reinforcing an existing landed force.
In the end, two designs have made it through the selection process and are awaiting approval. The first, from Pyramid Aerospace is, oddly enough, not a pyramid. It’s a faceted design, all straight angles, no curves visible anywhere. Even the weapon mounts are faceted. According to the documentation, backed up by AFGE analysts, this simplifies construction while permitting a slightly stronger spaceframe. The design has an identical armor profile to the competing design from Majeure Electrique, but is less heavily armed while carrying more cargo, reducing the stress on logistics slightly. In a pinch it would be possible to occupy the 4th drop collar on the
Caravel with a combat dropper rather than a logistics transport.
The Majeure Electrique design was the second of two submitted. The first was much smaller and cheaper, but apparently somebody at the company realized that they’d managed to submit a smaller and cheaper design, decided that they could have that, and the Mk II which is on your desk is more expensive and just as large. It has the most firepower of any of the designs, including 12 Long Toms for artillery support when grounded.
Finally, Lee Aerospace has proposed a Command Transport, meeting all of the requirements for the regular transports but adding in space for the entire divisional command staff plus reserved volume and tonnage for a future upgrade to a mobile dual HPG system.
[] | Name | Cost | Materials | HP | A/D | Specials |
[] | Pyramid proposal | $414.447.01 | DHS, FAA | 686 | 506 |
- Armored 13
- AMS 120
- Capital AMS 12
- Missile 120
|
[] | Majeure Electrique proposal | $476.944.64 | DHS, FAA | 1097 | 937 |
- Armored 11
- AMS 120
- Capital AMS 12
- Missile 144
- Artillery 48
|
[] | Lee Aerospace proposal | $458,283.84 | DHS, FAA | 842 | 682 |
- Armored 11
- AMS 120
- Capital AMS 12
- Missile 144
- Artillery 40
- Command 3 (ground)
|
QM SPECIAL NOTE - If you select the Lee Aerospace design as your primary choice, please select one of the others as your secondary choice. The format would be as follows
[] Lee Aerospace Proposal
- [] <insert design of choice>
If you select one of the others as your primary choice, please disregard.