Turn 122 - Shela
There is a major controversy building up in the Empire. One that is pitting family members against each other, best friends on opposite sides, brother against sister, mother against daughter, father against son. It erupted out of nowhere, and is now turning into a great contest of wills.
Which is cuter, the bumbling lystrosaurus, or the Capricorn cuddlebear.
A biotech research firm has recently managed to develop a subspecies of the Capricorn Cuddlebear that can eat ordinary vegetable matter rather than being hyper-specialized to the giant bamboos found on the continent of Capricorn. They are now being marketed on the pet market after passing all relevant safety and ethics review boards. And this has caused the most hilarious ‘conflict’ you ever saw… which is cuter and more cuddly.
The cuddlebear seems to have only one ambition in life, to be cute and cuddly. Ten out of ten grifftigers agree, cuddlebears are just too cute and cuddly to hunt in the wild. Many people seem to agree, considering how popular they are becoming as pets.
Lystros, on the other hand, are merely incredibly cute, in a bumbling sort of way, and their detachable tails are the yummiest steaks imaginable, so they are cute and delicious, and you can enjoy lystro tail steaks without any guilt, since detaching the tail not only doesn’t hurt them but is actually very advantageous to the cute critters health. And very delicious.
The Eldest manages to settle the entire affair by posting an image universally accepted as the final word on the subject, a cuddlebear cuddling a lystrosaurus. This is promptly declared to be the cuteness singularity before which all other cuteness must bow.
You are still giggling over the entire thing days later.
You aren’t able to leave Griffsport for the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics this year over on Glorreich, but you do make a point of watching. The Bourbons had lodged fresh protests this year over the existence of naked volleyball, being exceptionally self-righteous about it all. You contacted the Bourbon king and he informs you that he shuffled off a number of moral busybodies to something harmless and apologizes if they’re being annoying.
Considering that such protests from those twits is quite common anyways, and the Committee pretty much lets them rant, asks for a second on their motion, which never happens, and the case is closed for another four years.
This year, however, apparently the athletes from all four teams are tired of it all. So during the Athletes Parade in the Opening Ceremony things get a tad spicy, as all four teams decide to protest the shenanigans of those busybodies by wearing precisely what was issued to them upon their respective births. Good thing that the Empire is not prudish at all, or you’d probably be flooded with complaints about this.
And of course your youngest daughter is right there with the rest of Team Griffon.
The Black Steel has not made any moves in the first few weeks of the year, although there is an uptick in pirate activity along your eastern flank, the NRI patrols are doing a superb job dealing with that problem. Reports indicate that the pirates are making use of somewhat more sophisticated equipment, not nearly up to your standards but better than they’d been using previously.
It had originally been thought that the Iskra system would achieve Core status this year, however a number of corporate failures in the electronics industry have delayed this by at least a year as that sector of the local economy recovers. The companies in question produced consumer goods but had been caught out by shifting consumer preferences, they bet on the wrong horse, so to speak, and a number of bankruptcies and reorganizations followed.
The refits of the Lyr-class are underway. Admiral Bremman of Home Fleet has requested that the refitted Lyrs not be reassigned to his fleet, however, citing their incompatibility with their tactical doctrine. He recommends that once they are no longer needed by Grand Fleet that they be first transferred to Strike Fleet, then retired to system garrison duty.
Admiral Fisher, Admiral de Palo and Admiral Fanni all object to this, on the grounds that the Lyr is too capable an interstellar platform to be relegated to mere system defense duties, that Home Fleet is supposed to include ‘garrison duty’ as part of their mission anyways, and that Admiral Bremman is just angling to eventually get a number of rather wild ‘missile’ destroyer, cruiser, and even battleship designs into service.
You’ve met Admiral Bremman, you totally can see him doing something like that. So you preemptively rule that once Grand Fleet is back up to strength the Lyrs will go back to Home Fleet. You do approve of some competition among your commanders, it helps keep them all sharp, but you are not willing to sacrifice efficiency for the purpose.
That being said, a replacement for the Guiseppe Garibaldi-class Light Cruisers has been proposed by BuShips. It’s currently in the early design phase, with multiple designs being considered at the moment. One path is simply an updated Garibaldi, keeping the same basic armament, adding the new modular AMS systems, upgrading the fire control suites to further boost what the existing design is already specialized in (making enemy ASFs truly regret their existence), and removing some ‘gold-plated’ equipment that seemed like a good idea at the time. The other takes the same basic platform but goes in a somewhat different direction, stripping out the bow armament, the sub-capital lasers, and the ASF complement in order to fit a lethal array of heavy naval PPCs and heavy naval gauss cannons. A third design under consideration is a bit of a hybrid between the two, but one with a focus on actual ‘cruiser’ operations rather than acting purely as part of the screen, with a more varied armament optimized for independent operations. Admiral Fisher promises to keep you up to date on developments.
Another military development that is of interest to you is that the three branches of the military have finally settled on a unified standard suit of sealed power armor, as opposed to battle armor. Previously all three services had their own suits for use by pilots and vehicle crews with none of them being cross-compatible. Amaunet finally settled the arguments, as all three branches had been loudly insisting that they couldn’t possibly use suits designed for the other branches as they ‘didn’t meet their needs’.
The Army insisted on mounting an anti-personnel gauss rifle on a stowable shoulder mount, along with an attachment to fit their standard laser assault rifle to one arm without interfering with the armored gloves of the suit. The aerospace force were quite happy with the gauss rifle but wanted jump jets and extended life support without the infantry rifle mount. The navy, meanwhile, wanted no weapons on the suit, full space-adaptation gear but no jump jets, and a set of cutting torches faired into the forearms of the suit for emergency situations.
Amaunet had put up with the quibbling for quite some time before finally putting her paw down, the final suit is an amalgamation of these features that every single one of the services absolutely hates. It has a mounting for a standard infantry rifle on one arm, the integrated cutting torches, full space adaptation gear, jump jets, and extended life support capacity.
You are not all that sympathetic when everybody comes to you about this. You figure that it’s the perfect compromise, since it accomplishes what needs to be done yet absolutely nobody is actually happy about it.
Amaunet has informed you that she is absolutely certain that technicians in the field will happily remove unneeded features and customize the suits to their individual users preferences, but that’s OK, this creates a common structural core that will seriously improve the logistics of the situation.